Intentional Living Archives - Page 3 of 4 - Simply Organised at 60plus

Downsizing – 9 Questions to make the move easier.

Why can it be so hard to get a house ready for downsizing?

There are many reasons – these three are the most relevant for most people:

1. – Downsizing is a major life change.

When we decide to downsize, we are not just changing our physical location.

We are also leaving behind a larger home that holds memories of our past and present lives. The smaller space we move into will initially be unfamiliar – and it will shape our future.

Downsizing is, in essence, a significant life transition.

Continue reading Downsizing – 9 Questions to make the move easier.

Your top priorities make it easier to plan and organise your life intentionally.

Living intentionally means that you deliberately decide how you want to live – and what you want to do to create the life you want.

It means that you don’t let life just happen to you and purely react to its circumstances and challenges.

Instead, you actively define what’s important to you and how you want to experience and live your life.

You are well aware of your priorities and proactively make changes that move you toward the life you want to live.

Your priorities give your life direction and guidance.

Planning your life with intention doesn’t have to be an intimidating or overwhelming exercise.

If you regularly check and update your priorities, you are well prepared to act and react confidently when faced with bigger or smaller decisions in everyday life.

Your priorities also direct and guide you when you must manage a significant life challenge:

- A planned transition like entering retirement, becoming an empty nester, downsizing,
- or an unexpected event like divorce, the loss of a job, a critical illness, or the death of a loved one.

How do you choose your priorities – and direct your life in the way you want it to go?

Continue reading Your top priorities make it easier to plan and organise your life intentionally.

Living intentionally means that we carefully pay attention to where we put our attention.

Our lives and our experience of life reflect where we spend most of our attention.

The thoughts that we paid the most attention to in the past, the ones we thought most frequently, are the thoughts that have created our current results.

The thoughts we pay most attention to today, those we are thinking most frequently right now, will create our future results.

Our attention is our most powerful resource. And we can intentionally make good use of this resource. We have the power to control where we place our attention.

However, the amount of attention available to us is limited.

At any given moment, we can pay attention to only one thing. Just one.

That’s why it is so important to intentionally decide where we want to put our attention.

3 little questions help us make use of every day – intentionally

Often, time flies by, one day quickly passes, and then the next, and the next, and suddenly the week is gone.

And if someone asked us what actually happened during the week, what we did or didn’t do, what went well and what didn’t, we struggle to remember.

That’s a pity.

We risk losing valuable memories and experiences. And we miss the opportunity to learn from our daily successes and failures.

A little evening routine can help us live every day more intentionally.

Two powerful decluttering questions

Do you plan to do some decluttering work – and feel stuck?

If you don’t feel motivated to get your stuff sorted out and to let go of any clutter, or if you feel motivated but feel unable to decide what’s actually clutter and what’s not,

I suggest you answer two questions – although it might feel a bit uncomfortable.

Ask yourself:

- Who will most probably (have to) clear up my belongings after my death?
- And what do I want them to think about my stuff – and about me?

Yes, I know, most of us don’t like to think about our mortality.

That’s why we actively avoid thinking about what is going to happen with our personal stuff and who will have to take care of it when we pass away.

Answering the questions can bring clarity and make decluttering decisions easier.

Living Intentionally – Short Introduction – Part 3

In Part 1 of this short introduction series, we defined what living intentionally means, in a broader and in a more narrow way.

In Part 2, we listed some typical life situations to get a clearer idea of what intentional living might look like in real life.

Today, I want to briefly discuss a simple framework that helps us create a more intentional life.

Living intentionally – How do we get there?

No matter what the specific intention behind a client’s decluttering or organising project is, we always use my simple 3-step process – the ‘ADA Framework’ – to realise the desired outcomes successfully.

The ADA Framework

These are the steps that my clients practice and implement to actively take control and create the life they want to live:

Living Intentionally – Short Introduction – Part 2

Now, that we have defined what intentional living means, it’s time to consider how the concept plays out in real life.

Living intentionally – What does that look like?

Living an intentional and organised life looks different for each of us, of course.

Each of my clients has very personal and unique goals and ideas about what they want to achieve and why they want that.

Decluttering and organising physical stuff and personal information.

For some of my clients, the focus of the work is creating more space and order in their personal environment. They want to clear their home and belongings or optimise their physical paperwork and digital information management. Their intention is to enjoy more spaciousness, clarity, and lightness.

