126: Standardising your life to free up energy

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Wayfair. Every style, every home. Here's a tip for you. There's a podcast out there with fans waiting to be your next customer. They tune in every week. They trust the host. And that host wants to talk about brands like yours in their own words to their audience. The problem is you just haven't been introduced yet. We're Acast, where that introduction happens. As the world's largest podcast marketplace, we let you browse shows, see who's listening, and book host-read sponsorships or run your own ads, all from one platform. Transparent pricing, real-time data, complete control. Start advertising on podcasts by visiting a-cast.com/advertise. Hello everyone and welcome back to another episode of Canny Crystals, the podcast. I hope that you're all well. My name is Mart, I'm your host, and this week I feel a bit drained of energy, if I'm totally honest with you. I don't know if it's because we are coming to the end of the seasonal year or what, because here in the UK spring is just around the corner. Now we're only a short few weeks away from, you know, those long sunny evening walks on the beach. Oh, isn't it bliss? I absolutely love that. But I'm just holding on to the hope that, you know, the spring and the summer warmer weather is going to give me that extra boost of energy. Because I've been so busy these last few weeks, I've not even been able to book myself in for a haircut in 7 weeks. Honestly, I look like I've been dragged through a bush backwards. I've been to the gym twice in those 7 weeks. I've barely been meditating or anything else, to be totally honest. And I know I'm always preaching to the choir here, but Jesus Christ, my reading has gone right down the pan as well. I've not had time to read. I think, I think I've probably read one book in 7 weeks, so not too bad. But you know what I was like, I'm a bit of a bookworm. I just need to be able to find myself maybe half an hour a day to get back on track. So parents, I see you, I feel you 1 million percent. Anyway, this week I was a bit inspired to have a little spring clean around the house. So as you'll probably remember, I retired me mum at Christmas in 2022. Can you believe it's that long ago, by the way? So she now comes to work for me one day a week, cleaning the office and cleaning me house. And don't judge, she absolutely buzzes off it. She loves to clean. She's cleaning obsessed, in fact. So after she'd been over last week, I was just looking around and I was thinking, you know, we could have really done with pulling this out or hoovering underneath there, or, you know, getting a feather duster to reach those really high ceilings up there. All those little bits that tend to get missed during the weekly clean. So I don't really know if that's to do with the time of the year, but I was a bit inspired to really give the place a good gutten out. So I started on me wardrobe because, you know, like I've mentioned before, it's going to be warmer weather soon and my wardrobe is just full to the brim with big winter coats, jumpers, sweatshirts, thick shirts, and I just thought, well, you know, I'm not going to be wearing any of those in the summer, am I? So again, as I do every few months, I stripped my wardrobe right back. I sent lots of clothes off to the charity shop that's local to me, and in doing this, I pulled out 70 coat hangers from my wardrobe. 70. 7-0. And I put them into piles because, you know, ADHD kicking right off, and I realised that I had 19 different styles of hangers in my wardrobe. Oh, Marie Kondo will be spinning in her grave. She's not dead, but she'll still be spinning in it. Now, I distinctly remember Denise Duffield-Thomas talking about this months ago and how subconsciously we always give energy to the most random of things in our lives. So, you know, we might see a chip in a plate that we're eating off and our brain subconsciously thinks that we're poor because we can't afford to eat from a nice unbroken plate. Little things like that. So I went on Amazon and I bought myself 50 new coat hangers. Nothing fancy, I just wanted all plain black, all the same size, you know. So I got some that are like this velvety material because they tend to be non-slip, and I gave all the other 70 hangers to the charity shop with me clothes. I can't tell you the satisfaction that I feel right now. This is when you know you're getting old. I can't tell you the satisfaction I feel when I open me wardrobe now. It seems so insignificant, just changing coat hangers to standardise things, but you know, deep inside, I now get this sense of calm when I open those doors. I've never been one for fashion, and the more I reflect on this, like every time I opened me wardrobe beforehand, I would feel this sense of panic almost inside of me thinking, 'Oh my God, what the hell am I going to wear today?' But now with everything standardised and all in colour blocks together— yes, I was that sad to do that, got all the red together, all the oranges, all the yellows, all the greens. It's like a material rainbow when I open my wardrobe now. I feel like I've organized the way that I look at how I dress. So it kind of made me realize how much black I wear as well, and that's something that I do subconsciously, probably to hide my rolls of fat under. So half my bloody wardrobe is black things. Black. So anyway, taking all of this into consideration, I just started looking at, you know, all the different other areas that I could standardise to try and get into the