Have you ever walked into a room and thought- “I don’t even know where to begin?” Or have you organized a space and watched it return to it’s previous state because the maintenance wasn’t clear? Watch this video for my organizing success formula and get clarity about your projects.
(Click here to watch on YouTube if you can’t see the embedded player. Or watch the video at http://bit.ly/tcdclear.)
Transcript:
Hi. I’m Lorie Marrero, creator of The Clutter Diet Book and on-line program, and today, we’re going to talk about what you should do first before anything else in your organizing projects. We do have a five-step process based on an acronym of the word “order” that is our general approach for any organizing project.
“Order” starts with the letter “O” for “Outline your plan,” and is a strategic planning step that just takes a few minutes that you can do to make sure that you are going in the right direction with your project. This is great. This five-step process can work for anything and be very effective. You can implement it right now, but if you want to ideally have the best, most long-lasting results, I would ask you to back up one step from that and think about clarity.
So, clutter is delayed decisions and delayed actions. As you’re going through this process, all decision-making is going to be much more difficult if you don’t have clarity on your life in general – your career, your family, your general direction, your desires, your hopes, your dreams. All those things have to be pretty clear for you to be able to answer those questions. Think about it: If you’re packing for a trip, it matters greatly what you’re packing in that suitcase, whether you’re going to the beach or going to the mountains. Same thing in your home – It’s going to matter if you decide that you want to have children – Don’t buy a white sofa that’s going to have juice stains and sticky fingers all over it. If you’re going to have a corporate career, you’re going to have more formal suits and better business attire in your closet. If you’re going to have a dog-walking service, then you’re going to have a different kind of wardrobe in your closet.
There are all kinds of examples of the physical items in our lives being affected directly by our choices of our career and family and all of those things. If you’re not clear on those, it’s going to be harder to do your organizing projects.
Unfortunately, clarity is elusive, and I have developed a little formula that I like to think about in terms of how to get clarity. There are certain transition points in your life when you need to think about this all over again, and I’ve gone through some of those. So, let me share my formula with you. It is clarity equals mindfulness, plus action, plus surrender. So let’s talk about what that means.
So mindfulness is simply being present in your life. If you think about it, in our modern world we are so glued to our electronics. We’re in front of our phones; we don’t have as many face-to- face interactions with people; we tend to have more texts and less actual face-time. We also watch a lot of television in this society. We take the same route home from work every day to the same job and sit in the same chair. We become disconnected and we become almost zombies walking through our lives. We have to make an effort, more than ever, to be mindful and present in our daily lives. If we’re not present, we will miss some of the signs and signals and information that we need to have to get the clarity that we want.
The next step is action. You can’t just let clarity land on you; it’s not going to happen. You need to have a practice and a discipline of some sort moving toward that clarity. Think about it. If you’re trying to buy a house, are you just going to sit at your house and just wait for someone to call you and tell you that there’s a house for sale? Probably not. You’re probably going to get online, you’re going to take some action, you’re going to have a practice and a discipline toward almost daily searching, book-marking, and going out to see the houses. You’re going to be actively looking. So, I would like to suggest to you that one of those practices will be meditation. Meditation will help you with your mindfulness, and it is a practice that improves your brain health; it improves all kinds of response and reaction time in your life, and it helps you, as we said, be more present. The science is in – it’s not a religious practice. It is a scientific, smart practice, and I never miss a day of meditation. Journaling is great as well.
You also might want to get some counseling, you might want to talk to certain people or read certain books. There are actions you need to take toward finding your clarity.
The last piece is surrender. So, you can take all the action you want and you can be present, but at some point you also have to understand that getting your clarity is a process that is slightly out of your control. It takes time. Surrender to the fact that it is a process and it does take time. You can’t wake up tomorrow and have perfect clarity on your life. Maybe if you’re lucky. But most people need to go through this process with their practices and their actions and their mindfulness, and it’s going to take a little while to get there. So, surrendering to the fact that the “how” is not always up to you. Letting those serendipitous things happen and occur to you, being mindful enough to notice them, that’s all part of the surrender and the letting go of the control of the whole process that’s going to let that unlock for you.
I hope this has been helpful to you. Please share in the comments how you’ve gotten your clarity. What are your practices? And if you’re stuck, and you need help with your organizing project and you want to get started, that’s what we’re here for. We have a program – it’s been around almost 10 years now – at clutterdiet.com/learnmore. You can get help from our expert team as much as you want. Come in there every day, post pictures of your project, and ask our experts how to get it done. We will help you personally one-on- one in our Message Boards to get that done. Again, find out more at clutterdiet.com/learnmore. We’ll see you next time. May you always be happy and grateful for having more than enough.
You may have been searching for first steps on a new project or how to find clarity or take action on something.
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