Sweep Time (Viewing, Listening, Waiting For, i.e., Unfinished Business)
Welcome back and here we go for our final article in this series that is specifically designed to get you to sweep. Just so you know, now that you are a “sweeper,” you will never go back to being a non-sweeper. Rest assured!
We are focusing on specific prompts (which you will want to download) in the categories of viewing, listening, writing, and “waiting fors,” which I also think of as “unfinished business.”
Take a look at page 56. I figure this is enough to get you started. It is quite possible that like most of us, you have a whole array of videos, dvds, webinars, classes, trainings, movies, and so forth that you want to watch or retrieve information from. See what jumps up when you see this. I know one idea that is likely to jump up… “Hmmmm…apparently I need to live another 100 years at least given all that I’d like to learn and think about and do!” I know that feeling! One idea you may end up writing down after working with this page of prompts is: “Face reality. Get rid of all those old videos, since we don’t even have a player anymore” (or something like this!)
Also on this page are some “listening” prompts. I wish I had discovered “books and classes on tape” when I was still a graduate student and lived in Dallas. Because of the size of the city and the monstrous traffic and the fact that I lived and taught in completely different parts of the city and went to grad school another 40 miles away, I could have listened to hundreds and hundreds of hours of books and classes each year instead of listening to the radio. But, I didn’t know! Now that I live in the huge state of Nevada and have driven most parts of it many times, over the years, I moved from books on tape to books on CD to mp3s to podcasts. My ear buds are in my ears so I can be learning from a podcast or class (or listening to a novel) nearly anytime I’m not in conversation with another person.
What about you, what do any of these terms prompt in your mind?
Page 57, and this is a big one really. I have taught quite a few workshops on this topic and need to revisit the concept often!
My definition of unfinished business is:
Any and all aspects of your personal and professional life that are on your mind but not in a trusted system, with that system being one which provides a means for acknowledging, accessing, and assuring completion.
In many ways, you can see how this entire mind sweep program has been about unfinished business. This page simply calls it out more deliberately. Go through this and think about,
**‘Hm…Do I have any communications — either letters, emails, or intergalactic messages that I have sent out that I haven’t heard back on and I should have?’
**‘Hm…orders — oh yeah. What happened to that cord I ordered for my computer? When is it due in?’
**‘Reimbursements — yep. Once again, my place of work is not the speediest. Some of us joke that they may think we’ll forget if they’re slow enough and then they can keep the money. I need to follow up on this and I need to set up a SYSTEM so that from now on, I can track this without it being on my mind.’
Keep sweeping any and all items that are on your mind and not in a trusted system that would let you acknowledge, access, and assure completion of those things.
Last page in this module is “writing.” One of the professors who was in the real-time Mind Sweep *E*vent suggested that one could do a mini-mind sweep just on writing projects and she is exactly right, of course! Once I started listing out all the words and phrases that might help you think about the writing tasks and projects that you have traversing around your mind, I filled up a page in a hurry! You’ll see that there are both personal and professional writing tasks I’m encouraging you to acknowledge.
You might as well write them down. Since many of us have already tested to see if our writing gets done magically, I can save you that trouble to assure you that it does not. Write it down and THEN you’ll be able to get it into the queue for completion (or deletion, which is an option, too).
In the Hunks, Chunks, & Bites workshops I’ve done all over the country for university faculty, one of the first activities folks do is share their estimates of how many writing projects they have. I hear estimates of 3, 5, 6 because people are thinking about GIANT writing projects as writing projects. I need to move them very quickly to noting those but then also acknowledging all the less-than-giant writing projects, too. Once they’re acknowledged, then they can be planned (or panned!)
Make a good pass through this page and figure out what else you want to get out of your mind and ultimately, into a system… Your notecards or however else you’re gathering for now is a better system than your head, by the way. And there are many ways to refine your system but this is the start!!!
Here I am the most recent day I was leading a mind sweep for about 50 people. I wore a rainbow shirt and rainbow necklace to symbolize the “arc” of how this process goes.
Here I am the most recent day I was leading a mind sweep for about 50 people. I wore a rainbow shirt and rainbow necklace to symbolize the “arc” of how this process goes.
