Values and Decision Making - the Keys to Decluttering and Organizing Your Home
The personal coach approach to professional organizing in Seattle.
I suppose you might liken the activity of decluttering and organizing your home to other extremely exciting endeavors such as pulling teeth or sitting in traffic?
Let’s face it, when it comes to activities that get us excited about life, facing whatever lurks in the hallway closet is hardly top of the list; let alone the kitchen cupboards. Or heaven forbid the attic.
We would rather just… not.
As a professional organizer, I think a lot about how we put things off because they’re simply no fun. But the thing is, sometimes life requires us to do what needs to be done for the sake of reaching a different outcome. We have to stretch ourselves. That’s just how life works. For instance, the need for change becomes obvious when we suddenly have a throbbing toothache. Though we dread it, we must go to the dentist. And it’s a good thing that our bodies communicate with us so clearly in these emergency situations. In this case, fixing what’s wrong will literally save our lives!
Rarely does the clutter in your home speak with such clarity. But it does speak.
Because, the fact is, your piles of stuff are just masses of decisions that have not been made; sitting there in physical form, clogging up your life. That’s right, that heap of stuff is just a heap of decisions. The question is, why are we not making these decisions?
Decisions take energy, that’s why. And if we’re stressed, that energy can be hard to muster.
(If lack of energy is what’s in your way, I would suggest you look at the problem head-on. Is it okay to be so stressed and exhausted that your home environment completely falls apart? I mean, this is where you live. Might you need some change in your lifestyle so you can tend to your environment?)
And if your problem isn’t lack of energy, could it be…
Fear of making the wrong decision? (All hell could break loose!)
Guilt about making a decision that will affect others? (Do I have the right to make decisions?)
Shame that the pile of stuff in your house is proof of your complete lack of character? (I don’t want to look because I’m disgusting anyway so why try.)
Better to just skip this decision-making step and avoid these questions, right? Who wants to get all up into this uncomfortable territory? The fact is that trying to make decisions without first acknowledging our values can be extremely stressful, confusing, and fear-inducing and our modern lives have no space for more stress.
But think about it: a decision is just the conversion of an experience into a focused insight; a point of consciousness that we stop and consider. There’s nothing scary about that. It happens all the time. We take a moment to give a situation or a thing or a person our attention. If we have also taken the time to consider our values and connect to our passions, decisions that lead to actions are the simple result of following through on what matters to us.
Thankfully, with a little redirection, we can set aside the old bellwethers of fear, guilt, and shame, and use our values to make decisions instead. But first, we need to get clear about what it means to value something, (As in: what drives my sense of purpose, gives me meaning, and makes me feel GOOD) and understand that the more passion we have for our values, the more effort we'll put in to achieve an outcome based on those values.
Passion helps us suffer better.
Passion helps us keep going when things get tough. These days, we hear a lot about something called grit. Grit is just us standing up to the inertia of life and facing adversity to create the life we actually want.
Passion gives us grit. The more passionate we are, the more likely we are to stick with a task or a goal, and the more we learn and grow and develop. And the more we get out of our own way for growth, the more we experience flow. (Somewhere in there is the experience of happiness.)
!!!
But the weird thing about our values is that, even though they are incredibly important to the way we live our lives, sometimes they’re unclear to us. This is simply because we haven’t taken the time to stop and consider them.
Most of us value happiness, for instance. This is something almost everyone is interested in, if not actively trying to achieve.
The question is, how passionate are you about creating a happy life for yourself? Do you even know? Are you willing to suffer a little bit to get there? What is your own personal version of happiness?
Asking yourself these questions and taking the time to jot down your own personal mission statement, or the mission statement for your relationship or your family could provide you with a huge amount of clarity on the subject of your values.
A mission statement is just one sentence: short, sweet, and to the point. It’s a statement that focuses you and inspires you and reminds you what you’re here on the planet for. When you clearly state your values in this way, every decision you make can be easily weighed against what you truly want and desire. This way, you are all set up to convert your experiences into insights, easily taking action to follow through on what you care about!
It’s math. Well, not really. But it’s the kind of math that makes sense to me.
;-)
All of this attention naturally leads to systems thinking in the organizing process and the maintenance of our lives.
And that’s just:
Who
Does what
When
And how
That’s it.
A system is a pipeline or process wherein “things” run smoothly through various frameworks to their desired outcome or destination.
A well-planned process solves procrastination by making key decisions in advance based on values. Knowing what the frameworks are and where the decision points happen sets us up so we don’t have to think or consider our way through the process every time we use the system.
We can summarize this concept with these questions:
What are the raw materials? (We inventory what items or information we’re dealing with.)
What are the decisions? (We remember to use our values, not our fears.)
When do the decisions happen? (We plan ahead so we don’t have to figure it out as we go through our daily life.)
Where (and through which frameworks) do the raw materials go? (Everything has a place!)
What are the desired results? (Again, we refer back to our values to imagine where we want to end up.)
As we actively direct the flow of resources through frameworks, we stop bottlenecks before they even have a chance. And through this flow, we reach our outcomes.
This is where your Growth Mindset comes in.
You might have heard that mindset has a huge impact on outcomes?
A growth mindset allows us to make mistakes, adjust, and keep going. This way of thinking values growth over all things and sees “failure” as a stepping stone toward reaching our goals.
But dare I say that most of the world unknowingly operates under a fixed mindset?
With a fixed mindset, failure is proof that you’re not up to the task and you should stop whatever you’re doing.
!!!
Let’s not go there. It’s a huge dead end on our road of growth. We’ve had enough of this kind of thinking to last seven lifetimes plus a million years.
But through a growth mindset, we can evaluate the outcomes of our systems in a nonjudgemental way and adjust as necessary. Systems are not diagnostic of your character or symbolic of your lack. They are not there to criticize us or prove us unworthy. We can edit them every which way for however long we like so that they really work for us. And because these systems are yours, they are designed by you, FOR you, and completely under your control.
So, that’s it.
Using values to make decisions that clear your internal and external blocks will bring more of what you really want into your life. But remember, anything you acquire will, at some point, require your time and attention. So acquire wisely.