Winter Intentions: Warmth, Health, & Decluttering

In this episode, I am sharing a conversation I had with Sarah Swift about how she chooses to appreciate—rather than just endure—the winter season.  

Sarah has learned to welcome winter by carving out intentional moments and finding joy in each day, and remembering that life isn’t a race all year long—there’s time enough for everything that matters. And slowing down, especially in the winter, aligns with seasonal rhythms, which is how we are meant to live!

Here are three takeaways:

Mindset is Everything: Look for small joys in every day—regardless of the season. Whether it’s appreciating freshly fallen snow or savoring a slow cup of coffee, choosing to focus on little moments of happiness can totally transform our experience of the colder months.

Healthy Habits: Don’t let winter be an excuse to put your well-being on hold. Movement (like walking outside—even in the Wisconsin chill!) and muscle toning happened as she learned to adjust her routines, layer up, and create inviting spaces in her home.

Refresh Your Space, Refresh Your Mind: Winter is the perfect time to tackle projects inside your home, from deep cleaning to adding special touches to your favorite spaces. Start small with one meaningful area (maybe your bathroom or office) . Don't feel like you need to declutter your whole house at once!

Links 

• Join Kelly's Group Coaching Program
• Join Kelly’s Free community on Skool
• Sarah Swift

Let's connect.

I am cheering for you!

