By Jody Eagen

Are you looking for more customers? Bigger customers? Richer and more fulfilling assignments and opportunities? Of course you are! So why are they not materializing? Well, one reason could be that there is no room for them in ‘your space’. So the key would be to make room for what you want to attract into your business by Scrubbing Your Space.

By ‘Your Space’ I am referring to your physical, intellectual and emotional spaces. All of you and your business and personal life. Imagine ‘your space’ being represented by one side of a sheet of paper.

Imagine the words on this sheet represents all the tasks, ideas, issues and communications that you have not finished or hope to start and finish one day. I call these Incompletes. An Incomplete is not just something that is not finished but it is anything that carries energy around it.

Incompletes could be a great new idea, an old idea not followed though on, an administrative task or a conflict with a spouse or employee.

So think for a moment of all your Incompletes: I need to organize my receipts; I should start that new marketing plan; I ought to follow-up on that lead from the networking session last week. If you are like most people, you spend a lot of energy around these need to's, should's and ought to's. Even the want to's take up energy if action is not applied to them.

With that in mind, this sheet now represents all ‘your space’ and it’s filled with your Incompletes. How can you attract anything else into ‘your space’ if it is already full? How can you focus your energy on bigger and better business when so much of your energy is tied up in thinking and worrying about everything already in ‘your space’?

The key is to Scrub Your Space. By doing so you free up energy and make room for the results you say you want. There are four ways to Scrub Your Space: 1) Do it; 2) Dump it; 3) Delegate it and 4) Date it and do it later. Lets look at each of these.

1) DO IT: This is the most effective way to Scrub Your Space. Why? Because by completing things you will gain esteem, trust and confidence in yourself, not to mention that your energy is notched up in the process. An all around winning approach to scrubbing your space.

2) DUMP IT: Yes, I am implying here that there may be Incompletes in your space that you will never get to that are taking your energy away from more important activities. Decide which ones those are and free up the energy around them. To do this, they really have to be dumped... forever!

3) DELEGATE IT: ‘But I’m an entrepreneur, I have to do it all myself!’ In my coaching experience, I assist entrepreneurs to understand their strengths and manage their weaknesses. They realize that they spend far more energy trying to do things they are not good at then what comes naturally to them. It’s amazing how, with some creative thought, my clients have come up with ways to delegate work.

4) DATE IT AND DO IT LATER: The two key components of this step are to really put it in the future, i.e. release the energy now, and to really do it on the date you said you would, don’t just date it into the future again. If you date it again, then you are letting yourself down again and that diminishes energy, esteem, confidence and trust in yourself. If that happens, maybe this is a candidate for Dumping.

People who are results oriented will often struggle with Dating It if the Incomplete is so large that they do not know what to do next. They may believe that they have to decide what to do about an incomplete before they can Date It, i.e. they have to know the task. Therefore they can’t date it and they are in a catch 22. At such times it’s key to remember that tasks do not have to all be ‘doing’ items; Dating a task to ‘think about this incomplete’ is acceptable as long as the energy is released.

Once your space is scrubbed, the key is to keep it that way. One the biggest ways we sabotage ourselves is to not complete things or not keep our word. Following through with what we said we are going to do is the best way to maintain confidence and trust with ourselves and with others.

This means both in your personal and professional lives, especially for entrepreneurs since the dividing line is so thin. This implies that regardless if you say, ‘I am going to get up and exercise tomorrow’, or ‘I am going to make 20 cold calls tomorrow’, your overall confidence and trust will increase if you keep your word to yourself.

How many of you would rather keep your word to others before you keep your word to yourself. If you continue to let yourself down, even in the smallest ways, you will not trust yourself to spend the energy on those big ideas and plans you have.

So if we want to attract more customers, bigger customers, richer and more fulfilling assignments and opportunities, there has to be room and energy for them. One way is to make that room and energy is to ‘Scrub Your Space’!

The concept ‘Scrub Your Space’ is taught by Context Associated.