Clearing Out Clutter – A Simple Way

I’ve been at the warehouse on one of my periodic “it’s time to clean out this place” passions.. It’s a bit of a challenge sometimes. If cleaning out your closet or garage seems like a bit much, imagine a whole warehouse.

Oops. I mean stop imagining anything that big or possibly overwhelming. 😉

Instead, enjoy this article I found by Steve about some really pleasant and useful ways to deal with reducing clutter in your life.

In the process of clearing out the warehouse I came across some interesting items that in the spirit of this article I’m going to take the opportunity to pass along to you over the next few weeks.

So I’m going to have a few interesting warehouse clearance sales soon – stay tuned!
Best regards,

Tom Dotz

 

Clearing Out Clutter – by Steve Andreas

From time to time we need to sort through an accumulation of things in order to make space for what we want to keep. However, many people have great difficulty doing this. Would you like to learn a ridiculously simple trick to make this easier?

When most people do this, they look through their closet full of clothes, the drawer full of socks, or the shelf full of books, and try to decide what they don’t want. While this seems very logical and straightforward, there are several reasons why it’s not the best way to accomplish the task.

Imagine that you went to a grocery store to buy some food, and you were focused on what you don’t want. Pause for a moment to imagine actually doing this in your mind, to find out what this way of shopping would be like for you. . . .

Doesn’t that seem a little backward? Now imagine shopping the way you usually do it, by focusing on what you do want. . . .

Whether you have a list of things that you have already decided that you want, or whether you look around to see what appeals to you (or both), focusing on what you do want is much simpler and more direct.

There are probably only a few things that you do want, and an immense number of things that you don’t want. If you were focused on eliminating what you don’t want, it would take you much longer, because there is so much more of it that you would have to process.

You have only a certain amount of attention; if you are focused on what you don’t want, you have much less attention for what you do want, and you might even lose track of it altogether, which is what happens in paranoia.

Perhaps most important, if you are focused on what you don’t want, you will be having the feelings that go along with thinking of those things. Those feelings are likely to be much less pleasant than the ones you have when you think of what you do want. Try this in you imagination. First think of a food that you don’t want, . . . and then think of a food that you do want. . . .

Which feels better? If you think of what you do want, you will feel better, and you are likely to keep on shopping. But if you are having the feelings that go with thinking of all those things that you don’t want, you are likely to stop soon, so that you can feel better!

So far I have written about what you do want and what you don’t want. But there is another category of stuff that is even larger than both of these put together; stuff that you don’t much care about one way or another-“Mister In-Between.” When you focus your attention on what you do want, all this is ignored along with all the stuff that you don’t want.

To summarize, if you are deciding what to buy in a store, it makes a lot more sense to focus on what you do want than what you don’t want. It is also much simpler to do, because it is harder for us to process negations like “don’t” (“do not”).

Now let’s go back to the task of sorting through an accumulation to decide what you want to keep. All the factors I have discussed above are equally true when you want to sort through stuff. If you focus on what you don’t want, it will be more difficult, less direct, it will take longer, and it feels unpleasant, so you will probably soon give up and do something else-perhaps berating yourself for your sloppiness and “lack of willpower” or “lack of persistence.”

How can we apply the way that we naturally and efficiently acquire stuff to the task of discarding stuff?

It’s absurdly simple: empty out that closet, drawer, or bookshelf completely and put everything that was in it somewhere else. Now imagine that this is stuff in a store, and you can select what you want from it-absolutely free! Now look through it to decide what you want to keep, and discard the rest of it.

There is an additional advantage to this way of sorting through stuff in order to simplify and streamline your surroundings. If you were successful in doing what most people do-focusing on what you don’t want, and discarding that, you would still have all the stuff that is meaningless to you-“Mister In-Between.” But by selecting what you do want from that pile of stuff, all the “Mister In-Between” stuff remains in the pile to be discarded.

If you are someone who likes to keep “in between” stuff around for a while in case it might become useful, put it in a box, and date it. If you haven’t looked at it after a given length of time-perhaps six months or a year-look through it quickly to be sure there is nothing you want to keep, and then dispose of it.

Another little trick I use is to think of who would be happy to have the stuff that I’m discarding. Even though I don’t have a use for it, it might be important to someone else; the thought that someone else might appreciate it gives me additional pleasure at the thought of passing it on to someone else, making it even easier to let go of it.

This is only one specific application of the importance of focusing your attention on positive outcomes-what you do want, rather than what you don’t want-a key element of NLP, and of living a life that works for you.

Do you have other strategies or “tricks” that make it easier for you to clean stuff out? If so, I welcome you to add them to this discussion.

During 30 years of writing researching and teaching NLP Steve Andreas collected a series of stories and metaphors. Some he wrote himself, others came from sources all over the world, poets and authors, therapists and mystics.

He used them as examples of different patterns, of the power of metaphor, and sometimes just for an entertaining distraction for the conscious mind. A few years ago he gathered the entire collection between two covers titled “Is There Life Before Death?”

If you’d like your own collection of these “Steve stories” I have some hard cover copies of “Is There Life Before Death?” that I bought at a really great price. They were pushed to a back corner of the warehouse and I completely forgot about them until we started packing for the trainings.

Due to an odd packaging they were packed in twos and I got a really great “remainder” type price on them I’m sharing with you. Originally $19.95 in hardcover, you get two copies for just $9.95 plus postage. That’s like 75% off.

(What to do with the extra copy? Surely you know at least one person who likes stories. Even Mom would like these 🙂

Click Here to find out more and get yours: “Is There Life Before Death?”

0 thoughts on “Clearing Out Clutter – A Simple Way”

  1. Great story! Can’t wait to get home and try it out. Makes so much sense. Thanks for circulating it.

    Sarah Nelson MD

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