Category: The Mind-Decluttering Series

Making changes and achieving goals requires commitment and determination.

When we make the decision to change something, when we set a goal, we usually feel excited and determined to do whatever we have to do to make the change happen, to achieve the goal.

However, doing the work isn’t so much fun in many cases.

Decluttering our home, for example, can be hard work.

We have to be willing to invest time, effort and energy, we might feel uncomfortable and anxious about how to get the job done.

Often, our excitement about the desired change shrinks and our motivation to do the first step decreases rapidly.

So how can we keep ourselves going when we feel like giving up and quitting the work even before it has started?

We can strengthen our determination and commitment by taking responsibility for our future self and learning from our past self.

How our future self and our past self can support our present self

The idea of a future, past and present self (Source: Brooke Castillo) is a construct, it’s all made up.

However, the imagination of our three selves can help us get started and keep going whenever life gets hard and we feel like hiding or running away.

Our present self is creating our future.

Our future self will be the result of our current thoughts, feelings and actions. It completely depends on the decisions our present self makes today.

Thinking about our future self and loving it as much as we love our present self can change how we are showing up and following through on our plans today, in the present.

We can gain energy, inspiration and motivation from asking questions like these:

• • How will our future self feel about ourselves if we now remain committed and do the work (e.g. get the clutter out)?
  • How grateful will it be to our present self for pushing away any self-doubt and thoughts of giving up?
  • How proud will our future self be about the achievements of our present self?

Our past self has created our present.

Our current self – the person we are today – is the result of the thoughts, feelings and actions that our past self created.

Our past ambitions and our goals and our willingness to realise them, no matter how hard the work was, have brought us to the point where we are now.

We can deliberately appreciate what our past self has done for our present self.

We can decide to learn from our past self and copy the methods and tools it used successfully to move forward.

We can gain advice and insights by asking questions like these:

• • How did our past self get started with difficult projects (e.g., projects similar to our decluttering job)?
  • How did our past self overcome self-doubt and procrastination in similar situations?
  • What useful tips and tricks has our past self to offer to make our present self’s life and work easier?

Conversations with our past self and with our future self can be very helpful. And they can be real fun!

LITTLE FUN EXERCISE

Give it a try!

Start playing around with your three selves:

Imagine your three selves are sitting at a table.

• • First you ask your present self to choose and describe the problem it wants to solve.

This could be, for example: A project you postponed again and again. A bad habit you want to get rid of. A challenging goal you want to achieve. An upcoming conversation you are afraid of. …

• • Now ask your future and your past selves for support.

Ask them the questions listed above. And anything else that comes up to your mind. Write down their answers and recommendations.

• • Then tell your present self to get started with what has to be done.

• • Monitor its progress. Evaluate and make changes to your activities/actions if necessary.

Don’t forget to celebrate your success.

And invite your three selves to the party. 😃😃😃

“Saying goodbye is difficult, and most of us don’t do it enough.” (Brooke Castillo)

However, saying goodbye is part of life, and it is necessary:

If we wish to evolve and grow, if we want to make changes in our lives to move forward and make things better, we have to create space for the new:

We have to let go of what no longer serves us, what no longer fits into the life we want to have.

We need to say goodbye to the past

if we want to open the door to the present and welcome the future.

We need to say goodbye to relationships that are complete – relationships with things in our life, but also relationships with people, relationships with beliefs and thought patterns, and habits.

If we are holding on to something that’s no longer truly valuable to us, just because we had a relationship with it in the past, it will wear us down, slow us down, and it will suck up our energy.

Dragging stuff along that no longer serves us is a waste of energy – and we have a limited amount of energy.

Why do we find it difficult to say goodbye?

There are many reasons why saying goodbye is so hard.

A very big one is that saying goodbye means making decisions and initiating change. And that’s something our human brain doesn’t want us to do.

Our brain wants us to keep things as they are because it wants to keep us safe.

It wants us to avoid the unknown and the potential risk involved in letting new stuff into our lives. That’s why it’s easier to hold on to everything we have and avoid the decision to let go of what’s no longer needed and useful.

Also, we tend to associate loss with saying goodbye. We try to avoid saying goodbye because we don’t want to experience ‘negative’ feelings like sadness or grief.

Another reason for not making decisions and not saying goodbye is that we are afraid that we will feel regret or guilt about letting go of something that was valuable at some point in time.