mindset of someone that doesn't need to take up too much brain space and energy just performing the smallest of tasks like getting yourself ready on a morning. For example, another area that I looked at was my kitchen. I went into the cupboards and I looked at my Tupperware that I sometimes meal prep in. I say sometimes because I'm not great at it, you know what I mean? I have every intention to meal prep and then I end up getting a Deliveroo or an Uber Eats. My bad. Some of them had orange lids, some of them had clear lids, some of them had white lids, some had orange stains in them. I've had a collection of them probably since I moved in with Johnny about 9 years ago, and I took one of them and I just thought, "Nah, this looks crap. Let's just get some nice new glass ones that won't stain." So I took a long hard think about what size I needed and how many I actually needed. So when I counted these plastic Tupperwares, when I took them out, there were 39. 3-9. When am I ever going to use 39 Tupperwares at the same time? The most I ever use is maybe 5 or 6 tops, and like I say, that's when I meal prep. So back on Amazon I went again, and I got a bargain because all I needed was those 5. Doing this even cleared up so much room in my kitchen cupboards by chucking out all them plastic misshapen Tupperwares. You can imagine how much space we saved going from 39 randomly sized Tupperwares to 5 that stack inside of each other. And then I did it with me mugs as well. I'm sure you can agree with this, but mugs mount up over the years. There were ones that I'd been sent from This Morning when I was on there. There was one from a competition that I'd won. There was like funny ones that my friends had bought me, you know, ones I got with Easter eggs over the years. 19 mugs. 19 bloody mugs there were in there. 19. There are 2 of us living in this house and we never drink more than 1 cup at a time. I don't think we've ever probably had more than 2 visitors at any one given time as well. So 15 of those mugs went the journey. And again, you can imagine how much space that cleared up in the cupboards. It's wild when you start doing things like this. It's almost like decluttering your life, but but standardising it for the life that you want to live. Because if we're all honest with ourselves, you know, nobody wants to live in a cluttered home. Nobody chooses intentionally to live that way. It just happens naturally to us all over the years. Similarly, when I was going through our baby drawers in the nursery, like, he's already outgrown so many of his clothes. In fact, he's gone from 6 pounds born to 10 pounds 7 just yesterday. He's almost doubled in length. So I put a couple of his baby grows that have that sentimental value, like the ones his birth mom bought him for hospital, because I've put those away in his memory box. You know, maybe one day we'll make a cushion out of them or something like that. But all of the others, some of which still had tags on, have gone in a bag to give to a local children's charity. Now when I go into his drawers, I can see all of the 0-3 months things in one drawer, all of his 3-6 month clothes in another drawer, and it just makes it so much easier to choose him an outfit for the day because I'm not having to use all of my energy up going through loads of clothes that no longer fit him. It sounds like such a simple concept, doesn't it? So I was talking to the girls in my business WhatsApp group earlier last week, and I mentioned to them that as I had very little time at the moment, I'd not even been food shopping in about 6 or 7 weeks. And, you know, I've been spending a lot of money, a lot of money getting groceries delivered from things like Uber Eats on an evening. Like, the same loaf of bread that costs you a pound in the supermarket might cost you £1.60 on Uber Eats. It's absolutely disgusting. But they don't just bump the prices up, they also have delivery fees, the Uber fees, the driver fees, you know. And someone said, "Why not just get a food delivery once per week with the essentials?" And I thought, well, that's what I am doing. And then I thought, actually, there are certain things that I get every single week from the shops, you know, such as wraps, eggs, oat milk, rice, pasta, potatoes. And I thought to myself, surely there must be a way that you can just have these set up to come to your house at the start of every week. And who knew there is? This saves me so much time and effort now because I've got all of my favorites saved in a basket with my local supermarket. So all I do is I add them to my cart and then add in the other things I need, such as meat, vegetables. And standardizing this took me maybe 30 minutes, but now I don't have to drive to the shops, I don't have to wander aimlessly around the aisles. I don't have to be totally distracted by chocolate and Easter eggs and crisps and fizzy drinks. And because I only have that stuff in the house, I'm eating a lot healthier again. I even did the same thing with me vitamins. I thought, well, I know that there's 90 capsules in here, and I know that's gonna last me 90 days, so surely I can place a subscription that will be delivered to my door every 90 days with these same vitamins. And there is! You can just set it up on Amazon. I was shook. This is going to save so much time and, you know, free up a lot of my energy because I don't have to go on and physically order things one by one. Standardizing your life to free up energy from mindless tasks can be such an effective strategy for enhancing your productivity and