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.
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,
Ask yourself:
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.
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.
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.
These are the steps that my clients practice and implement to actively take control and create the life they want to live:
Continue reading Living Intentionally – Short Introduction – Part 3Now, that we have defined what intentional living means, it’s time to consider how the concept plays out in real life.
Living an intentional and organised life looks different for each of us, of course.
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.
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.
It means that we actively
Continue reading Living Intentionally – Short Introduction – Part 1And it doesn’t matter how much we paid for it.
Sometimes we hold on to something we don’t need, use, or love any longer, just because we have spent money on it.
We believe that we are obliged to continue valuing (= keeping) it because of the money we once invested into getting it.
However, money that has been spent is gone – it’s ‘sunk cost’, it’s gone as soon as we spend it.
Keeping something that no longer serves us but once cost us money means – in our mind – we still ‘own’ it and that makes us feel like we are somehow still having the money’s worth in our pocket.
But that’s not the case, of course, the money is gone.
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.
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.
Continue reading Clutter Awareness – 4 ways to get to know your stuff better
Mini habits create the path to our goals – no matter how big those goals are.
If we want to achieve long-term goals, we should not focus on the goal itself but on the behaviours that will get us to the goal.
We design an easy path to the goal by choosing suitable behaviours and changing them into habits.
The behaviours that we want to develop into habits should be behaviours that we want to do – because we have positive thoughts and feelings about them:
Because of our deliberately positive thoughts and feelings, we are willing and able to do new behaviours repeatedly, until we have achieved the goal.
To check whether the chosen action is tiny and enjoyable enough, we can ask ourselves if we can believe and say with confidence:
Continue reading Easy-to-do mini habits help us achieve our goals – easier and faster
Mini habits are much smaller versions of a new behaviour habit that we want to develop.
For example:
If we want to create the habit of running 60 minutes each day, a mini habit could be to walk each day for 10 minutes, or even just 5 minutes.
Mini behaviours and mini habits help us avoid procrastination.
Procrastination is a short-term mood repair; we procrastinate to manage our emotions. That’s why getting started is often so challenging.
If we, for example, feel anxious about something we need to do and decide to put it off until tomorrow, our anxiety disappears, and we feel relief.
The positive feeling of relief is a reward for the procrastination behaviour – and the more a behaviour is rewarded, the more the survival manager likes it, and the more likely we are to repeat it. We kind of train ourselves to procrastinate.
That’s why it is so important to break down goals, projects, or new habits into small, easily doable pieces.
If we can expect and experience success from the beginning, we no longer feel anxious and hesitant to get started.
Now we get rewarded by our successes and no longer need ‘reward from failure’ (the relief after the postponing).
Mini behaviours and mini habits get us well prepared for more difficult behaviours.
If we practice small and easy-to-do behaviours, we create easy, fast, and constant successes that we can directly celebrate and feel positive about.
And success leads to success.
If we feel successful at something, even if it’s something small, our confidence increases, and we feel motivated to do it again, and to perform related behaviours.
And the more we do a behaviour, the easier it gets. Which again increases confidence and motivation.
And higher confidence and motivation levels increase our ability and willingness to do behaviours that are harder or bigger than the original one.
Mini behaviours and mini habits make us independent from our current level of motivation.
Yes, if motivation is high, we are willing to do difficult or hard behaviours.
But motivation is unreliable because it is based on how we feel.
We all experience ‘low mood days’.
Low feelings usually show up unpredictably and are often hard to get rid of. We are tired, have a headache, just feel miserable, stressed, weak.
If feelings are low, motivation is low.
Also, doing big things can feel hard and painful. We might have to push ourselves beyond our physical, emotional, or mental capabilities.
The survival manager of our brain (read more HERE), however, doesn’t want us to do painful or energy-sucking things. That’s why we can’t expect our brain to support us and why our motivation might shrink as soon as things become more demanding.
If we make a behaviour/habit tiny and easy to do, we don’t need much motivation.