If we have invested our time, energy, attention, or money into something, we often hesitate to let it go ‘for free’.

That’s why we keep so much stuff in our lives that’s still usable but no longer useful to us.

We think we should only sort out what is damaged, broken, and no longer working.

However, it’s not always necessary for something to be faulty to say goodbye to it.

If we don’t need, use, or love it anymore, it occupies undeserved space in our homes, minds, and hearts, and it sucks up our energy.

Space and energy that we need for new things, people, thoughts, etc. to come in.

How do we make goodbye decisions?

It’s good to know that our brain hates any changes and let-go decisions and will try its best to bring up thoughts and feelings that are supposed to keep us where we are and what we have in our life right now.

If we prepare ourselves for ‘negative’ thoughts and feelings, we can better confront them and deliberately decide what WE want to think and decide:

First, we take an inventory of what we currently have in our life:

• • our physical belongings (including paperwork and digital information),
  • our relationships with other people,
  • our thoughts and beliefs,
  • our habits, behaviours, and actions
  • our work, hobbies, interests, activities,
  • etc. 

Then, we ask ourselves questions – and we answer them honestly.

• • ‘Does it still serve me? – Do I need, use, love it? Really?’
  • ‘Does it move me toward what I want, or does it move me away from what I want to have in my life?’

If we can’t respond with a clear ‘yes’ to this type of question, it’s time to decide to let go and say goodbye.

It’s important that we make these decisions clearly and definitely, we have to commit to the goodbye and not look back.

Then, we can move forward, into our (uncluttered) future, toward what we want to have in our lives.

We now have the space and energy for new experiences, relationships, interests, activities, things, etc.

If we aren’t getting the result we want it’s because of a thought.

Our thoughts create our feelings, our feelings drive our actions, our actions accumulate into results. – The trouble starts when we forget about this powerful cycle of results-creation.

If something is not as we want it to be,

if we have a result in our life that we don’t like,

for example: ‘My desk is covered with piles of papers’),

• • we often believe that something is wrong with us.

For example: ‘I am hopeless at organising my stuff.

• • Or we blame certain circumstances in our life.

For example: ‘I don’t have enough space to file my paperwork properly.’

The consequence is feeling incapable, out of control, and stuck, and making any changes to the unsatisfying situation seems impossible.

It just seems like that that’s the way things are and that there is nothing we can do about it.

However, we can do something about it! Always!

We can change the results we currently have by changing the thoughts we currently think.

How can we declutter limiting thoughts?

The first step is becoming aware of the limiting thought. We need to recognise that what we believe to be a fact is actually a thought.

The fact in the example situation above is: ‘My desk is covered with piles of papers.’

The statement, ‘I am hopeless at organising my stuff’, however, is not a fact, it’s just a thought about the fact.

This differentiation is very important!

Thoughts are optional.

We can change them, and we can believe whatever we want about the circumstances/facts in our lives.

As soon as we are aware of what we are thinking, we can start to question our thoughts.

Questioning our thoughts

One of the many ways to test our thoughts – especially our limiting beliefs – is to ask ourselves powerful questions like the following (Source: April Price) – and to answer them:

• • ‘If I didn’t believe this, then what would I do?’

We play around with the idea that what we believe to be true might actually not be true.

Example: ‘I am hopeless at organising my stuff. 

-> If I didn’t believe that, then what would I do?’

Possible new answer: ‘Organising might not be one of my top 5 strengths but that’s okay. And I am actually getting better at it.’

• • ‘What if I’m wrong about that?’

The more willing we are to consider that we might be wrong about our beliefs, the less self-limiting power they have over us.

Example: ‘I don’t have enough space to organise my paperwork properly. 

-> What if I’m wrong about that?’

Possible new answer: ‘I absolutely have enough space to organise my paperwork properly. I just have to rearrange a few things before I get started.’

• • ‘What if this is just a story my mind made up?’

Stories are not reality; they are made up. They are interpretations of the things and events in our lives. We can decide to interpret things differently.

Example: ‘I am hopeless at organising my stuff. 

-> What if this is just a story my mind made up? What’s a different story I could tell myself?’

Possible new answer: ‘I didn’t learn how to organise my stuff when I was young. So, of course, I don’t find it so easy today. But it’s just a skill, and I am getting better at it.’

