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Struggling with the clutter in your wardrobe? – ‘Talk’ to your clothes and ask them for help

‘Talking’ to our belongings can open a door to our unconscious mind

Asking our belongings for their feedback is a playful way to gain more awareness about the things we have accumulated over time. Questions like ’‘Why am I not using you?’ help us uncover what’s going on in our mind.

If we are willing to listen to the honest answers we get from our stuff, we begin to understand our subconscious attachment to things that no longer serve us, and we find it easier to make let-go decisions that are over-due.

Wardrobe clutter conversations – Your clothes know what’s going on in your closet

There are many ways to declutter and organise our wardrobe so that getting dressed in the morning becomes simple and enjoyable.

One way to understand the situation in our wardrobe better and to simplify the decluttering-decision process is to ‘talk’ to our clothes and ‘ask’ them for help.

EXERCISE

You start the ‘conversation’ by taking everything out of the wardrobe that you haven’t worn for a while.

Spread it out on your bed or another suitable flat surface.

Then take each piece of clothing in your hands and ask it,

‘Why am I not wearing you?’

All sorts of answers will come up and they will help you clarify your relationships with your clothes.

Making confident decluttering decisions gets easier if you hear (and accept) the truth.

Your clothes might give you answers such as

You’re not wearing me because

    • I have stains that you can’t get out’
    • you’ve never tried. Look here, I’ve still the price tag on’
    • you never liked me’
    • I am out of fashion’
    • you forgot about my existence’
    • you have so many clothes similar to me’
    • I don’t fit you’
    • we don’t fit to each other’
    • your lifestyle changed and you no longer need me’
    • you don’t look good when you put me on’
    • I give you negative emotional associations’
    • you don’t like my colour/style any longer’

If you are willing to listen to your clothes and trust their answers, you will find it easier to decide what you want to keep – and to say thank you and goodbye to those clothes that gave you honest and tough answers – because they no longer want to stay with you.


Decluttering your wardrobe can make decluttering your life easier

If you plan to not only declutter your home but other areas in your life as well, getting your wardrobe sorted out is a great starting point.

Many of us feel emotionally attached to at least some of our clothes. This can be the reason why we postpone decluttering our wardrobe again and again.

As soon as we get curious and ask ourselves (and our clothes) questions about all the stuff in the closet, we start to come up with answers that help us clear up the emotional ballast – ballast that causes not only the clutter in our closet but also in other areas of our life.

3 questions that help us focus on creating more fun and excitement in our life

In a recent article of the Powerful Questions Series I discussed how defining our values and our purpose in life can give our mind and our soul structure, stability, and direction. We used a couple of questions to get a clearer idea of the priorities in our lives.

The following 3 little questions can also help us pay more attention to what’s important to us – this time the focus is on having fun and excitement in our life.

Ask yourself – and play around with the answers:

    • What am I currently excited about in my life?
    • What does it mean to me to have a full and rich life?
    • How could I have more fun and joy in my life?

You will probably not arrive at a final definition of your fun priorities and your idea of living more joyfully on purpose just by answering some questions.

But anything that helps us define our priorities in life will make it easier to move forward in a meaningful and intentional way.

Are you ready for some more fun, and excitement in your life?

A small step can change everything: Your home – your mind – your life.

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. 

A small step can change everything. Give it a try.

Our mind – not the stuff in our home – is the cause of our (clutter) problems

Where does the clutter in our life come from?

As human beings, we all have clutter in our life:

    • Belongings in our home that we don’t need, use, love.
    • Thoughts in our minds that don’t serve us.
    • Feelings in our heart that disturb our wellbeing.
    • Actions in our daily life that draw us away from where we want to go.
    • Results in our life that keep us stuck.

The most damaging category of clutter is the clutter in our mind.

This type of clutter – all the self-limiting thoughts and unsupportive beliefs – is so powerful because the mind-clutter causes all the other types of clutter in our life.

Why we need to actively manage our mind

An unsupervised mind gets easily cluttered.

Left on its own, the lack of direction and guidance causes the mind to come up with automatic thoughts which then create feelings and actions that can

    • cause us to create a mess in our home,
    • damage our relationships with others and with ourselves,
    • hold us back in our personal development,
    • keep us stuck in a job we don’t like or slow us down in our career,
    • make our financial situation difficult,
    • keep us from setting and reaching goals and creating the life we want to have.

However, it’s within our power to take back control and clear up the mess in our mind – and in our life.

In fact, our mind can become our best and most supportive friend – if we take the initiative and learn to manage what’s going on up there and how to get rid of anything that’s not serving us.

