Clutter, Clutter, Everywhere, And Not A Space To See

Feel like you're drowning in your own home or space?  Is Chaos more than the name of a foreign spy group?  Does your mess bother you, even a little?  Chances are if you said yes to one of the above, you're dealing with clutter.

Clutter begins with fear and doubt.  If we don't examine and then challenge these unconscious beliefs, we will stay stuck.  The primary fear is "I may want/need this later".  This keeps us holding onto some useful and not so useful items based on the unspoken theory that if we don't have it when we need it, a catastrophe will occur, we won't survive.  Are the consequences really that dire? How about the inconvenience, frustration and time wasted in trying to find things in the clutter? Rationally speaking, we can see that this is not true.  We can turn this around by saying something like "What can I do instead? What are some other options ?"

This first fear naturally leads to doubts about our ability to handle that unforeseen situation and to making sound decisions.  Looking at our decision-making history, too, can challenge this.  If we do this, we can generally come up with examples of good choices we've made and look at the process we used to arrive at them. We can gain some confidence in our ability to make decisions and transfer that onto this process of learning a new skill, namely, reducing clutter.

Knowing the source of why we struggle is the beginning.  Over the next few weeks we will look at motivating ourselves to deal with the clutter and some practical steps at tackling the issue.

 

 

Read all the parts to this series: 2, 3 & 4