Give it a try!

Pick a limiting thought, something you got so used to that you never questioned it.

Question it now (see above). Then, write down the answers. Pick one of them to practice and establish a new thought.  

Whenever the old thought comes up – and it will for a while because your brain is so used to thinking it – you decide deliberately to let it go. And you ‘turn around’ and focus your attention on the new thought. 

The more often you do this, the faster the old thought will lose its power.

Based on the new thought, your feelings and actions will change – and your results.

It works! Always!

How are you going to create a clutterfree life?

• • Are you learning how to declutter your home? – Or are you becoming a declutterer?
  • Are you learning how to declutter your thoughts and feelings? – Or are you becoming the master of your mind?
  • Are you going to make better buying decisions? – Or are you becoming a conscious shopper?
  • Are you starting to be more organised? – Or are you becoming the organiser of your home/life?

Who are you becoming? What’s your future identity?

When we decide to make changes in our life, when we start to move towards achieving our goals, we are not only starting to do something differently.

Before we can start to act differently, we need to learn to think and feel differently.

We are becoming someone different, we are creating a new identity.

A new identity that is different to our past identity. Thus, we can’t look to the past for evidence on what to do differently and how to do it differently.

Our ‘future self’ can help us create our future identity

We can use our imagination to ‘slip’ into our future identity, so that by taking this special new point of view we can develop a better understanding of the person we are going to be in the future.  

When we start to identify ourselves as who we are becoming, it’s getting easier to find empowering thoughts and words to lean on when the work of change gets hard.

Thus, let’s not focus so much on what we are going to do differently, let’s instead focus on defining our new identity – how we are going to be different.

We can ask ourselves:

• • ‘Who am I becoming?’
  • ‘How does that person – the new me – make decisions?’
  • ‘What does that person think?’
  • ‘How does that person feel?’
  • ‘How does that person act?’

LITTLE EXERCISE

Give your mind a powerful idea of who you are becoming.

Focusing on your future identity will help you think, feel and act like the person you want to become.

Step 1: Define your new identity

These are just a few examples of new-identity ideas:

• • ‘I am becoming a life-declutterer.’
  • ‘I am becoming a mindful person,’
  • ‘I am learning to be a conscious shopper.’
  • ‘I am determined to become the organiser of my mind, my home and my life.’

Step 2: Describe how you will think, feel and act differently.

Example:

Thoughts: ‘As a life-declutterer I make sure that there is no clutter in my mind and no clutter in my home. I only ‘own’ thoughts and belongings that serve me. My mind and my home are clutterfree and organised.

Feelings: I feel determined and confident.

Actions: I practice mind-decluttering every day, and I create useful habits and routines that help me to keep my mind and home clear and clean.’

Now it’s your turn! Who do you want to be?

Fill in the blanks:

 ‘I am becoming a _______________.’

‘These are the thoughts I am going to think about myself and my life:

_______________________________________________

_______________________________________________’

‘This is how I will feel and act in future: 

_______________________________________________

_______________________________________________’

Everything in our lives is a result of the thoughts we think.

This statement is the foundation of ‘The Model’, a coaching approach developed by Brooke Castillo (The Life Coach School).

I personally use ‘The Model’ on a daily basis to work on decluttering my mind and letting go of useless or harmful thoughts and feelings. 

Every problem is a thought problem

This is how ‘The Model’ works:

As soon as we have a thought about a circumstance – a fact that’s outside of our control -, the thought creates a feeling, which causes us to act and behave in a certain way, which then leads to a certain result:

Circumstance/facts -> Thought -> Feeling -> Action/inaction -> Result.

We are free to choose our thoughts. Unfortunately, we often choose problem-focused thoughts rather than solutions-focused thoughts.

It’s always the thought that things shouldn’t be the way they are and that something has gone wrong that is causing the problem.

However, thinking the circumstances should be different will never change the circumstances.

The thought that things should be different creates a problem for us, because it negatively affects our feelings and diminishes our ability to show up and act in a way that we want to show up and act.

We can’t create positive results and solutions if our thoughts focus on problems, on all the things that should be different.

The good news is that if we ‘create’ our problems by choosing certain thoughts, we can also solve our problems – by choosing different thoughts.

Let’s have a look at a little simplified example.

