1% Better Mindset - Less Is More

Good morning, Cadre. My name is Craig Thielen. This is a 1% better mindset. It is Friday, I live in Minnesota, and it is gently snowing like it seems to be doing every day here. So welcome to this live stream. The 1% better mindset is a place where we can talk about how we improve personally, professionally, and learn about ourselves and learn about how we can become a better version of ourselves or the true essence of who you are. And there's lots of ways to describe that. Today I want to talk about this idea of, first of all, we're in the month of December and it's a month of reflection, gratitude, celebration.

And so I want to talk about how we can prepare ourselves for this time and for the new year that's going to be coming very quickly. And it's nice to see you, Ms. Shannon Paul. Thanks for joining 1% better here. The idea that I want to talk about as we think about that is this idea of less is more things, not fill it up with clutter and noise. Another way to look at this is a famous quote by Albert Einstein. If you, if you can't simplify something, you don't truly understand it. So again, I think it's, it's sort of in the same vein essence, of course, he did this with an incredibly complex equation that he distilled down to E equals MC squared.

Pretty, pretty brilliant. So how can we make our life into E equals MC squared? So one of the things I want to challenge ourselves, all of us, including me, and the opportunity is really to say, we've got three weeks left between now and end of the year. So let's take each of those weeks and take, give ourselves a moment to reflect and meditate, pray, whatever the technique that you want to use or the term, and just listen to yourself. And what is cluttering in your mind? What is getting in your way?

What is bothering you? What is there that perhaps we could clutter clean? It could be something as simple as negative thoughts. So how can we sort of cleanse and let those go? And there's, there's techniques to do that. It could be some, some feelings that we're harboring and how do we sort of accept those and release those? It could be something physical. It could be something like you have a, a junk drawer in somewhere, as we call them, that you can clean. So there's some, I think, some science that indicates that when we have a messy environment or we have messy parts of our life, it causes stress and it causes negative thinking.

And we apply These small things into larger things. So if I have a messy junk drawer or messy bedroom, a messy car, boy, I must have a messy life. So just simply cleaning up one small part of our life is a mental boost. It gives us energy, it gives us some confidence that we can do this in other parts of our life. So it could be, as I said, maybe a bedroom that needs to be cleaned or a closet, or in my case, a garage that needs to be cleaned. That could be something. Perhaps it's your to do list.

We all have the massive to do list that just seem to be never ending. Are there to do items that just go from week to week to week? Well, do we really need them? Maybe we just cross them off and just clean that list up and get down to the bare bones minimum of what needs to be done. It could be doing things that perhaps you've deferred or delayed. It could be making an appointment that you should have made, like an eye appointment. It could be ordering a product or a supplement or something that you've been wanting to do for yourself and you haven't gotten around to.

It could be just taking some time to meditate or taking some time to reflect on your year and what you're grateful for. It could be reaching out to a friend that you haven't talked to in a while. There's so many different things. So the challenge is to do that, find time to do that once per week. So we have three weeks between now and end of the of the year and see if there's a way that you can simplify your life and sort of take out the clutter. One of the mess that I hear a lot, lot about this idea of 1% better is that we, we have to constantly do more, more, more, more, work harder.

And part of that is true in terms of our learnings and our path to improvement. But I think the myth is that getting 1% better many times is not doing more. It's actually and really reflecting on what is the most important thing to me and really focusing on that. One of the reflections I have, I host a podcast called the one percent Better Podcast. And it has some really just amazing guests that we're fortunate to be able to get on the show. And their life stories are inspiring and amazing. And there are some themes that come through when you talk to people of all sorts of walks of life that have had great accomplishments.

They've all had great failures and great challenges and great tragedies as well. And so. But one of the things that I notice is just how the intense focus that they have for whatever their purpose is, whatever sort of goals and aspirations that they have that allow them to accomplish great things is they have really honed in their focus on what's important and they've really simplified their life. They don't have they're not trying to do 32 different things every day. So food for thought. I hope that helps.

I'm certainly going to be working on my simplification over the next three weeks. I would love to hear in the comments from you if, if this is helpful if you what what you're doing to sort of work through the holidays and simplify your life and hopefully enjoy it just a little bit better and in preparation for a brand new year and a brand new start and a time of, you know, the cycles of life. So with that, thank you for joining 1% better. Hope you have a great rest of your Friday and great weekend.

Sa. Sa.