manifesting more of what you want in your life. So I task you today to start by identifying which tasks in your life consume a significant amount of your time without adding much value to your life at all. These could be such mundane tasks like grocery shopping, like I've just mentioned there, or cleaning, or checking emails. Just take a look at what you can standardise. So I used to go to Pets at Home for me dog's monthly food. I'd walk around with him, and before I knew it, I would sometimes have £50 worth of food and toys that he didn't really need. Honestly, his toy box is so overflowing and he doesn't play with half of them. So I thought, I'm gonna bag up all of his old toys. I took them to Newcastle Cat and Dog Shelter, and I moved him onto subscription dog food through tails.com. So it works out at £25 a month, which is half of what I was paying at Pets at Home, and the food is delivered to our door rather than me having to go out and get it. So I'm not only saving myself time but I'm also saving myself money and the bandwidth of having to even give it any thought. So when we do this kind of thing, we free up so much of our lives to enable us to get on with what we really want in life. Hell, I might even get 5 minutes to meditate now. Another way this method can help is by reducing the amount of time it takes us to make decisions in life. Like I was saying earlier about the food shop, or, you know, choosing meself some clothes on a morning, Sometimes I would wander up and down the aisles in the shop thinking of all the things that I could make and then trying to find all the ingredients for those meals. Or sometimes I'd like pull out a t-shirt out of me wardrobe and then put it with a pair of jeans and be like, no, that doesn't really like look right. So I'd choose another outfit and I would go through outfit upon outfit. There'd be clothes everywhere. Create routines for repetitive tasks to minimize the amount of decision-making and energy spent on them. That is essential. Create those routines. Having a set schedule for daily activities like mealtimes or exercise and work, that can help automate your day-to-day decisions. So if you're really militant, you can always create yourself a meal plan on a Sunday evening for the week ahead, and that just means that you'll have more energy to put into other things rather than faffing on each night looking through the cupboards, looking through the fridge, thinking about what you can make to eat. Because you'll know what you're going to be eating, you'll know what you've got to prep, you'll know what's in the cupboards because you're going to be making this meal. It sounds really simple, doesn't it? But it's honestly a bit of a game changer. One of the other ways that I incorporate this is in my business because I leverage technology and apps to automate tasks where possible. So every Sunday evening, I spend maybe an hour or two scheduling all my social media posts for the week ahead. Then I'll go and I'll automate messages. So for example, when someone comments the word wealth on any of my posts about my Money Masterclass, it'll automatically send them a link with a discount code to their inbox. That means that I don't have to respond to every single comment or copy and paste messages to people with the same information. And every single night, my social media posts go out, usually whilst I'm either cooking tea or feeding baby. Imagine if I was feeding the baby in one hand and trying to post on Instagram with the other. I'd get stressed and I could even end up posting the wrong thing or spilling the milk. So it really, really does free up my time. Even if you don't have a business, you can do this by setting up automatic bill payments, for example, rather than paying manually. You can use smart home devices to give meter readings so that you don't have to log in each month and input your digits. Or you could even use time-saving apps that streamline task management and productivity. Now, a lot of what I've spoke about at the start of this episode, I'm sure a lot of you will probably think it's quite closely linked to decluttering. So we've mentioned before on here, haven't we, that a cluttered space can sometimes lead to a cluttered mind. So I just want you to spend that little bit of time to organize your living and working spaces to make it easier to find things and focus on the task at hand because minimalism in your physical and digital spaces can reduce distractions and decision fatigue. I had a cleanup of some of my apps the other week. My phone was absolutely bogged down with them and I was getting hundreds of notifications every single day. So I would be sat working and me phone would ping from a bloody app that I've never used in years and I'd use that as an excuse to open Instagram And you know, before I knew it, I'd been scrolling for 30 minutes. So I got rid of all the games that I no longer play, you know, all the apps I never use anymore, social sites such as Snapchat, Houseparty that I haven't used in probably, you know, 3 to 4 years. I also turned off notifications of apps that do me head in from pinging a million times a day, like WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook, so I only go on when I've actually got capacity to do so. Decluttering anything can bring an increase of focus back to what we're physically wanting to do. You can even group similar tasks together and tackle them in a single focus session. Now, this approach, some of you might have heard as batch processing, and that can significantly increase our efficiency