Planning, organising, and successfully realising bigger changes in life.

Living Intentionally – Short Introduction – Part 1

Living intentionally – What does that mean?

Basically, living intentionally means that we deliberately decide how we want to live our life. And then we act on that.

We don’t let life just happen to us and purely react to its circumstances and challenges.

Instead, we actively define what’s important to us and how we want to experience and live our life.

We proactively make any necessary changes, even if that doesn’t feel very comfortable.

And we get ourselves well prepared for the challenges and opportunities the future might bring along.

Specifically, living intentionally means that we get good at thinking and acting intentionally.

It means that we actively

Clutter Awareness – 4 ways to get to know your stuff better

Before you can decide what to declutter you need to know what you have

If you don’t feel completely comfortable in your home but struggle to decide what you should change or what you should let go of, you can use little experimental exercises that are not only fun but also help you see your home from a different and more neutral point of view.

Your increased awareness will help you make more confident and determined decluttering decisions.

EXERCISE 1 – Take the view of a stranger who is visiting for the first time

Go outside and enter your home through the front door again.

Walk through all rooms and pretend to see all your furniture and belongings for the first time.

Which assumptions are you making about the people living in this place?

Take notes of the thoughts, feelings, and judgments that come up.

EXERCISE 2 – Imagine you would move out soon

Continue reading Clutter Awareness – 4 ways to get to know your stuff better

How to separate the treasures from the clutter

What are your treasures?

We all own things we truly love, things that we cannot imagine parting with, even if sometimes other people can’t understand our attachment to those special things.

These are our treasures.

Their worth is not measured in money, but rather in the meaning and significance they hold for us. Often, they represent very special experiences of our life, and they reflect what is unique about us.

Treasures are the things that you for sure want to preserve from the past and take along with you into your future.

The following exercise will help you discover your personal treasures – and it will help you to constrain yourself to a limited number of treasures:

You want to be careful not to declare too many things as treasures because that would belittle the value of each of them.

EXERCISE

Step 1

Decide how many items you wish to declare treasures before you start to select them.

The smaller the number, the better.

You might want to constrain yourself to 10 treasures. Or 5? Or 15?

Decide now, and commit yourself to stick to that number.

Step 2

Think about which of your clutter-champion categories might hide some of your treasures.

For example, if books belong to your clutter champions, decide whether you wish to assign 3 or 5 (or whatever number you choose) of your favourite books the status of treasures.

If your kitchen appliances are clutter champions – you have too many of them or several duplicates -, decide to declare the 3 – for example – most used/loved ones as treasures.

Step 3

Imagine the house burnt down and you lost everything (Only the most important personal documents could be saved.)

Which belongings would you badly miss?

Which of them could not be replaced?

Step 4

Take all the items with ‘treasure’-potential out, hold them in your hands for a while, try to ‘feel’ how truly important they are to you, and then arrange them in a ‘treasure collection area’ or – if you don’t have the space for such an area – take photographs.

Spend some time with your treasure candidates and evaluate how much you treasure each of them.

You might want to ask yourself questions like these:

- Is it something that reminds me of a happy memory?
- Is it related to a special accomplishment?
- Is it closely related to me, to the very special person I am?
- Would I be very sad if it suddenly disappeared?
- Does it refer to my values and to the vision that I defined for the next chapter of my life?

Step 5

Now make your final choice and compile a list of your personal treasures.

This list and the insights gained about your treasures will be very helpful whenever you have to or want to make decluttering decisions.

Do you know your ‘clutter champions’? – Is it time to knock them off their pedestal?

Our ‘clutter champions’ are those areas of our home and those categories of belongings that contain a very high accumulation of things that don’t serve us.

It’s usually obvious that we don’t need our clutter champions and that we don’t want them:

- We often hide them (push them under the bed, into a hidden corner in the garage),
- we don’t take good care of them (let them collect dush or get rusty),
- we try to ignore them (don’t look at them, move around them),
- and we never use them.

Typical examples of clutter champions:

- areas of our home that are no longer usable because they are overcrowded with stuff, such as a garage that leaves no room for the car,
- furniture not (or no longer) used, such as an inherited armchair nobody sits on,
- books we are no longer interested in, or recipe books we never opened,
- piles of papers we never touch but grow by continuously adding new pieces,
- papers from former phases of our life, e.g., materials from school years or a previous job,
- kitchen appliances that don’t fit our current cooking habits,
- a dresser drawer we never open because it contains out-of-fashion tops,
- a wardrobe full of clothing that no longer fits, that we hope ‘may come back in style’, that we don’t wear but keep because it was expensive,
- a 24-piece cutlery set never unpacked but kept because it was a wedding present from our aunt.