Transcript

0:00

What if your intentional thought for the next few months when it's cold and snowy is- this could be my grounding reset season? Welcome to the Live A Vibrant Life podcast. I'm life coach Kelly Kibbitz, and each week I'll be here to encourage and equip you with the tools you need to grow in self-awareness and invest your best energy in your dreams and your purpose. I believe self-awareness changes everything. Let's get started. Hey friends. Welcome to the Live A Vibrant Life podcast. I'm so glad you're here with me today. Today I'm gonna be talking to Sarah Swift. Sarah, thank you for being here today. Thank you for having me, Kelly. I'm excited to talk about these subjects. I have previously loved summer more than winter, and that shift has really changed in the last probably two years. I'm so excited to hear all about it. So tell me a little bit about you. What is your heart and passion to share all this good news with? Is it with young moms? Tell me a little bit about you. I turned 51 this month. So I'm a capricorn. My focus is helping younger mothers, where I was several decades ago when you're just overwhelmed and struggling You want to be an encouragement to them. I don't know if you ever see on social media people with young children using that sound. You're gonna miss this. And so the kids are screaming and the house is a mess. They're like, you're gonna miss this. And I'll tell you, my children have flown the nest. You are gonna miss this. I miss that. I miss the messy house and the noise and all of that, so I think it's gonna be a great word that you share. So you told me it is your birthday, happy birthday, and you are Capricorn. I don't know what Capricorn season means. I'd love to hear about it. Yeah, so Capricorn season, it's about becoming the vessel, slowing down and discipline. So there's a bunch of elements to it. I've really embraced it. The last two years I've really been enjoying this season. I. Summer is really short in Wisconsin, and I live on the lake. I want to be outside, I want to enjoy the sunshine, do all the things. But then what happens is projects that I push to the side kinda pile up and the holidays come. And I embrace this season now because I realize it's really a time to reset. That's what I need in order to go into the new year with the mindset of it's not a race. There's plenty of time. I can be intentional every day and every day I can find things that are joyful. What if your intentional thought for the next few months when it's cold and snowy, is this could be my grounding reset season. And that served you these last couple years? About March of 2024, I started waking up around four, 4:30 AM no alarm clock. Wow. I have always been on a schedule so I was a little confused where it was coming from. My morning routines were quiet dark and calm. I have actually don't even have an alarm clock. I don't even own an alarm clock anymore'cause I just, I don't need it. And I used to press the snooze. At least twice every day. Yeah. So this is all new. I found just getting the kind of light that doesn't hurt my eyes in the morning makes the morning routine so much more inviting. And I like the darkness in the morning. I like doing yoga in the morning rather than when the sun is up in the summer. So it is possible for all of us to find thoughts in the winter about where there's some goodness, some grounding, some reset. I was thinking we could talk about three of the words that you shared. One is warm, one is healthy, and one is cleaning. So first I want to talk about warm. How do you stay warm in Wisconsin in the winter? What do you do? Thanks. So first of all, I have several winter coats. So I switch according to the day. And I'm all about not only warmth, but how do I want to feel that day? Where am I going? So if I'm going to work, my coat choice is gonna be warm, of course, but I'm gonna be a little dressier because I do like to dress up when I am, I'm a hairstylist. Yep. I do work behind the chairs still a few days a week in addition to my other business, helping moms. So I'm gonna wear a wool coat, probably a really cute scarf. Physically I stay warm. I have what my daughter's friends call my iconic. Fuzzy blush colored coat. I'm gonna wear that on my casual days. Still dressy enough, but comfortable. And then I have my really, really warm winter coat, which it's great when it's windy and I'm walking outside, which I do every day. I walk my 10 pound dog, Nora, and we go, it doesn't matter. We're out there. I just actually came back from my walk a few minutes ago, it's snowing. It's very cold today. The last thing I'm just gonna mention for warmth is fireplace. We have two of'em in our home and so I also, I like to do my stretching exercises in front of our fireplace and the bonus room where we have our exercise equipment and my yoga mat is up there. We have one downstairs as well. So when we're in the kitchen or if we're all cozy cuddled up on the couch, have it on and just the ambiance of it is so warming and I love that. I agree. We have a pellet stove. So the same thing. You were even encouraging me while I was listening to you talk. Do the stretching there, like use that as an invitation. Now you also are a warm beverage, warm soup kind of girl. Any tips there? I really am. My morning routine year round starts with my coffee routine. I do like to ground my grind, my own coffee beans, so I use, organic coffee. I grind it, and then I use a coffee maker where it actually slowly drips into the craft. It's actual like a ritual that I do. And then I enjoy sipping that in the morning in my office. Like you, I do like really dim lighting. We have dimmers in our home everywhere, so I have a dimmer in my office. I tend to start journaling pretty shortly after I, sit in my office. But warm soups, I have been making regular chili and white chicken chili. Pretty much every other week. We've been having it really often lately just because I'm craving that warmth. Having the dimmers is really important. I know it made it easier for me to get out of bed in the morning with the warm light versus get up and turn the bright light on. It made me not want to get up. The point of today is to say winter really is here. It doesn't have to be the negative fourth of our year. It could be something that we choose to lean into and we say, you know what? This is our