Small steps matter.
They create change, step-by-step.
The first small step is the most powerful. Nothing happens without it.
Having a clear and organised home (or not) has to do with how successful we manage two different but closely related activities:
-
- we have to be good at decluttering / organising physical stuff
- and we have to be good at decluttering/organising our mind.
Our home and our possessions should reflect and support our lifestyle and our values, instead of making life more difficult and stressful.
However, when we are surrounded by belongings that we don’t use, like, need, we can’t relax and refuel our energy resources.
Instead, the mess sucks up our attention and energy. It clutters our mind, the physical clutter bombards our brain with excessive stimuli. We find it hard to focus on our daily lives – it’s all too much!
If we struggle to take action to declutter and organise our home and life, it’s often because the task seems to be so huge that we feel overwhelmed and end up with doing nothing.
We look at the mess and feel stuck, we feel incapable of getting active and making changes.
In this situation, it often helps to just get started – to take the first tiny step:
We choose one small area to focus our decluttering project on and forget about the big rest of the mess for now.
Instead of planning the clear up of the whole house, we decide, for example, to get one drawer in the kitchen sorted, or a little cupboard in the bed room, or our handbag. We set the timer for 20 or 30 minutes, and get the job done, from start to finish.
A small exercise like this, these 20 or 30 minutes, can change everything.
Choosing one small concrete project and tackling it successfully, creates not only new order and space in a little area of our home.
It also changes how we experience ourselves.
Decluttering and organising a small area delivers a visible real result. And this little success triggers a sense of ‘I can take action’, ‘I can organise’, ‘I can achieve results’.
It allows us to start believing in ourselves and our capacity to be(come) an organised person.
Thus, even just a small successful experience like taking action and changing a cluttered drawer into a clear and organised drawer can have significant effects on our mind and our thinking. (Click Here to read about an example project: Decluttering and organising my office supplies’ drawer.)
It can have the power to set off a cascade of other changes in our life because our thoughts and beliefs are the cause of anything we experience in our life:
As soon as we start to believe that we can organise our stuff, that we can achieve results by taking action, we start to feel more powerful and confident, which frees us up to take further action, which delivers further results.
Which then reinforce and intensify our thoughts of being capable of changing our life and taking control. Which strengthens our feelings of strengths, which … .
A tiny small action creating small but real results can get the ball rolling, can trigger a circle of success.