Clutter champions are champions because we let them win.

We allow them to occupy space without truly contributing to our life and well-being. They have become a burden to us, but we don’t admit it.

Clutter champions hold us back, they make us feel bad about ourselves because we feel that we should have done something about them a long time ago, that it’s our fault that they are ‘staring’ at us.

We can change the game and become the champions!

If we take the time to intentionally acknowledge and really get to know our clutter champions, we become the winners.

While we take a closer look at them, we also learn more about ourselves, and we better understand why we tend to collect and keep certain categories of things, and why certain areas in our home get so easily overcrowded.

Our increased self-awareness then helps us make long overdue decisions with intention, confidence, and determination.

Making decisions allows us to take actions, actions that create the clutterfree results we want in our life:

Letting go of all or some of our clutter champions not only creates more space in our home, but it also creates more space in our mind. And it makes us feel good about ourselves and capable.

We now know that we can do this and decluttering other areas in our home and life becomes so much easier.

Use the following exercise to clear up your relationship with your clutter champions.

EXERCISE

Step 1 – Walk around your home. Open the door to each room and look around.

Ask yourself:

- Any clutter champions around here?
- Any stuff that doesn’t serve me at all?
- Anything I feel shame or frustration about?

Don’t allow yourself to look away! Bend down and look under the bed. Open cupboards and boxes. Drawers and bags. Shine a light in the dark corners. Take photos if that helps you to get a clearer picture.

Step 2 – Create a list of all the clutter champions.

These are my clutter champions:

- …….
- …….
- ……..
- …….

Step 3 – Now sit down and spend some more time with your clutter champions.

You want to deeply understand what’s going on here.

Ask yourself questions like:

1. What do I think about my clutter champions?
2. What’s the story of each clutter champion? How did they get into my home? Has there been a time when they did serve me because I needed and used them? When and why did that change?
3. Why did I allow them to stay with me after they had lost their usefulness?
4. How do I feel about still having them?
5. How would I feel if they were gone?
6. Am I ready to let them go? Now?

Step 4 – Make a decision:

This is the clutter champion that I am going to clear up first:

- …….

Step 5 – Take action

Make an assumption about the amount of time you will need to sort out clutter champion #1, and schedule one or several decluttering sessions in your calendar.

Then stick to your appointment(s) with yourself – and do the work: create some space by letting go of what no longer serves you.

Getting unstuck – Let go of the past and focus on the future

Our thoughts determine what our life looks like.

We are all confronted with circumstances outside of ourselves that we can’t control:

The weather, our past, others and their behaviour, tax regulations, a pandemic, the price of a litre of milk, the time it gets dark in the evening, losing our job, the size of our feet, etc.

It’s easy to think that we don’t have power over how our lives look because of all the circumstances that we can’t influence.

We tend to forget, again and again, that we own the most powerful tool in the world – our mind.

What we think about the circumstances in our life and about ourselves is totally within our control, we are free to choose how we want to think about us and our life.

This is so important because what we are thinking determines how we are feeling, our feelings then fuel our actions which finally create the results in our life.

Our thoughts determine how we experience our life!

But how do we choose our thoughts? And where do they come from?

We have about 60,000 thoughts each day, most of them we are not aware of, they run in the back of our mind, unconsciously and automatically.

The vast majority of our thoughts are past-focused.

Many of our thoughts are ‘recycled’ thoughts from the past – they entered our mind a long time ago and we are re-using them again and again, on default, unintentionally.

This is especially true for the thoughts we have about ourselves.

“Who are you? What are you capable of?”

To answer these questions, most of us turn backwards, we go to our past.

We define ourselves and our capabilities by looking at who we have been, what we have done and what we have accomplished (or not) in the past.

We define and build our self-identity based on the past.

Many of the past-based definitions of ourselves are serving us.

- I always was an A+ student, I am really good at learning new stuff.
- I always find the right time to change my job to make the next step forward in my career.
- I am great at ocean swimming. Always have been.
- I never give up and that’s why I can overcome any challenge.
- I had a tough childhood, yes, and that made me a strong person.
- …

But most of us also have lots of past-focused thoughts that limit our potential and keep us stuck.

