I call it the 90 second breathing space project.
First, I turn off most notifications for all things, except my own, because I know what I want. I don’t want somebody else’s notifications. I look for reasons, any reason to unsubscribe, delete. It’s noise, I don’t want that. What I want is being very intentional.
I schedule short periods throughout the day so I can reflect on the breathing space. Am I getting more or less? Am I being intentional or not? These have to be for short periods of time such as 90 seconds, or it won’t be realistic for me to commit to that. But even those 90 seconds have a profound impact on bringing me back into focus.

*Transcript from Video

“Why do you want to start having your mind open, having a little breathing space, do a little decluttering?
As you see things from a different perspective, scientists call it escalating intelligence. As your vantage point continues to increase, you see things differently. As you go up in altitude, everything changes.

You can see things a little bit differently at every elevation. After you’ve seen it, you can’t not see that anymore. You start seeing more and the doors open to things that you didn’t even know were there. “ah, that’s how that works.”

Breathing space is like this, it compounds. The more you have, the more clearly you’ll see, the more opportunities and doors will open that you never expected. Even creativity unlocks and the more good things start happening.”

*Short Summary-See Video For More Details
If you can’t answer the questions “Who Am I and What do I want with my life?” It’s going to be impossible to prioritize how you spend your time and energy, if you don’t know the larger picture.
A big part of breathing space, is unwrapping who you are and what your best life looks like so you can connect that vision to the actions and decisions needed.

*Short Summary: See Full Video for more expanded details.

One of the things I learned is that people (including myself) skip from book to book to book. They take course after course. They hope there’s some magical idea that will change their life for them. There are many golden nugget ideas, but you need to take those ideas and apply individually to your own life and your situation. Life is too individualized for the same advice and strategy to work for everyone. Take the ideas that work for you and apply them. Leave the rest as they add clutter to your life.

Short Summary-Watch Full Video For More.

Most people fall short of their goals and they don’t understand why.
People have a lot of goals and they’re often lofty. They’re too far away. It’s good to have lofty goals, but then we need a blueprint. Here’s the picture of the Taj Mahal.. It’s impossible to build all at once immediately, so what steps do we need to start with?
Breathing space helps you reverse engineer your lofty goals into simple, yet important daily activities that you need to do right now. These compound and eventually you’ve laid the foundation, built the walls, and you’re significantly closer to having the Taj Mahal you envisioned.

When you first declutter your life, there’s still stuff coming at you. You may go into your day all excited with good intentions and the right mentality but then we collide. The spirit collides with real life and it’s like we get hijacked along the way. We may take a downturn that kind of takes the wind out of our sails. Now we’re down a peg. And then we collide with something else and we go down another peg, then again, and again… and pretty soon you can’t wait for a happy hour.
But if we go about this a little bit differently we may be able to avoid this. What I do is use 3 cards that each have a different word on them: Anticipation, Adaptation, and Reflection.
I need a better way to anticipate my day. I can imagine those things that I’m going to collide with that are going to take the wind out of my sails. Then if I can, I will arrange things a little bit differently to be prepared or avoid those items. There are some things I have the power to arrange.
However, I don’t have the power to change and control everything, but I do have the power to shape. And with that little power to shape, things can start changing. When I do collide with something. I need to adapt. I can turn toward what matters most, or I can turn away and have the wind taken out of my sails.
The other card is reflection. You know, how are things going? Even something as simple as. if you experience something, did I like it? What didn’t I like? And then you can go, okay, going forward. I want more of the stuff that I liked and less of the stuff I didn’t.
I use these cards to help with my own breathing space and mentality instead of getting the wind knocked out of me and having it be another average, boring date where we get to the end of, gasping for breath, wondering what happened.

What is breathing space? I always ask people, when’s the last time that you created more of it? And with more of it, what difference would it make in your life and work.

Imagine the things that are weighing on you or wasting your time, energy, and heart, and if we could get rid of 25% or 50% of those things. Now could we do with that space that we have that we didn’t have before. How that might feel?

So start by stepping back to get some space from the things that are railroading us. De-clutter some of the things that are wasting our time, energy, and heart.

I often say we need a heart monitor because our heart can intuitively feel what is right. I call it the breathing space meter. Imagine the meter goes from 1-10 and if you hold this up, when it feels really good, it’s a 10, right?

Ask yourself what would a 10 feel like? 9? 8? 7? Ect?

If you take the time to register these measurements, you can hold this up to everything in your life and give it a score. If it’s a 10, nine or eight, that’s good. If it’s something less than a 8, maybe we should delete it. Or if we have to keep it, then it’s something that we need to figure out how to disentangle.
But there’s a lot of stuff you could just get rid of.

Unfortunately it’s the stuff in the middle that people accumulate. The 1’s and 2’s are easy to recognize because we often hate them or they are painful. But it’s 3-7’s that will add more to your life that don’t matter and take time and energy from the 8, 9, and 10’s.

Imagine if you were playing a card game but you don’t pick up every card. Instead you just pick up the cards that are going to make your hand better. But in life, we don’t do that. We accumulate crap, you know, we accumulate a noise and garbage and load. And we spend all day with the, energy that we have just taking care of all the stuff and a lot of it doesn’t matter.

Shed the load that doesn’t matter and keep the stuff that matters by giving it your energy and time.