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.
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.