- I’ve always been overweight, it’s just who I am.
- I’ve never been very fit and active.
- I was shy as a child already, that’s why I don’t like social events.
- My father forced me to play the piano, that’s why I hate it now.
- I tried this three times without any success, it’s just not the right thing for me.
- I’ve always been a messy person.
- …

Why and how to switch our focus from the past to the future

The past is outside of our control. And it’s over.

Past failures, missed opportunities, challenging or hurtful experiences, negative circumstances – all gone.

So, as the past is gone anyway, it doesn’t make sense to continue to give it the power to negatively influence our present and future.

It’s our choice, we can decide to no longer let the past determine our thoughts, feelings and actions today. And in the future.

As soon as we have made this decision, we can start to take action:

1. Becoming aware of our past-focused thoughts is the first step. We do thought downloads to get the stuff that we carried along from the past out of our mind by putting it on paper
2. The next step is to do some mind-decluttering work. We separate the positive supportive thoughts from the self-limiting thinking and decide to let go of the latter.
3. The final step is to reorganise our mind with intention. We search for powerful future-focused thoughts and practice thinking them so that they can help us move on with our life.

Why we need determination and commitment to focus on the future

Focusing our thoughts, feelings and actions on the future allows us to evolve.

As soon as we switch our attention from who we have been in the past to who we want to become in the future, we automatically start to do the things that help us create the life we want to live on purpose.

However, our mind doesn’t like to focus on the future.

Our mind doesn’t want us to evolve. It’s main goal is to make sure that we are safe. It doesn’t want us to change and move into unknown – and potentially ‘dangerous’ – territory. Thus, it is very attached to the well-known past and it wants us to stay where we are, in safe territory.

It’s good to know that our mind will always resist if we decide to focus on the future.

Knowing this helps us understand why it requires more energy and effort—and therefore more determination and commitment—to think about and plan for the future than to remember and rely on the past.

EXERCISE

This little exercise helps you uncover some of your past-focused thoughts and exchange them for new future-focused thoughts.

Step 1 – Become aware of the ‘always’ and ‘never’ in your life

Words like ‘never’ and ‘always’ indicate past-related thinking, feeling, and behaviour.

Give yourself 5 or 10 minutes to write down a few sentences about yourself that include the words ‘never’ or ‘always’.

Then pick two or three of those that don’t serve you.

Examples:

- ‘I always feel responsible for other people’s feelings.’
- ‘I never manage to finish a task on time.’
- ‘I’ve always been a messy person.’

Step 2 – Rephrase your sentences using the past tense.

Examples:

- ‘In the past, I used to feel responsible for other people’s feelings.’
- ‘I usually didn’t finish my tasks on time in the past.’
- ‘In the past, I had a tendency to mess up my place.’

Step 3 – Rephrase again, now taking a future-focused approach.

Examples:

- ‘Nowadays, I know that everyone is responsible for their own feelings. That’s why I can now focus on myself and my feelings.’
- ‘I’ve decided just now that I am getting better and better at finishing tasks on time.’
- ‘I am going to become really good at decluttering and keeping my place clean in the future.’

Play around and rephrase as often as necessary, until you find a sentence/thought that expresses your future-focus and makes you feel good.

Step 4 – Practice the new thought every day.

Use your new future-focused sentence to redirect your focus whenever your mind comes up with its stories of the past. And it will, because that’s its job.

- Set aside 5-10 minutes each day to review and meditate on your future-focused statements.
- Consider integrating these new beliefs into a daily affirmation practice.
- For instance, repeat your future-focused statements aloud each morning to reinforce the new mindset.

Step 5 – Stay committed. Have patience and compassion.

- Remind yourself, again and again, that it doesn’t matter what you thought, felt, or did in the past – it’s gone and out of your control.

It only matters what you decide to think, feel, and do now – and in the future. And that’s 100% in your control.

- Keep a journal to track your progress and reflect on any changes you notice in your thoughts and behaviours.
- Whenever you catch yourself slipping into old, past-focused thoughts, gently remind yourself of your future-focused beliefs and reaffirm your commitment to them.

HOW CAN I HELP YOU?

Are you tired?

Tired of trying to (re)organise the various areas of your life entirely on your own?

Fortunately, you don’t have to figure it out all by yourself.

We can do it together.

You can decide to get my support, advice, and guidance – and achieve the desired changes in your life so much faster and easier.

Check out how I can help you.