3 Ways to Declutter Your Life
When talking about decluttering, people often refer to a physical space. The conversation tends to lean towards cleaning a room or organizing a closet or clearing off your desk space.
One thing that is not talked about enough is decluttering your mind.
If you have ever been challenged with removing clutter from your environment, here is a secret for you…until you begin removing clutter from your mind, it is going to be difficult to clear out your physical space.
“If you can change your mind, you can change your life.” ― William James
Here are 3 ways to start decluttering your life by decluttering your mind.
I am going to argue that the best way to start decluttering your mind is to turn off the television set. If it is on television, there is an 80+% chance it is depressing or negatively bent.
I welcome you to challenge this on any given night at any given time.
The same goes for radio talk shows. Stop listening! Talk about irate! How many people listen to talk radio and sit there and argue with the radio! How obnoxious is that? Like you do not have enough chaos in your life? Let’s just create some. You don’t have enough stress in your life, you need to go looking until you find some?
As a culture, we sometimes seem to look for opportunities to make ourselves aggravated.
This is something weird about our society — if we are not stressed, if there is not chaos or despair, if we cannot be a martyr about something, we are not happy for some reason.
Stop that! Choosing to seek out that which makes you feel aggravation can cloud your clarity and weigh heavy on your mind long after the program is over.
Keep the memory and ditch the stuff whenever possible.
This little concept is illustrated in many different ways. Sometimes it is about “tidiness” or minimalism. At other times, it is about being clear on what has meaning to you or someone else.
An example is something that meant so much to a person of an older generation that has little or no meaning to a more current generation. Things like china and “the good silver” mean little to my generation. It is nice to have something that belonged to my grandmother or grandfather or someone who meant something to me, of course. But, it is more important to me to keep the memories and “ditch the stuff.”
My grandmother and the memories I have of her are worth more than a cabinet full of plates.
Here is the key — if you are keeping things for the wrong reasons (for example, “I can’t throw that out, it was my grandmother’s” instead of “that is important to me because there is a wonderful memory about my grandmother attached to it”), then something that should be pleasant can become clutter very quickly.
Deep down, that stuff can become a burden to you and to the memory of someone you loved. The memories are important, the basement full of “stuff” you will never use is not.
Imagine if you could get some of that “stuff” in to the hands of someone who could create their own important memories with it. That can be life-changing.
“People cannot change their habits without first changing their way of thinking.”
― Marie Kondō
Want to change your life today? Stop telling yourself you cannot do it. Wow, is that simple or what?! But, it is true.
If you step off the proverbial hamster-wheel of life for just a couple of minutes and take a look, you will see something extraordinary. The vast majority of the time, YOU are your own worst enemy when it comes to moving forward. You cannot change the past, nor can you predict the future. Right? So, ask yourself this question…where do you spend the majority of your time? If your answer is anything other than “the present,” you are standing in your own path holding up a big stop sign.
Stop blaming everyone else for your lack of progress. You are in so much more control than you think!
“Change the way you look at things and the things you look at change.”― Wayne Dyer
Changing your mind is step one to changing anything else. Start there.
WRITTEN BY
Robin Sacks Professionally, I am a Confidence & Performance Coach, speaker, author and motivator. Personally, I am a mom, wife, and friend.
I live for bad puns and good mysteries.