Scenario A) – Problem-focused thoughts

• • Circumstance: ‘It’s Tuesday morning, 6.44 a.m. The bus is going to leave in 6 minutes. My red jacket is not in my wardrobe.’
  • Thought: ‘I can never find what I am looking for. I am a mess.’
  • Feeling: ‘I feel stressed, angry at myself.’
  • Action/Inaction: ‘I put on my green jacket. In the afternoon, I go shopping and buy a new red jacket. I also buy a black and a blue jacket because they are on sale.’
  • Result: ‘I squeeze three more jackets into my wardrobe. It’s a mess. I still don’t know where the missing red jacket is.’

The thought (‘I am a mess’) about the circumstance (‘The red jacket is not in my wardrobe’) causes feelings of stress, which drive me to do some frustration-shopping, which results in the problem of having a cramped and messy wardrobe. 

Scenario B) – Solution-focused thoughts

• • Circumstance: ‘It’s Tuesday morning, 6.44 a.m. The bus is going to leave in 6 minutes. My red jacket is not in my wardrobe.’
  • Thought: ‘My wardrobe needs a clear-up. This could be a fun-activity if I did it together with my sister. I can ask her to join me for a ‘decluttering-party’.’
  • Feeling: ‘I feel excited, active.’
  • Action/Inaction: ‘I put my green jacket on. In the afternoon, I call my sister to arrange a decluttering-party. We spend the next Saturday with sorting and trying out my clothes.’
  • Result: ‘My wardrobe gets cleared-up. I find my red jacket. I spend some fun time with my sister.’

Switching from problem- to solution-thinking needs some practice, of course, it doesn’t happen over night.

However, as soon as we start to pay more attention to what’s happening in our mind, we become more and more aware of what we are thinking and how our thoughts influence our feelings, our actions and our results.

LITTLE EXERCISE

Next time when things are not as you wish or expect them to be and you realise that you think you have a problem, you could ask yourself:

• • ‘Why do I think that this is a problem?’
  • ‘How could it not be a problem?’
  • ‘What would I be thinking if I always searched for solutions?’

---

PS

Mind-decluttering is so important if we want to change our life to the better.

Yes, it’s not always easy. It’s similar to decluttering our home: We get so used to what we have that we struggle to make let-go decisions.   

So we need to learn to declutter and organise our thoughts and feelings. The new space and clarity in our mind enables us to take action and create positive change in all areas of our life (including our home). 

The good news is that you don’t have to manage it all on your own. 

I can help you get it sorted out – the problem-focused thoughts in your mind and the clutter in your home. With my support it’s going to be easier and faster.

 

Which of our thoughts are clutter?

A powerful question to uncover clutter-thoughts is:

‘Does this thought serve me?

Does it help me to feel and act in a way that allows me to achieve the results that I desire?’

If we begin to do the mind-decluttering work on a regular basis (learn about ‘thought downloads’ in Part 4 of this series), we soon discover some of the thoughts that don’t serve us (any longer).

Thoughts that we brought along from the past

These could be thoughts that we believed to be true in the past but that no longer fit the person we have become or want to become.

They don’t support us in a positive way, they hold us back and keep us from making changes.

Examples of thoughts that might keep us from achieving our home decluttering and organising goals:

• • ‘I like looking at nice things. That’s why I need lots of stuff to decorate our home nicely. However, it’s such a burden – these ongoing re-arrangement and re-decoration projects!’
  • ‘I want a cleaner/clearer home. But I always loved abundance. Clear surfaces and walls will feel terrible, won’t they?’
  • ‘All women in my family are a bit messy. I am like my mother and she says my grandmother was the same.’
  • My mother told me that I should never give away something that I might be able to use again some day. But how am I supposed to store all this unused stuff in my new little apartment?’

As any thought is optional, we are under no obligation to keep them, not matter how long we have had them.

We can sort out any thoughts that we no longer want to have, we can throw them in the ‘mind-clutter bin’.

Why do we hang on to some thoughts?

As we know from our home-decluttering projects, sometimes it is hard to let go of something, although it has become useless and we don’t need or like it any longer.

We keep physical things, for example, because we got used to them, or because we believe that they still have value, or that we might need them again some day.

It’s the same with our thoughts.

