Q&A: Decluttering Your Home |
Q: My home is a mess. I have so much stuff in so many places that I don't know where to begin. I'd really like to create more order. Help!
A:The fact that you want to create more order is a good sign. Harnessing that desire will fuel your efforts to attend to this energy drainer. In coaching, we use the phrase "energy drainer" to refer to anything that depletes your vitality. Energy drainers come in many sizes and forms, including both tangible ones (such as a chaotic desk, room, or home) and intangible ones (such as unfinished business with someone in your life).
As a coach, my job isn’t to provide answers, but instead to ask questions that can support you in accessing your inner wisdom and creating a unique solution that works with your values and lifestyle. With that in mind, here are some questions that may spark new perspectives.
• How would you like it to be?
This is often one of the first questions a coach asks, regardless of the focus of a session, because connecting with your vision energizes you and fuels your passion to make it real. How would you like your home to be? Close your eyes and take a few moments to allow a vision of your home to emerge. Take time to let the details become clear. What do you notice when you imagine opening your front door and entering your home? Walk through your home in your mind’s eye. What do you see? How do you feel as you move from room to room? What do you notice in your body?
• What is the first difference you notice between the vision you just stepped into and your home as it is now?
More order? Less stuff? Rearranged? Or perhaps it’s as much the atmosphere as the actual objects. Whatever captures your attention first is intuitive input that’s worth paying attention to. It’s often a powerful message about what matters most to you.
• What else do you notice? And what else? And what else?
It’s wise to keep asking “What else?” and stay open to receiving more information. We could stop with the first thing you noticed, but we’d be skipping over a lot of potentially valuable information. Perhaps the first thing you noticed is that you had less clutter in your living room; that’s a valuable clue. So is noticing that your home may feel more nourishing when more sunlight enters it (new window treatments, perhaps?) or that you need to create a place in your home that’s a sanctuary from the everyday hubbub.
In addition to getting in touch with your vision, many other questions can bear fruit in pointing you in the direction of where to begin. Here are a few:
• What change will have the most impact?
A former client of mine believed that decluttering her home would be a long-term project, but she quickly identified her first goal: to create an art corner in her bedroom. She was thrilled to realize how easily she could make that happen. Together we identified the (very few) steps required, which she gleefully took within a week.
• What's bugging you the most?
If you find yourself saying, “If only I could get ______ (fill in the blank) handled, I’d feel soooooooo much better!” you’re a great candidate for the “debugging” approach. One of my clients has a dining room table that used to be a chaos magnet -- unopened mail, shopping lists, library books to return, magazine articles to file -- you get the picture. We quickly came up with a system for handling each of the things that used to collect on the table. In the process, she instituted a practice of buying fresh flowers each week to shift her table from a place of chaos to a place of beauty. She immediately noticed how much her spirits were lifted by being in her dining room. Her beautification plan has since spread, like a beneficial virus, to the rest of her home.
• What approach to this challenge fits your personal style?
I’ve heard many people say it’s wise to tackle a big challenge first because it creates such a sense of satisfaction and achievement. If that works for you, great. However, I take the opposite approach and handle the smallest things first, for two reasons:
* I can get a lot of things crossed off my to-do list quickly, which helps me feel freer.
* Everything I handle is a success, which soon creates a string of successes, which soon creates a veritable trend.
What’s the easiest thing you can do right now to create a success in the area of your home? It’s surprisingly simple to start a positive trend. It might be as easy as washing a few dishes and noticing how the increased order impacts your mood. Or going to your closet with the intention of finding three pieces of clothing to give away. Or finding a professional organizer in the Yellow Pages.
Check in with yourself regularly as you explore the decluttering process. You’re scanning for good ideas you can implement and, even more, for a bodily sense of “aaaaah” or “that’s it!” I believe that there’s a best solution for everything -- and that our intuition gives us clear feedback when we’ve hit on it. And remember, the best solution is often a series of little solutions. No need to tackle your entire home at once, like a mountain climber starting with Mount Everest. Little steps add up to big successes. |
Kira Freed |
| About the author: |
| Kira Freed is a Certified Life Coach (CLC) and former psychotherapist with master's degrees in counseling psychology and anthropology. She has been passionate about personal growth since her teenage years and has been fortunate to attend a wealth of professional trainings and workshops. She has worked in the field of human development since 1990 and is inspired by and honored to collaborate with coaching clients in the emergence and expression of their authentic selves. Kira lives in Tucson, Arizona, and most of her clients work with her by telephone. She can be reached at
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for more information or to book a coaching session. She offers a sliding scale, and the first session is free. This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it |
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