and free up more time for our meaningful activities. So like what I was saying about meal prep, you cook one big meal, making maybe, you know, 4 or 5 portions and then you batch them into containers so that you don't need to cook for the next few evenings. Something that I'm horrific for though, and something that I really need to get better with is to learn to delegate because delegation really, really helps you with this. So I want you to identify tasks that can be delegated or outsourced to other people 'cause again, that's gonna streamline everything. That's gonna declutter this process to the point of, physically handing it to someone else, whether it's a household chore, admin work, or anything else that can be handled by someone else. When we free up this time, that can be so invaluable to you. I know when I first started Canny Crystals 3 years ago, I thought I'd be able to do all my work, all my accounts, my HMRC documents, my VAT returns. Piece of piss, I thought. Cut to me a year in with all these deadlines approaching, having not submitted anything to the government, I felt— oh my God, the sense of dread that I had. I felt so overwhelmed and confused. That's all I can remember about it. I was overwhelmed and confused. I was trying to click buttons and I was thinking, what am I even writing down here? I specifically remember sitting down one day thinking, let's crack on with this and nothing else and we'll do it all in one day and I will do this VAT return. 3 days later, I was still muddling through the forms whilst trying to work and pack orders at the same time. It was awful. I remember buying some software as well to do me tax returns for me. I think it was like Sage or something like that, and that took me a few days to get me head round and learn how to use. And then when I did start using it, it still confused the hell out of me, and I ended up resenting doing my taxes. I'd put it off for as long as possible because I just couldn't be bothered to get stressed out over it over and over again. Anyway, to cut a long story short, I reached out to a friend who's an accountant and he said, you know, we can do all of that for you for £60 a month. I'd spent days, and when I say days, I mean days on this. It made me instantly think about how much money I could have saved in my business had I have been thinking about other things. Or putting other ideas in motion instead of like wasting all of my time on this form. I just felt so, so stupid. So I delegated my accounts and all my tax returns and my VAT returns, but I still to this day struggle to delegate anything else. I'm a bit of a control freak. I have Jade in my office who packs most of my orders, but I still can't delegate much else to her because I struggle with control. And I mean, it's hard because Take this podcast for example. Like, can you imagine if one day me mam just did an episode for you all? It's a bit random, isn't it? And you lot would be listening thinking, what the actual hell is going on? It's like what Denise Toffield Thomas says, like, I am the business, the business is me, my face is my fortune. But in my home life recently, I've just had to delegate things. I've had to ask for help because I know fine well I wouldn't have been able to get through the days had I have not asked for help. One day a couple of weeks ago, for example, I had a baby reflexology class, then a dentist appointment, then a social worker visit, then a healthcare visit, then a 1-hour membership call with my members, then I had a call with our foster carer support worker, and I spent over an hour on the phone to our GP to try and get an appointment. All of that in one day amongst having to try and do everything else that I do on a normal day. So I just had to say to Johnny, please can you just take JJ out for his walk this afternoon? Please can you go and collect this prescription from the chemist? Please can you reorder these leaflets that go in my orders? So by delegating tasks that others can do just as well or better, I was then freeing up my own time and streamlining my focus on tasks that require my unique skills and abilities. And this increases overall efficiency and productivity because tasks are completed faster, and you can concentrate on higher value activities. Taking on too many tasks as well can lead to stress and burnout, and we know this, that negatively impacts your mental and physical health. So when we delegate, that helps to maintain a healthier work-life balance by ensuring that we're not being overwhelmed. Therefore, you're gonna preserve your energy and you're gonna focus for tasks that matter the most. Something else that I've had to standardise in the last few weeks is my friendships. So simply just learning to say no to commitments that don't align with me goals or values, setting clear boundaries around me time and energy with people, that's been crucial for maintaining focus on what's important to me. So one of me friends asked if she could come round the other night, another had asked a couple of days before, and then someone else asked, and I just thought, you can all just come round at the same time and we'll kill 10 birds with one stone. That was a game changer for me too. I saved so much time. They all came round together, we all had a laugh, and a couple of hours later they all went home and I'd caught up with all of them in one go. Now that might sound like a pretty simple thing to do, but it saved me so much time rather than everyone visiting individually. So by systematically reducing the mental load and the energy