Sometimes we hang on to thoughts that are no longer serving us for similar reasons:

• • If we had a certain thought for a long time, it might feel as if it somehow belongs into our life. (‘Some people are good at organising their stuff. I never was one of them.’)
  • Or we feel that we have to keep a thought because an important person ‘gave’ it to us. (‘My mother always said that even as a little child I was messy.’)
  • We also might fear that we are no longer ‘complete’ if we let go of a certain thought because it feels closely linked to our identity. (‘I have always been this way. It’s part of who I am.’)

How to let go of clutter-thoughts?

Getting aware of a negative thought doesn’t mean that it’s easy to get rid of it.

Our mind got so used to thinking it that it’s often very hesitant to give it up.

We have to take the lead and direct our mind.

We deliberately decide to let go of a certain thought and to replace it with a new and more useful thought.

And then we make sure that our mind understands and accepts the new thought. 

We can tell our mind, for example:

• • ‘I used to believe that I was not good at organising my stuff. Now I am getting used to believing that I can and will learn how to organise my home. I am becoming a good organiser.’
  • ‘How I might have been as a child has nothing to do with how I choose to be today as an adult. I am getting really good at tidying my place.’
  • ‘I am totally free to choose my thoughts, feelings, and actions. I am the only person to decide who and how I am.’

LITTLE EXERCISE

• • Which is one of the thoughts from the past that no longer serves you?
  • How can you persuade your mind to let it go?
  • Which different thought will you start thinking instead?

 

Our thoughts determine how our life looks like.

When we think a thought about a certain circumstance in our life, that ‘sentence in our mind’ creates a feeling in our body. The feeling then drives an action. And the action creates a result.

If we don’t like the results that we are currently getting – e.g. living in a cluttered home –, then we can decide to change these results by changing our thoughts.

A thought is just a sentence in our mind, however – it has superpowers.

Usually, we don’t pay much attention to what’s happening in our mind.

We don’t consider deliberately what we are thinking and feeling and how that affects what we do (or don’t do) and achieve (or don’t achieve) in our life.

When we feel unhappy with our life, we often blame our current situation or other people and their behaviour – the circumstances in our lives – as the creators of our unhappiness.

But the circumstances in our lives don’t cause our negative feelings. Circumstances are facts. They are neither good or bad, they are neutral.

Our feelings of unhappiness and dissatisfaction are caused by how we think about the circumstances that we are experiencing.

The thoughts we think and the stories we tell ourselves determine how we show up in life. And how we show up in life determines the results we get.

How to declutter and organise our mind

If we want to make changes in our life, we first have to make changes in our mind.

1. 1. We have to become aware of the thoughts that we are thinking about ourselves and about the circumstances in our life.
   2. We then decide to clean up our mind and let go of the thoughts that don’t serve us. We declutter any (self-)limiting thoughts and replace them deliberately with new more helpful thoughts.
   3. Supported by the new thoughts about ourselves and the circumstances in our life, we now start to feel differently and act differently, more in accordance with who and how we want to be. – This is when we begin to create the results that help us to change our lives to the better.

All thoughts are optional.

This is good news because it means that we only have to keep those thoughts that we want to have.

The not so good news is that we are thinking more than 60,000 thoughts each day, and many of them are automatic and unconscious thoughts and not so easy to uncover. Thus, examining each thought when it comes up is actually impossible.

‘Thought downloads’ – a great tool to declutter our thoughts

The solution is to introduce regular mind-decluttering sessions in our daily life.

This works in a similar way as it does with regular home-decluttering routines.

We schedule a time for our mind-decluttering work, and then sit down and do a ‘thought download’:

1. We set a timer for 5 or 10 minutes and now take any upcoming thoughts out of our mind and put them on paper.

2. The next step is to pick up one thought and evaluate it. We can ask ourselves,

‘Does this thought serve me?

Does it help me to feel and act in a way that allows me to achieve the results that I desire?’

3. And then we decide if we really want to keep the thought or if it needs to be replaced.  

A simple example of a thought download

Let’s say we feel stressed and overwhelmed because there is so much stuff in our home.

We decide to do a thought download about it.

We write down any thoughts that come up, such as: ‘I feel so bad about all the stuff. I don’t feel good at home. I don’t like my home anymore, I hate it! How can I relax with all the clutter around me. This is such a big job. It’s hopeless – how can I even get started.’

