Read these helpful tips from our guest blogger. Eliza has worked with clients through JFS counseling to help them get on track. Here she discusses how to get off to a fresh start in 2017.
Every resolution requires subtraction. Even if your goal isn’t literally, “I want to get organized!”, you still have to let go of something in order to succeed.
If your resolution is to eat healthier, you cannot succeed without first decluttering your pantry items containing ingredients that you can’t pronounce. If your resolution is smarter budgeting, you may have to shed the mentality of buying “wants” in order to impress. If you had a resolution to finish writing your novel, you couldn’t do it without purging some things from your schedule. Without releasing, we cannot gain.
And when you think about it, there’s really no room to do the opposite: We are past capacity in our closets, our storage units, our brains, our organs, and our ability to take care of other people.
I tell my organizing clients that clutter is a material clue that something needs to be emotionally released.
We think about clutter as the tangible: The pile of papers or the bloated closet. Let’s look farther: The real clutter of the paper pile is our anxiety about decision making. The true clutter of the bloated closet is that we feel like we can never have enough, or that we don’t like how we look.
Life throws endless clutter at us. There is clutter in our food…. Clutter when you bring in the mail… Clutter on TV and on the radio… Clutter in all the magazines that insist that celebrities are far more worth paying attention to than working on our own lives… Clutter in the air around the holidays, suggesting that we are not good friends or children or parents if we don’t show our love and gratitude in the form of gifts. Don’t even get me started on Black Friday: It’s just another path for clutter to slither into our lives.
New Years is my very favorite holiday because of the opportunity to shed another skin, and turn around to thank it for another educational year before walking away and never looking back. No need to save our skins; we can carry these lessons in our hearts, and proceed forward with lighter pockets.
In my de-cluttering workshops, I call out the unspoken fears that make us want to hold on to our dead skins for dear life. Potential, Guilt and Identity Loss are just some of these anxieties that whisper those words “Just keep it!!” in our brains. Naming our fears aloud is Step One in releasing them.
- Am I doing this for me?
- Where can I let go?
- What am I making room for?
- I invite you to search for subtraction in any resolution you choose for 2017. When you make a goal, ask yourself:
Whether your subtraction takes the form of donating unwanted items, cleaning out your calendar or letting a not-great relationship come to an end, keep an eye out: The reward will arrive when you give it a home.
Life should be simple. We deserve to begin and end our day in a space that is beautiful, uncomplicated, and inspiring. When we remove the superfluous, we are our best selves.
Eliza’s contact information:
Simplicana
Contained Home Organizer with The Container Store
eliza@simplicana.com
913-815-0008