expenditure on all of these silly little mundane tasks, you can create more space and energy for activities that align with your goals and values. This streamlined approach can not only increase your productivity, but it also enhances your overall well-being and your ability to manifest your desires. The Law of Attraction doesn't work better when we have a clean house. We should also focus on other areas: our relationships, our bodies, our thoughts, and even smaller, seemingly insignificant things like our handbags, for example. Clutter blocks us and stands in our way when we want to manifest our dreams and goals successfully. The Law of Attraction works in such a way that we clearly signal to our subconscious what we want, such as our goals and our dreams, and we can do this in many different ways. For example, by being vibrationally aligned with our goal, or by visualization, and also when we start living as if we have achieved our goal. Because our subconscious mind will filter out everything that matches this new reality that we create. But what happens when we have a lot of clutter in our lives and when we're disorganized? That can feel very overwhelming for the brain, and that's going to create a lot of stimuli for the brain to deal with and will actually stop your subconscious mind from doing its job correctly. Sometimes that clutter is even worse because often it stands symbolically for something negative or is attached to some limiting beliefs. One example of this might be a wardrobe full of clothes that you've long grown out of. So what signals do you think these clothes in your wardrobe send to your subconscious mind every time you see them and realize that you don't fit into them? It's obvious. One of the most powerful and fastest ways to manifest more abundance into your life is by standardizing and decluttering. So get rid of everything in your life that no longer has its value and get rid of everything that is no longer aligned with your dreams and goals. If you look at all areas of your life, you'll find some low-hanging fruits, and these are the ones that you should work on first, the ones that are going to be the easiest for you to implement. These are usually the things that don't seem to make such a big difference, such as that chipped plate that I talked about earlier. So we just accept it and we don't really care about it, but these are the things that will add up over time. That chip might turn into a crack, that crack might split the plate open and then you're like, "Oh, I'm down to 3 plates now instead of 4." Subconsciously, every time you open that kitchen cupboard and you see that you've only got 3 plates instead of 4, you're going to feel poor. They stop you from being successful. They stop you from being aligned with the universe, and they stop you from manifesting your bigger dreams. All these things draw our attention away from the big goals that we want to achieve in life. The other thing is as well, if we get stressed over all the little things in life, subconsciously we start to feel disillusioned about what we can actually achieve. Like, if we can't even replace a plate, how are we going to manifest our dream home? Does that make sense? I hope it does. It's not even that this stuff is really hard to handle, or it would take a lot of time, or a lot of money. We just don't make it a priority, so it never gets done. We just overlook it, okay? So give whatever it is in your life that is taking up so much of your energy give that your priority this weekend. Clearing your space for more flow, abundance, and more manifesting success should be on the top of your priorities. So I really hope that this episode landed exactly where it needed to for you all today. Have a look at all the areas of your life that, you know, you think you can standardize and just give it a go. It's spring, like I say, we've got March 21st coming up, which is the start of spring, so this is the perfect time to do this work, okay? Give it a go. You've got absolutely nothing to lose but everything to gain in terms of time, effort, and energy. And just before I go, if you would like any crystals, just to let you know, the website was updated on Thursday night at 7 PM. If you're on the newsletter, you would have received an email. If you were on Instagram or Facebook, you surely would have seen that as well. So head on over, grab yourself something amazing. We've even got Moldavite again. There are another 300 pieces for sale. Last time, all 300 of them sold out over a weekend. So if you are wanting some, don't leave it to chance. There are pieces there from, I believe, £6 when it goes live. They probably sell out within minutes. So if you're listening to this on the Friday, they might have sold out, but go on, have a look, type in moldavite. I've got moldavite rings, moldavite, uh, pendants, moldavite pieces. But the website itself has been, you know, updated with everything else as well. And there's not just crystals. We've got candles, we've got journals, we've got bundles, jewelry, subliminals, and lots of other spiritual items, even down to online courses based around manifestation. So head to either cannycrystals.co.uk or cannycrystalsacademy.co.uk and enter the discount code, which is the word podcast. You'll get 10% off your entire basket. And I guess that there's nothing left for me to say other than I'll see you all next Friday for another episode. Have a beautiful start of spring, have a good spring clean, and have a beautiful weekend, guys. Bye!

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