Now we pick one thought:

• • We might choose this one: ‘I don’t like my home anymore, I hate it!’

We ask, ‘Does this thought serve me?’

The clear answer is ‘No, it doesn’t.’ If we tell ourselves that we don’t like our home, and if we feel hate, we will not be motivated to take action, we will not clear up, and there will be no change in the way our home looks like.

But we are free to decide to let the negative thought go and to replace it with a more positive one.

This could be, ‘My home is really important to me. I am determined to do whatever is needed to be done so that I can enjoy my home in future.’

• • We could also pick this thought: ‘This is such a big job. It’s hopeless – how can I even get started.’

Does the thought serve us? No. As long as we think this thought, we will feel hopeless and confused, and unable to begin working on the problem. We procrastinate and nothing changes. We should get rid of this thought.

A more helpful thought could be, ‘Yes, it’s a big job. Thus, it’s a good idea to take the time and work on it step-by-step, dividing the work into small enough tasks that I can handle with confidence. I’ll get there.’

How can we organise our new thoughts?

Sometimes, it’s not difficult to replace a negative thought with a more helpful new thought.

We become aware of the limiting thought, make an immediate decision to think differently, and then manage to create a new thought pattern.

Often, however, it takes some time to create a permanent place for a new thought in our mind.

That’s normal because our mind got so used to its thought patterns.

If we don’t pay attention, it will automatically pick up the old thought again because we have thought it so many times. Our mind is so good at thinking that thought that it doesn’t want to give it up.

It can happen that we again and again have to sort out the old thought and put the new thought at its place.

However, finally, our mind will accept the new order of things and will ‘forget’ about the old thought.

The new thought has taken over and now reliably creates the feelings and actions that lead to the desired results.

TIP

Help your mind to get used to a new thought by deliberately focusing your attention on it for several days in a row.

• • Write the new thought on post-its and place them all over your home, at places where you will see them frequently: the bathroom mirror, the bedroom door, the edge of your computer screen, etc.
  • Send yourself an email with the new thought in the subject line.
  • Send yourself daily reminders of the new thought via your online calendar.
  • Use the teeth-brushing-time to think about your new thought.
  • Tell a friend about your new thought.
  • … (What else could you do to remind yourself of your new thought?)

We are the owners of our mind – and responsible for our mental clutter

The clutter in our home often creates negative feelings, such as stress, frustration, helplessness and even embarrassment.

However, negative feelings and thoughts are not only a consequence of clutter, in most cases they actually are the cause of clutter:

The clutter in our mind – negative thoughts and feelings that don’t serve us – has a huge impact on the amount of physical clutter in our home.

Mental/emotional causes of physical clutter

We all have our special and very personal reasons why we bring too much stuff into our home and get rid of too little.

• • Impulsive and excessive shopping trips, for example, are often attempts to avoid or cover feelings of frustration, stress, boredom, etc.
  • Feelings of guilt, shame, or obligation let us hold on to belongings that we actually don’t need/use/like.
  • Grief, anxiety, or loneliness can create sticky emotional attachments to certain things.
  • Surrounding ourselves with too much stuff can be a subconscious strategy to make us feel safe and protected.
  • etc.(What are your most important types of mind-clutter?)

If we want to make our home-decluttering projects sustainable successes, we first have to do some mind-decluttering.

We need to become aware of the thoughts and feelings that might be hidden behind our stuff. We have to be willing to invest time and effort in uncovering and removing any mental and emotional clutter.

Our thoughts are our most valuable ‘possessions’

Our thoughts are much more important than our physical belongings.

Our thoughts determine how we live our life: they determine how we feel, what we do (or don’t do) and what results we create in our life.

• • If we, for example, think, ‘I have never been organised, I’ll never be able to create a clutterfree life’,
  • we will have a negative feeling (such as overwhelm or resignation)
  • which will probably cause us to procrastinate and postpone any decluttering activity.
  • The result is that we continue living in a cluttered home.  

Thus, if we want to declutter our home and our life, we have to declutter our mind first.

We are the owners of our mind – the home of our thoughts

We are all creating (more or less) clutter in our homes by bringing in too many (and often the wrong) things and by not letting go of the stuff that doesn’t serve us (any longer).

The same happens with our mind, the home of our thoughts.