grounding. This is our reset. We're gonna do things we really enjoy. The other things you're saying, you don't want a soup in the middle of summer. So if you enjoy a soup or a chili, like look forward to that. I love your coffee ritual. I am a big fan of Emma Dunwoody. She's a human design teacher and she calls the time she drinks her tea, her tea ritual. I think making these things special. It's important, right? For us to enjoy our one precious life. You also mentioned going out for your walk. I would say healthy is a word that you still keep in the winter. Tell me about that muscle toning, walking, staying healthy, even though some of us might decide, oh, it's just too much. I'm just gonna stay back. I think you having three coats reminds us. There's no bad weather. It's just bad clothing. So how do you stay healthy in the winter? Wellness is really a focus of my year round, and this goes back decades, it's just keeps evolving actually as I get older. So how do I stay healthy? I do do muscle toning exercises. In fact, my girlfriend was reminding me, she said, wow, you were doing them as a teenager and I'm 51 now. I use bands on my upper body. I have shoulder issues that kind of came along with my profession and repeated stance. Um. Where my arms were in the same position too long for long periods of time. So I do band work. I also use, small hand weights.. I'm trying to make sure as a woman that I'm not losing my mass as I age. I like the fact that the end results, because I'm not really all that tall. I don't want these big, bulky muscles. I don't have legs that, you know, go on for miles for sure. I just want to be toned, I want to be healthy. I want my bones to be strong. Yeah. And that's a completely different workout than the daily walk that I do, which is more being outside with nature and stress relief as well as the aerobic part for my heart. Maybe listening to this podcast will help somebody come up with a new thought. You can be healthy in the winter. You might need some different clothes. You might need to get up a little early. You might need to find a place in your house that's inviting like a fireplace, pellet stove, or just a nice lamp and. Maybe it's just changing something. So in the summer you might go swimming a lot, but in the winter you're going to use your bands. I think it's so great to have people who keep pointing us to examples of what's possible. It's so easy for our human brain to say, forget it, it's winter. I'm just gonna hibernate and have someone say, no, you could just do these small things every day and feel a difference at 51. Your third word, which I thought was fun, is cleaning. And you were mentioning in the summer you want to be outside, you want to be having fun, you postpone the projects. How do you get in the aligned energy in the winter to do the projects? As soon as the weather gets cold and the holidays are over, so my mindset's not on the holidays anymore. I did take, um, a course last year. It was like a detox, clean out your space course and that was great too'cause it was a really good accelerator. I kind of just think about the spaces and I divide them up into sections. So I'm not thinking, oh my gosh, I have to do my entire house and I start with a space that's small enough that kind of creates the energy to start the momentum. This year it was, I call it my beauty, but it's my master bathroom. It's where I do my hair and makeup and shower, and I have a section that's just mine. My husband doesn't go into that section. I changed the lighting, like the light fixture in there was probably about 15 years old. It needed to be updated and I got some new towels and I'm getting a new, actually, I'm in the process of getting a new,, jewelry hanger for my necklaces, and it was just making that space and also physical cleaning, like deep cleaning it, cleaning the tile in my shower, just like extra clean with the products. Making it physically clean, but also taking out clutter and adding some extra special kind of feminine touches. In my case, I'm very feminine and, I like the little bit of bling that's on my new light fixture and making it feel like when I'm go in there, I'm intentionally ready to start my day, put my makeup on. Like to wear earrings. I'm an earring girl. And that really started the whole momentum. Right now that's evolved into my office. That's a bigger space, much more entailed time-wise. I'm tackling it bit by bit, because that means digital, it means physical papers that I'm going through, I'm getting rid of, and piles of things that my family will put in here. I've made it very clear. My office is no longer the dumping ground for the Amazon package boxes that you don't know what to do with. That might be a gift of winter, enough time, enough energy, you're not wanting to be outside necessarily. So you could track all these small things. Your encouragement would be find a small space that's really important to you. Start there and then you saw the success and it moved you to the next space, but you're not constantly giving yourself a hard time'cause you're not doing the whole house at the same time. It's too overwhelming. I think going room by room. Unless you're actually building a house, which you still have to take it, you know, room by room. Um, it's just more doable and I think you're gonna actually be more intentional. When we did our last, we've done three major remodels, additions on our home. We've been here for 25 years. We live, between two lakes, so it's a very beautiful setting. But our last edition, the designer actually really paid attention to the views of the lake. And she added a mirror in my kitchen, which I never would've thought of. It's on the wall by my peninsula. And she said, you want to be able when you're prepping food. And you're not looking at the lake to your right to be able to see the reflection of it. And I thought, oh my goodness, this is like gold for everybody. That is so gold. I love that. That is so good. And then you also talk about the energy to remove unnecessary things. I think that might be a hard thought for many people. How do you decide what's an unnecessary thing? When I was a young mom. The fly lady had just become popular and she would say, it's so easy as a human to see what everybody else is doing wrong. Like how I could fix my husband's stuff and my kid stuff. And her encouragement to