How we can start to manage our mind and our life successfully

The best way to start is to focus.

Instead of trying to change everything to the better in one go, we take a step-by-step approach.

We choose just one area of our life and commit ourselves to get it sorted out.

Clearing up this one area – and the related part in our mind – will build and strengthen our ‘decluttering-muscles’. We become experts in recognising clutter and sorting it out.

We also become mind-management experts.

Now we are the ones who decide what’s happening in our mind. Limiting thoughts are no longer tolerated, we get really good at letting go of what doesn’t serve us.

We gain space and clarity in our mind. Now we are free to move on with new useful thoughts, feelings and actions – which help us to create the results we want to have in the chosen area of our life.

Your home could be the one area of your life that you focus on.

Team up with your mind and get the clutter out – out of your home and out of your mind.

Decluttered & Organised BLOG ARCHIVE @ Let Go – Move On

What’s your focus of interest – Home Decluttering or Mind Decluttering? 

Just ask me – I now can easily find the information you are interested in. 

All my blog articles are now nicely organised in two ‘containers’ with clear labels:

Blog - Focus Home DeclutteringOne ‘container’ contains all the blog posts that focus on Home Decluttering topics.

Blog - Focus Mind Decluttering

The other one stores the articles that focus on Mind Decluttering issues.

The reason why I decided to do the work and why my blog archive is now clutterfree and well sorted:

Recently, I felt a bit ashamed because I – the ‘clutterfree life’ coach – struggled to find one of my blog posts under the ‘clutter’ in the archive.

A client wanted to get her sentimental belongings – items inherited from her mother – sorted out. I thought that a blog post that I had written about this topic a while ago would be helpful to her. 

But then I had a typical clutter experience – I couldn’t find that post. I knew it was somewhere but not where exactly. So it took me a while to search around in my archive. Finally I found it.

But I knew that it was time to declutter and organise my blog archive. 

And I had a typical decluttering experience – I discovered articles that I had forgotten about and was happy to see again. And others that might have been useful at the time I created them but now no longer were up-to-date and needed to go.

I made some tough decisions. And then got everything that I wanted to keep nicely organised.

Now I know again what I have in my blog archive and where I can find it. 

I can’t say that I was happy about the time I had to invest in the decluttering and organising process but I totally like the result. It was worth the time and effort. 

That’s a typical clutterfree experience:

The process of letting go of what we have kept but don’t need (any longer) is not always fun and very often hard work – but the result is always positive:

More order, space and clarity. More reason to feel relaxed, content, and peaceful.

More …   Fill in the blank – What are the feelings that you experience at the end of a successful decluttering project? 

Why we need to be very careful about what we are thinking

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, we often believe that something is wrong with us. Or we blame certain ‘unfair’ circumstances in our life.

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

However, we can do something about it.

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

One of the many ways to test our thoughts – especially our limiting beliefs – is to ask ourselves powerful questions – AND answer them! For example:

    • ‘If I didn’t believe this, then what would I do?’
    • ‘What if I’m wrong about that?’
    • ‘What if this is just a story my mind made up?’

Click here to learn more about how we can declutter our limiting thoughts.

Knowing and living our values gives life structure and stability

What can we do to ensure that we live and experience our life the way we want to live and experience it?

Deeply understanding what’s truly important to us and defining our values can give our mind structure, stability, and direction.

You can use this little exercise to become more aware of what you value:

Ask yourself questions like these:

    • What’s really important to me in the different areas of my life?
    • Am I currently neglecting important values?
    • What do I want to achieve in my life, today and tomorrow, in the next 5 years, etc?
    • Where do I want to focus my time and my energy right now?

Don’t rush through the questions.

To really benefit from the exercise, you need to be willing to invest some time. Consider the questions, one by one, and write down what comes to your mind. 

For example:

Before you answer the first question, you could make a list of the different areas of your life.

Your list might include important relationships, your work, your finances, your home, your hobbies and interests, your personal development, your fitness and health, etc.

Then you can go through your list and write down what’s most important to you in each area. 

At the end of the exercise, you can take your notes and decide how you could use your insights to now truly ‘value your values’. Ask – and answer:

    • How can I pay more attention to what’s important to me in my daily life?
    • Could I start a new personal or professional project, here and now, that’s closely linked to my values and my goals?
    • What else can I do to truly value what’s important to me?

Knowing what’s important to us helps us value and fully live our life, the way we want to live it. 


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.

How a conversation with your future self can help you to achieve your goals

The secret to creating the life you want: Talk to your Future Self.