Most of us haven’t been taught to deliberately declutter and organise our thoughts. We keep thinking thoughts that don’t assist us in living the life we want to live. We don’t throw out the thoughts that don’t serve us (any longer).

As the owner of our home, we are the ones who are responsible to keep it clutterfree and organised – to create and maintain the space and order we need to feel comfortable and relaxed at our place.

It’s the same with our mind. We are the owner of our mind and it is our responsibility to keep it clean and clear, and organise in a way that allows it to work efficiently and effectively.

And although we cannot control our outside circumstances (other people and their behaviour, our past, external events, etc.),

We can completely control what’s happening in our home and in our mind.

• • We are in control of our home, we decide what we bring in and throw out (or don’t throw out), how the place looks and feels like, how spacious and orderly it is or how crammed and disorganised. We are free to choose the things we want to surround ourselves with, and we arrange and use them as we wish.
  • We are also in control of our mind. We choose our thoughts, we decide what we believe – about ourselves, our family, our job, about our home (!), about our life – about everything. Then our thoughts and beliefs create feelings which fuel our actions which create the results in our life.

That’s why we have to be so very careful about which thoughts we offer a home in our mind!  

If we are not happy about our current life situation, we we can ask ourselves:

• • What’s going on in my mind right now?
  • What am I thinking?
  • Does it serve me?
  • How does it make me feeling?
  • And acting?

And then we can decide to change things to the better by starting to think differently.

The basics of the mind-decluttering process

How does the mind-decluttering work look like

Brooke Castillo from The Life Coach School has developed a self-coaching tool, ‘The Model’, which I use to declutter my own mind, and also apply when I help my clients get started with decluttering the stories they tell themselves about their homes and lives.

‘The Model’ is quite simple. It’s based on two main premises

1. 1. There are circumstances in the world that we cannot control – other people, our past, external events, etc. Circumstances are neutral, they are facts that everyone can agree on.
   2. Our circumstances are the only thing that’s not within our control. Everything else we can control: our thoughts, our feelings, our actions, and our results.

The very important and powerful consequence is that we have much more control over our lives than we usually think.

And that’s exactly where taking-control of our life starts – with our thoughts, with the stories we tell ourselves.

The stories we tell ourselves create feelings. These feelings fuel our actions (or our inaction!). And our actions create the results we have in our life. 

Making changes in our life, such as decluttering our paperwork, for example, is often so frustrating because we try to change our action without changing the thought or feeling that’s driving the action.

As long as we let our ‘old’ thoughts and feelings guide us, ‘new’ actions are hard to realise which makes new – better – results less likely.

This is an example of a typical ‘cluttered thought model’:

1. 1. There is a circumstance. – ‘The desk in my home office is covered by 3 piles of paperwork, each of them containing about 100 pieces of paper.’ (This is neutral, it’s a fact, everyone can agree on this observation.)
   2. I have a thought about the circumstance. – ‘This looks terrible. I should have a clean desk.’
   3. The thought creates a feeling. – ‘I feel ashamed. And overwhelmed.’
   4. The feeling fuels action/inaction. – ‘I plan to clear up the desk, but then postpone it, again and again. I start to avoid the home office, and only enter it to drop more papers on the desk.’
   5. The action/inaction creates a result. – ‘The desk is full of papers, it looks messy.’

If we look at this model, we can easily understand why it’s difficult or impossible to clear up our paperwork if we tell ourselves the story that ‘This looks terrible. I should have a clean desk.’, and feel ashamed and overwhelmed about it.

The desired action, decluttering the desk, becomes much easier if we change the story.

Although we can’t change the facts directly (several piles of paper on our desk), we have the power to change what we think about it, and, as a consequence, we change what we feel, do and achieve about it.

A much more powerful ‘clutterfree thought model’ could be:

1. 1. There is a circumstance. – ‘The desk in my home office is covered by 3 piles of paperwork, each of them containing about 100 pieces of paper.’
   2. I have a thought about the circumstance. – ‘I like clear surfaces. If I invest 2 hours in decluttering my desk now, I will enjoy a clear desk afterwards.’
   3. The thought creates a feeling. – ‘I feel determined.’
   4. The feeling fuels action/inaction. – ‘I start decluttering the desk immediately and use the 2 hours of time I have available right now to finish the work.’
   5. The action/inaction creates a result. – ‘The desk is clear and clean.’

