Happy Spring!
Welcome to my website and my first blog entry. I just feels right to be starting my website in Spring. I love Spring. Everything outside looks so vibrant and fresh. The blue sky, the many shades of green, and all of the flowers look so colorful, so beautiful, so perfectly…well… perfect.
It’s like a new exhibit came to town: The Exhibit of the Great Outdoors.
Spring is a great time to get a cue from nature and take a fresh look at your office. Could you use a little spring cleaning? With all the beauty going on outside, it can provide a sharp contrast to what is going on inside your office.
If there is a layer of dust left over from the last time we elected a President, it might be time to do a little office spring cleanup. My mom has an expression that she calls house blind. It means that there are things in the house that don’t really serve their purpose anymore, or we may have put them somewhere “temporarily”, but have now gotten so used to seeing them there, we have become completely blind to them. It reminds me of an office I did a consultation for in Beverly Hills.
The office was really beautifully done, the doctor had spared no expense on the décor, there was a marble entrance, Venetian plaster on the walls; it was really First Class. But there was a consistent theme of clutter everywhere. There was a fountain on the wall that was no longer working. It was just sitting there collecting dust, and even though it was a beautiful fountain, it seemed out of place.
There was a bulletin board in the reception area, which is great, but it was suffering from an extreme case of neglect: it was full of notices of things that had long since happened. It was severely out of date. In essence, there simply was not room for anything new to happen here. The doctor complained that she was not seeing enough new patients and her practice had become “stale”.
Hmmmmm, I wonder why? She needed to make room for new energy to come in!
Steps for Spring Cleaning Your Practice
If you are suffering from a case of a stale practice, the first thing to do is a complete spring cleaning.
- Have a cleaning crew come in and do a deep clean, wash the walls, doors, baseboards. Etc.
- Clean the carpets.
- Clean up the kids toy box, clean all the toys that are still fresh and throw away the ones that are ready for retirement.
- Scrub up your teaching tools; clean up your spine and vertebral models with a toothbrush and baking soda.
- Replace all the burnt out light bulbs.
- Give your fridge and ice pack freezer a good scrub, and put a new box of baking soda in there.
Next do an “office blind” check. Pretend that Brad Pitt or Julia Roberts has just called your office and want to come in to see you. Pretend like you were seeing your office for the first time. How does the place look? Would your office impress your new guests? Or would you need to run around with a Hefty bag furiously clearing out all the old stuff lying around that looks suspect?
Here’s what to do:
Remove all the things that are scruffy looking, not operational, or you simply can’t remember what they are doing there in the first place. Make three piles. If it does not have a purpose in being on display:
- put it away
- give it away
- throw it away
Make some room for new growth by clearing out the old! Remember, nature hates a vacuum.
De- cluttering you office provides room for new things to come in.
Office Blind is a perfectly common condition, but by taking the above steps this spring, and you will be making room for all those new patients just waiting to come see you!
