House cleaning as a sport.
What? House cleaning is not a sport, it's just house cleaning, right?
Or is it? We're going to talk about that today.
Hi there. I'm Angela Brown and this is Ask a House Cleaner.
This is a show where you get to ask a house cleaning question
and I get to help you find an answer.
Today's show is brought to us by HouseCleaning360.com
where you, as a small business owner, can
have a competitive advantage by listing your business on HouseCleaning360.com
It's a place to hold all of your social media, videos about your business, before and after
pictures about the houses that you've cleaned, and it also has a place for ratings, interviews
from your neighbors, your friends, your family, all the people that know and love you, people
that would refer you, and your customers.
It's an amazing setup for house cleaners designed, guess what, by house cleaners.
See, it's perfect, HouseCleaning360.com
All right, on to today's show, which is about house cleaning as a sport.
Now we were in a conversation the other day and a house cleaner asks me if there were
essentials that a house cleaner had to know and do or be,
what would those essentials be?
That was an excellent question and it brought me back to the fact that I'm a marathon runner.
I know, it's awesome.
I ran 29 marathons that are 26.2 miles each.
I've ran dozens and dozens, countless numbers, of half-marathons, which are 13 miles each,
and I've run one ultra, which is a 50 mile marathon.
All right, so you just wouldn't show up at a marathon and wing it.
And I'll tell you that you wouldn't do that because it's just not wise.
You don't just show up and not have the right shoes, not have the right training, not have
the right sleep or the right amount of carbs in your body, because running 26.2 miles takes
a big toll on your body.
It's a long-term race and as you race that long distance you have to budget your energy.
All right, so there's a lot of training that's involved, and one of the reasons that I love
marathons is because there's a strategy behind it.
There's also a strategy behind house cleaning, and house cleaning is very similar to a marathon
in that you just wouldn't show up to a house and wing it, right?
There's training, there's physical training, and there's a bunch of stuff that you need
to know so that you can budget your energy throughout the course of a day and also budget
your resources and your fuel, like food.
All right, so let's go back to the marathon for just a second.
When you get ready for the marathon, and let's say we know that it's 10 or 20 weeks in the
future, we build out a calendar and we figure out every single week how many miles per day
we're going to run.
So we have an easy day, a hard day, an easy day, a long distance day, an easy day.
And you break it up so your body can recover between the training periods.
Then there's a certain series of things that you have to eat.
We eat lots of bananas and lots of pasta and lots of carbs in order to have enough fuel
to get from the different training programs that you're doing.
Then as you get closer to the race, then you go into speed work.
You wouldn't think that speed work has anything to do with marathons because marathons are
long distance races, they're not sprints.
But every single marathon that I've trained for, I've gone down to the track and I've
run laps and I've done speed work to build my muscles for the race, because there is
some speed involved.
Then also you do stair climbing, and then there are other things that you do that are
not exactly exercise related, but they're things like heat compression packs.
If you start to have your knees wig out or your back wigs out or something, there are
other things you do, like jump on the little mini trampoline.
It's really exciting, because as house cleaners we use our physical bodies just like you would
when you train for a marathon.
Okay, so having said that, your body is the instrument that you're going to be using from
the entire course of your career, and this is exciting for this reason.
You have control over it.
So if you're going to be in the business for 15 or 20 years, you have to realize my shoulders
are going to take a hit.
With house cleaning there's a lot of wiping countertops and cleaning mirrors and vacuuming
back and forth, and it's movement that your shoulder takes the hit, so you want to keep
your shoulders in excellent shape.
So as essentials for house cleaners stretching every day is awesome.
Yoga every day is awesome.
Swimming is awesome.
Weight lifting is awesome.
That strengthens your legs and your back and your core.
I use one of the little mini trampolines, and I'll put a link to it in the show notes,
because I'm a big fan that every house cleaner needs one.
When you get home from a day and your body aches, your back aches or your neck is tweaked
out or you just are like blah, having one of those days, get on the little mini trampoline.
You don't have to jump high, but you can just jump for a couple of minutes in front of the
TV and it will completely realign your spine.
I'm such a huge fan of this.
If you want to go extra time, it's a great core building exercise for your butt, for
your quads, for your abs.
I mean it's just a great, great series of exercises that you're going to use every day
all those muscles while your cleaning houses.
What are the essentials for house cleaning?
The essentials are that you are on a routine.
By that I mean if you're an elite athlete you have a routine for your body.
What that means is you go to bed about the same time every night, you eat our meals about
the same time every day, and if you transfer this over into house cleaning you can do the
exact same things, because you are the instrument that will drive your business.
If you are treating yourself like an elite athlete, when you go to clean houses suddenly
you're in a different game, because a lot of the house cleaners that are out there ...
I'm not kidding, they'll show up and they'll wing it.
They may have stayed up way too late last night or they may have been out drinking with friends.
And now they expect they're going to show up and they're going to be on their A game.
They're not.
And when they get fired the person whose house it was that let them go, they're going to
be looking for another house cleaner that has, here's the key, consistency.
Consistency.
If every single day you show up and you feel a certain way you can perform at a certain
level, and house cleaning is a performance.
Like I said, it's all physical activity.
There's a lot of moving. There's bending. There's squatting. There's lifting.
There's all kinds of stuff that's involved in house cleaning.
And if you're out of shape and you are not at your elite best
rumor is going to get out and you may get fired and never know why.
But the house cleaners that are out there that work really hard on keeping a routine
for their physical body, they show up every single day feeling about the same way, and
when they have a down day, just like you do on sports, you can still go through the motions
and you can still perform a really awesome game, even if you don't feel 100% your best.
So the essentials that I'm talking about right now are you.
It is a very serious thing to treat yourself like your company's biggest asset, because
if you just get off on a tangent and you just show up every day and you wing it and then
you don't understand why your body is not responding and you're exhausted and you have
constant lethargy and whatever it is you're eating through the day is not enough fuel
to get you through the day, there's a whole bunch of other things you need to look at,
because your business will just collapse piece by piece until it just absolutely dissolves,
and you don't want to go out there and try to compete in an aggressive, competitive marketplace
and not have your instrument in tune.
Okay, those are the essentials.
That's my two cents for today and until we meet again
leave the world a cleaner place than when you found it.
Không có nhận xét nào:
Đăng nhận xét