Changing the results in our life is only possible if we become experts in analysing and changing the stories we tell ourselves.

Becoming aware of our thoughts is the starting point.

Whenever a result is not what we want it to be, whenever we don’t feel and act as we want to, we can ask ourselves:

• • What’s going on in my mind right now?
  • What am I thinking?
  • Does it serve me?
  • How does it make me feeling?
  • And acting?

And then we can decide to change our story by starting to think differently:

As soon as we purposefully decide to think thoughts that create positive feelings of motivation and determination, we start taking action – and we start getting the results we want.

Our homes are not the only places that can get cluttered. The clutter in our minds – thoughts and feelings that don’t serve us – can have much more serious consequences on our well-being and our life experience than the physical clutter in our homes.

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Why I decided to declutter my mind

Self-responsibility has always been my strongest personal value. It’s my deep belief that we are all accountable for how we behave and what we do or don’t do, for how we live our life, for how we care for our well-being.

If things are not like we want them to be, it’s our job, in my opinion, to get active and make changes. If we don’t feel good about ourselves, or our work, our relationships, our homes, we shouldn’t complain but do something about it.

All my life I have used ‘self-responsibility’ as a guiding principle. It has helped me to make decisions whenever I felt a bit lost or stuck, or to choose a new direction whenever I ended up at a crossroad in my life.

However, valuing self-responsibility so highly has also caused a great amount of shame and guilt in my life.

Whenever I was miserable or sad, I felt responsible for changing these feelings to the better – especially as there often was no ‘real’ reason to feel miserable or sad.

But very often, I didn’t manage to switch from negative to positive feelings. And then I felt miserable about feeling miserable. 

And I felt guilty and shameful because often my miserable attitude and behaviour made the life of the people around me unnecessarily difficult and uncomfortable.

How I started the mind-decluttering work

Some time ago, I came across ‘The Life Coach School Podcast’, launched by Brooke Castillo in 2014.

Since then, a lot has changed for me.

I am still the same person and most people will not immediately recognise any difference in my personality or behaviour.

But I am different because I learned how to think and feel differently, and – as a consequence – to act differently.

It still happens that I feel miserable without any valid reason, but now I am able to handle negative emotions, and I no longer feel bad about having them.

Yes, I still believe that I am responsible for what’s happening in my life. But now I know that I am even more responsible for what’s happening in my mind. And that it’s completely within my power what’s happening there.

Knowing that I can think and feel the way I want to, helps me to act in a truly self-responsible way.

I am now actively creating the life I want to live. Without feeling shame or guilt anymore (most of the time).

How the mind-decluttering ‘Model’ works

The foundation of Brooke Castillo’s work as a life coach and as a trainer of life coaches is ‘The Model’.

The Model is a tool that Brooke created to help us to become aware of what’s going on in our mind, and to understand how it works. We can use the Model to learn how to manage, organise and control our mind in a way that enables us to create the life we want to live.

The theory behind the Model is nothing new, it’s actually what numerous great thought leaders and teachers have taught us for ages: Our thoughts create the results in our lives.

New about the Model is that it packages and structures the well-known and broadly shared insights – about the processes in our minds and their effects on our lives – in a new easy-to-understand way.

The Model simplifies the theory and makes it easier to apply the universal principles in our daily life.

The basic idea is:

If we want to change our life, we have to change our thoughts.

We have to ‘declutter’ our mind by letting go of any thoughts that no longer serve us and by bringing in new and more useful thoughts.

As soon as we (ex)change our thoughts, we automatically change our feelings, which changes how we act. And the changes in our actions then create the desired changes in our lives.

All these changes are, of course, not super easy.

However, they are much easier to realise than to continue living with self-limiting thoughts that limit our potential and our life experience. 

I am consistently improving my self-coaching skills which helps me make my life better – a little bit, every day.  

And, after becoming a Certified Life Coach, I now help my clients to do the same, to apply powerful coaching and self-coaching tools in their daily life, to make it better and more enjoyable.

The ‘Mind-Decluttering Series’

The purpose of ‘Mind-Decluttering Series’ is to help us clear up the self-limiting thoughts and feelings that keep us from living the life we want to live.

We’ll approach the mind-clutter from different angles, we’ll make it visible and accessible, and we’ll use examples, exercises and self-coaching tools to help us free up our mind – and consequently our life.