We enable ourselves to do the behaviour successfully and repeatedly, no matter how our motivation might fluctuate.
Mini behaviours and habits are free of risk, danger, failure. They feel safe.
The main task of one part of or brain (the survival manager) is taking care of our safety and survival.
That’s why it not only wants us to avoid any potentially painful activities. It also wants us to avoid any potential risk or danger. To keep us save, it wants us to stay where we are and not change ourselves or our circumstances.
We can overcome our brain’s worries and fears and resistance to trying something new by avoiding big changes and instead choosing new behaviours that are so small and easy to do that they feel safe.
Mini behaviours and habits help us change our beliefs and our self-image to the better.
Our habits at least partly determine how we see ourselves, what we think and feel about the person we are (becoming).
Habits – behaviours we do consistently – become parts of our personality – the good ones as well as the bad ones. (E.g., ‘I watch TV each evening – I’m a lazy coach potato’, ‘I’m used to get up at 5am – I am a productive early morning bird’).
Practicing new habits is like developing new personality traits.
Mini habits create success experiences fast and easily which allows us to faster and easier see ourselves as a person who is successfully changing to the better: someone who is getting good at doing what she/he wants to do, who is becoming an expert in creating new habits, who is able and willing to do desired behaviours consistently.
Doing what we want to do makes us feel good and confident about ourselves and our capabilities. And possibilities.
Which makes working on more complex behaviours and habits easier and more probable.
Regular repetition of a new behaviour finally makes it habitual.
If we decide to start a new behaviour and intend to continue doing it, we want the new behaviour to get deeply ingrained in our brain and become habitual behaviour, so that we no longer have to invest attention and effort into doing it regularly and reliably.
And yes, if we manage to continue doing the behaviour for a while, our brain ‘gets used’ to it and accepts it as the best course of action in certain circumstances.
It decides that it no longer needs to take conscious care of the behaviour and transfers it into its unconscious areas – the behaviour becomes a habit.
Example:
Most of us buckle up as soon as we sit down in our car. We don’t have to think about it, we don’t have to remind ourselves to do it, we do it on default – buckling up before we start driving has become an unconscious behaviour – a habit.
It’s easier to transform a new behaviour into a habit if our brain ‘likes’ the behaviour.
The problem with many new behaviours is that the survival manager of our brain (Click here to read more about the two parts of the brain) doesn’t want to ‘get used’ to doing them in the beginning.
As soon as we start to execute a new behaviour, the survival manager in our brain gets nervous.
Habits are not boring or tedious or old-fashioned or stuffy – habits are necessary, effective, and efficient strategies that help us survive and flourish.
Our brain would get overwhelmed and finally collapse if it always had to deliberately choose what to do in a specific moment. We wouldn’t be able to use our brain for high-level cognitive processes if it had to take care of all the nitty-gritty situations and events in our daily life.
About 45% of our daily actions and behaviours are unconscious habits: actions and behaviours that we do on default, without thinking about them.
By taking regularly required behaviours and organising them into habits that get automatically activated when needed, the brain (the survival manager) helps us save energy. (Read more about the two parts of the brain here.)
And we gain precious free space and capacity in our conscious mind that we can use for more demanding cognitive work (the responsibility of the growth manager).
The good news is that we are the boss of our brain.
We are responsible – and capable! – of paying close attention to what’s happening in our brain.
We can – and should! – take the leadership.
It’s our job to supervise the survival manager and the growth manager (read more here) and make them cooperate in ways that allow us to survive and to grow.
As we are now aware of the main interests of the survival manager – seeking pleasure, avoiding pain, and saving energy – we can decide to actively support the growth manager and take the lead in the discussions with the survival manager.
The best growth strategy is to pursue new goals and change-intentions in ways that help loosen the survival manager’s automatic resistance:
We deliberately choose and practice empowering thoughts about our plans which help us create powerful feelings. The survival manager’s automatic resistance thoughts lose their power and influence.