A conversation with our future self brings us clarity.

This little exercise can be fun. And it can be extremely helpful if we feel a bit stuck.

EXERCISE – Talk to your much older future self

Imagine your future self being much older than you are now. You can expect her to be much wiser and more mindful and knowledgeable at this stage of life. 

Picture yourself sitting together with your future self, having a relaxed conversation with her. Don’t forget to take notes while you are talking with her.

STEP 1 – Choose a topic

Choose the area of your life you want to discuss with your future self. Tell her what you wish to change, improve, achieve.

STEP 2 – Ask powerful questions

Now ask her these 3 questions:

    • What does she recommend you should stop doing?
    • What does she want you to start doing?
    • What does she think you should continue doing?

Don’t judge or evaluate, just write down whatever comes up in her(your) mind.

Don’t push away what you don’t like to hear. Take your time to think it through.

STEP 3 – Create an action plan

Choose one or two of her recommendations about what you should stop, start, or continue doing.

Compile an action plan: List all the things you want to think, feel, and do differently.

Then start realising your goals.

Don’t postpone, take the first step – now.

 


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.

A set of 3 little questions – to make our actions and activities more valuable

Each day in our life offers numerous opportunities to learn something new, to gain helpful insights, to think in a different way, to benefit from an experience.

Unfortunately, we often miss these opportunities because we rush through our day. We are in a hurry to start, manage, and complete tasks, projects, processes, activities. We want to get it done so that we can move on to the next thing.

We don’t take the time to look back at what we have been doing, we don’t pay attention to the results we have created, we don’t stop to evaluate, review and adjust – we just move on, and on, and on.

How can we become more aware of learning opportunities and use them deliberately for our personal development?

A set of 3 little questions can help.

As soon as a job, task or project has been completed, at the end of an event, after any success or failure experience, at the end of the day/week/month/year month, we can ask ourselves:

    • What worked?
    • What didn’t work?
    • What am I going to do differently?

GIVE IT A TRY

At the end of today, pause for a moment, and see what you can learn from your answers to the questions

    • What worked out today? What did I do successfully? What positive results have I created today?
    • What didn’t work? What feels like a failure? Why? What went wrong, or not as expected/wanted?
    • What can I learn from this? What can I do differently tomorrow?

How a new evening routine can bring some light at the end of the day

What could you ask instead of ‘How was your day?’

Asking another person positive questions not only helps that person lighten up their mood, it also helps us: Making the effort to think about a good question and hearing ourselves asking it opens up our own mind to the good experiences in our life.

Give it a try, play around and experiment with asking other questions in the evening than just ‘How was your day?’

These are some suggestions:

    • Tell me three good things that happened to you today.
    • What was the best conversation you had today?
    • What are you most grateful for about your day?
    • What made you laugh today?
    • What did you do that was just for you today?
    • What was the best part of your day? Why?
    • Etc.

‘Inventing’ new powerful questions can become a great shared activity at the end of the day, a fun game that you can play with your partner/family at the dinner table every evening.

The good thing about this evening routine, however, is that we don’t need to have other people around us to do it.  

We can create the habit to ask ourselves at least one powerful question before or while we are going to bed.

Make sure that you have a positive mind at the end of the day!

How appreciation and gratitude help us fill up our personal treasure chest

Do you truly appreciate what you have in your life?

Daily practicing our appreciation of the good things in our life helps us strengthen our positive-feeling ‘muscle’. It makes us feel better. And stronger.

The purpose of the ‘Treasure Chest’ exercise is to come up with positive thoughts about the things we value and appreciate in our life, all the stuff we are grateful for and happy about.

These thoughts in turn will help us fill up our personal ‘treasure chest’ of positive and powerful feelings.

All the appreciation, gratefulness, happiness and contentedness that we add to our ‘treasure chest’ does not only make us feel good in that moment, it will also keep our heart warm during cloudy or stormy periods that might come up in the future.

How do you fill up your personal treasure chest?

Invest 10 minutes each day and write down what comes up to your mind when you ask yourself questions like these:

    • What am I grateful for today?
    • What am I happy about just now?
    • What are the people in my life that are particularly valuable to me?
    • What are the things in my life (personal belongings, money, space, time, etc) that I really appreciate?
    • What have I done/am I doing that I am really proud of?
    • Etc.

The nice thing about this treasure chest is that it’s not heavy and it can’t be stolen. We can carry it around with us all day, we can open it any time, and we can share it with others if we want to.

Enjoy what’s in your personal treasure chest!

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.