Being organized is a mindset – not a skill
Being a new mother has thought me one thing – being organized and planning things are essential to especially get through the first few months of motherhood. The advantage is that being organized to me comes naturally and is something that I have always been very good at. My whole life is a big plan and I live by to do lists. Now, while I therefore might be the other extreme of being too much of a planner, I still believe that being organized is taking us further and ultimately helps us to be more successful. Being organized and planning things in my opinion is not a skill that we learn – it is a mindset.
The theory this is underlying here, is that our outside living environment reflects our inside, our mind, feelings, and general happiness in our life. This would suggest that the more organized we are for our outside environment and people around us, the more mental stability we also feel on the inside. In contrast, the more unease we feel inside, the less capacity we must plan and organize the life around us.
Once we therefore understand the connection between our inside mental space, we find ourselves at and the outside with the environment being a direct reflection of that, we are in the position of making changes. However, the first step to becoming more organized and tidying up is as often suggested not to have a hands-on approach and start sorting shelves, but to tidy up the mental clutter in our minds. We should start with our inside, reflect and make sure we feel sat ease and things in our life are generally in order. If we already think gaps occur there, we cannot jump to the next stage of sorting out our environment yet, as it would be a waste of time, as we would just very quickly fall back into old habits.
Start with the inside is therefore the key. Identify things that cause issues to find the core causes inside us why we might find it so hard to plan and be more organized. Many people think this is the easy part, it really is not. Looking inside us requires a lot of work and reflection to really face issues and things we need to tackle in our life that prevent us from getting organized and provide a large part of mental clutter. The problem here, we are very often not aware of this mental clutter. By tidying up our metal clutter first and liberating us from it mentally, we set the scene for a change in our outside environment that will inevitably follow.
Once our inside is tidy and organized, meaning we know where we stand in life and where we want to go, we can start cleaning and tidying up outside of us. This will naturally follow in the process, as we mentioned in the beginning that our outside reflects the inside. Therefore, the outside will automatically be decluttered once our inside is taken care of. Our outside will change once the inner chaos is gone.
Being organized and tidy is key to me, specially with motherhood. However, the skill here is not to put a few things on top of each other, but to clean up our mind first and the mindset we hold inside. This will then also change our outside environment which is a direct reflection of the chaos and turmoil we feel inside very often. Those phases also change in our life, and we have periods where things are very clean and planned, and other periods where we fall Back into chaos. However, planning and being organized is therefore a mindset, not a skill. Getting organized start with going through our inner clutter, so start now with decluttering and we will be happier.