me 25 years ago was leave their stuff alone until you finish all of your own stuff. And I still haven't finished all of my own stuff. How do you know what's unnecessary? How do you find that energy? I also think that's good advice that you received because just on that quick note, um, working on myself rather than worrying about everybody else, has been really my focus for the last several, several years. It's easy to tell everybody else what to do, but working on yourself is the foundation. What I'm going to do and like what my focus is going to be. I think about mindset. So I'm gonna start with my office'cause that's my current area that I'm working on. That's just where my focus is right now, so it makes sense to talk about it. I have beautiful views in here as as beautiful view in here as well. I have a wood straight ahead and I have one of the lakes to my left and the other to the right that I can see because of the windows that are in the office. And so I really want to be able to enjoy the nature, enjoy the views when I'm working on my computer. And if I'm sitting in here for long periods of time and not having a lot of physical clutter around me is. Is absolutely necessary. It's taking everything around me that has piled up over the last six months because I am working on a lot of projects right now. I have physical clutter and I wanted it kind of near me so that I could grab it easily. But what I've found is it actually makes me feel overwhelmed. I'm in the process of color coding. Each course that I'm in, each project that I'm working on has its own color coded folder or notebook. It's clearly labeled. So now when I grab it, I actually know, okay, this is for my podcast, this is for my digital course, and I'm not paging through, or I'm not looking at a stack of papers that makes me feel so overwhelmed. I don't even want to pick it up. So that's basically what I'm doing, is I'm physically. Putting them into color coded categories. I love that so much because I categorize my books that way. And I found it really helpful today. I was going to teach a class on the Enneagram and just the way my brain works, I knew the colors of the books that I wanted to bring with me. And so I've never thought of that though, just kind of color coding. My podcast is gonna be this color, the self-development work. I will be a different color human design a different color. I love that. That was a really good tip. So as we finish, one of the things you said is you love summer and you've learned to love the reset of winter. If somebody's listening to us and they're like, you two are crazy, winter's the worst. How could we help somebody grow in what you would call mindset work of learning to find that thought or that idea that can move them closer to maybe you don't love winter, but you can maybe appreciate some of these things that we've talked about. What would you suggest to somebody who hasn't found that thought yet? That's really easy because this is what I focus on in my course is finding the joy every day. The season really doesn't matter. You can love summer more than winter or fall versus spring. Really, the mindset part of it is you're going into each day no matter what this season is, with the intention of, I'm going to feel good today. I may have to do tasks that I don't want to do, and we all have to do that. There's work to be done and dishes to be washed, laundry, whatever your task may be that day, but I'm going to enjoy whatever moment comes up that feels extra special to me. In winter. I find it really pretty when the big snowflakes were coming down this morning and I was in my office this morning so I had a clear view. On my walk, I had a clear view and so even though I don't necessarily like to be cold, it was beautiful. That was a joyful moment for me, for sure. And I think that's what it really breaks down too, is finding the little pieces throughout the day, not having to have this big. Expansive day of everything about my day is perfect. I think that's just, it's too much to ask your day. Break it down into what about your day feels joyful, is your warm soup that you're, taking the time to enjoy for lunch instead of, maybe just running and grabbing a handful of nuts. Maybe you're gonna sit down and you're going to eat it slowly. You're not slushing your coffee all over, you're gonna take a few minutes and you're actually gonna enjoy it. That might mean getting up a little bit earlier for some of the moms out there that have to drive their kids to school but I really think it's worth it. I think it's the intentional mindset of I'm going to find joy in each day, in every season. I love that so much. And I totally agree with you. I'm sitting also watching the beauty of the snow coming down. When this gets released, it is February, the bleak midwinter. And there are some things we're not in charge of how much snow is coming down, how cold the weather is. But there are some things we are in charge of. Do we want to get a dimmer, do we want to find a jewelry holder that makes us smile when we walk in the space? We're encouraging people find the small action steps that bring you back to the aligned energy you want to be in. Sarah, how could people connect with you if they wanted to learn more about some of these tools you were sharing? Oh, absolutely. You can find me on my website, which is the integrative mother experience.com. I have a freebie checklist that you can go and grab, and that will actually start you off with which areas that I'm teaching. There's five areas that I do concentrate on. You can also find me on my podcast, which is also the integrative mother experience with Sarah Swift. I'm on Instagram and Facebook as well. And that's time with Sarah Swift on Facebook at Lasette Hair Studio, and time with Sarah Swift on Instagram with period in between the word time. Awesome. I will be putting that in our show notes. Sarah, thank you so much for being here today. Thank you for joining the Live A Vibrant Life podcast. I hope our time together encourage you and will equip you with the tools you need to move into the vibrant life you desire. I'm here to help you live a brave, creative, purpose-filled life. And if you'd like to learn more. You can follow me on Instagram or Facebook, Kelly tibbits life coach, or visit my website kelly tibbits.com. I look forward to connecting again soon.