Spring Cleaning: Well-Being Practice

This Week, It’s Time for Some Spring Cleaning

Simple Instructions:

1. Spring has sprung! Each day, find an area of your life that needs cleaning and clean it up.
2. The space can be physical (like a desk or closet) or virtual (like your email inbox or Evernote notebooks).
3. You may also pick a large project, like your garage, and tackle a small part of it each day.
4. The space does not need to be large and it need not take long to clear up.

Watch this video for an explanation of this Well-Being Practice from Whole Life Challenge co-founders Andy Petranek and Michael Stanwyck.

Why Is This Practice Important?

There are lots of small things we let stand in the way of making the big moves in life. It helps a lot to have clarity in and around you when you’re making important choices. And straightening up small, manageable things is good practice in straightening out larger, more unwieldy things.

Cluttered physical, virtual, or even mental spaces provide unnecessary obstacles to doing what matters to you. Feeling like you’re surrounded by messes or chaos can keep you in “putting out fires” mode — the need to take care of the nagging things right in front of you first.

When your spaces are clear, new paths can open up. Waking up or living in an uncluttered reality can provide a sense of calm and leave room for creativity and productive action to flow. Therefore, this week’s Well-Being Practice is both a practice in accomplishing tasks and literally making the space for the bigger, better things to come.

Michael Stanwyck

Michael Stanwyck is the co-founder of The Whole Life Challenge, an idea that developed during his seven years as a coach and gym manager at CrossFit Los Angeles.

He graduated from UCLA with a BA in philosophy as well as a degree from the Southern California School of Culinary Arts, and feels food is one of the most important parts of a life - it can nourish, heal, and bring people together.

Michael believes health and well-being are as much a state of mind as they are a state of the body, and when it comes to fitness, food, and life in general, he thinks slow is much better than fast (most of the time). Stopping regularly to examine things is the surest way to put down roots and grow.

He knows he will never be done with his own work, and believes the best thing you can do for your well-being starts with loving and working from what you’ve got right now.