Konmari for your brain

If you’ve tried any version of decluttering or organizing your home, you understand the feeling of freedom. That immediate gratification of knowing all that you have and how to immediately find everything — it feels so satisfying, like a lightness that descends as the weight of too much stuff is lifted.

The entire exercise is defined as “eliminating clutter so you can live the life that you want.” It identifies the purpose of all that you own, forcing you to look closely at the “why” of every single thing you have brought into your life. And yes, it is a focus on what serves you in the now, but it is also a mindset that will continue to guide your decisions about what you choose to bring in to build your future. It’s the promise of a more aspirational life.

There is a direct parallel to this home decluttering exercise that is for your brain. It sounds really odd but the truth is that we have stuffed our brains with so much junk that no longer serves us. Junk in the form of thoughts about our relationships, our work, and ourselves that weigh us down and are getting in the way of living the life we often dream about.

Like the Konmari technique for your physical home, there is a process of looking at your mental home to determine which thoughts to keep and which to get rid of. As you do with your things, you must pull your thoughts forward and ask yourself:

Is this thought serving me?

Do I really want it?

Is it current or outdated?

Of course, the challenge with this exercise is how to sort through your thoughts when there are thousands of them every day? That’s where a coach can be most helpful. It often takes another brain to see how your brain is operating and to help find those limiting thoughts that are running in the background making choices that you aren’t even aware of. The ones that cause you to doubt yourself, procrastinate and stay stuck.

Just like the physical items that you choose to bring into your life, what you allow in your brain is truly a choice. What if you could eliminate the thoughts that hold you back? What if you could encourage the thoughts that will direct you toward the life that you are worthy of? That’s the true promise of an aspirational life.