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Organizing Your Mind

  • Oct 2, 2018
  • 5 min read

This month I'm going to focus on the true root of our disorganization.

OUR MINDS.

What separates us from other species? Our pre-frontal cortex a.k.a our conscious mind.

Our unconscious mind serves us well to get things done without having to use so much thought work. Our unconscious mind saves us on a lot of decision making. We have repetitive and programmed thoughts that serve us and our subconscious brain manages those thoughts for us very well. For instance, "pick up your leg", breathe, blink, etc.

Our minds make over 60,000 decisions a day!

We do however, have repetitive and programmed thoughts that don't serve us well. If we go on in life without organizing them and stuffing them into the backs of our minds, those thoughts will create unwanted emotions in the background. Some of those unnoticed thoughts are probably not elevating you into the human that you strive to be. When we bring these thoughts to the forefront we can organize them and make purposeful decisions about every area of our lives. Not just on our productivity and the state of our homes, but also in relationships with loved ones and of course, ourselves.

Ask yourself as we uncover these thoughts:

1. Is this thought serving me?

2. Do I really want it?

3. Is it current or outdated?

Are you looking for evidence from the past that confirms these negative thoughts?

Find the positive: Try looking for evidence that you can do hard things.

Evidence that you know how to make changes. Evidence that your conscious mind is in control.

I'm not saying avoid and not be aware of negative evidence. Just ask yourself the three questions I suggested above.

Our lives will always have positive and negative thoughts and emotions. It's 50-50. We grow from difficulties.

I want you to enjoy the journey.

You might be asking, "what does this have to do with organizing my home and life"? It has to do with EVERYTHING!

EVERYTHING we create comes from our thoughts.

All technology came from a thought. Engines came from a thought. Clothing came from a thought.

You get the picture!

Find the thoughts that challenge you to be the person you want to be. Find the thoughts to organize your home, your meal planning, your free time, your lunches with friends and family. Look at how much time you spend consuming information while searching for information on the internet. How much time do you spend on social media? What thought can you use to get you to do the things on your to do list? I challenge you to really look at where your mind goes. Brooke Castillo couldn't have summed it up better. This is not the full podcast, but some really good words about our minds. Enjoy!

Excerpt from Brooke Castillo Podcast #184

"Do you want to bring in new thoughts and new ideas and new plans, very similarly to bringing in new furniture, new flooring, remodeling the house, right? Or do you want to keep living in the same brain with the same categories with the same thoughts without any real conscious thought about what you’re thinking?

Are you hoarding thoughts about your past? Are you hoarding thoughts and judgments about other people, about yourself?

Are those thoughts useful? Are they serving you, or are they just taking up space? I want you to think about it as like tremendous clutter, and you need to lift it all up and look underneath and clean around and organize it in order to have the clean, fresh, minimal house that you want to be up there in your brain.

And then when you bring a new thought in, you bring it in carefully and purposefully and you make sure that it’s useful to you. I want you to think about your brain as a container of thoughts with a limited amount of fuel to think them. You want to get them organized, in order and deliberate; most of the time they’re just random, unfocused and overwhelming.

When you let your mind “go”, where does it go? What does it think about when you let it just think without direction? What are your obsessive thoughts? What are your habitual thoughts? Do you have thoughts that create desire for buffering? Where is your mind most efficient? Is your mind most efficient in creating over desire and creating procrastination and creating judgment, creating drama? Or is it most efficient when it comes for creating your future and coming up with new ideas and creating value for yourself and the people around you?

What do you want to use your mind power to create?

I want you to think about that. If you have limited mind power, what do you want to use it to create? Because it’s always creating something, most of you are just re/cycling thoughts and recreating the exact same life. And for many of you, it’s a life that you don’t want to keep recreating.

So there are two tools that I think are the best ways to focus your mind. One of the tools is to ask questions, to ask your brain very good questions and to have it seek the answer for you. Your brain is like a heat-seeking missile; it does not like an unanswered question.

So it will answer the question and seek solutions. So this is why I’m always telling my students to never say, “I don’t know.” Instead, ask your brain to figure it out. “What do I need to do to know? If I did know, what is the answer? If I was willing to make a decision, what would that decision be?”

Because a lot of times, what you need to do is make a decision and do that thing to find out if that is the thing that you should be doing. If you want to know what you should do, do it, and then you’ll know. We want to know before we do it. Most of the time, we can’t know that. so ask your brain really good questions and expect it to seek solutions.

Your brain is the most powerful piece of technology on the planet. Nobody has a machine that they paid for that is as exceptional as your own brain. And if you just let it get clogged up with files and you just let its memory get overloaded and you don’t clean up its desktop, you will feel the effects of that in your life.

And you will see the effects of that in your life, but when you choose only high-quality thoughts, when you choose only luxurious thoughts, I want you to imagine what it would be like to tour your brain with very carefully chosen thoughts that are beautiful, that feel good, that are luxurious, that serve you. And when you do that, you will get to feel the effect of that. You will get to have that deliberate life.

So please, go through this process. If you are in Scholars, make sure you answer the questions in your podcast book that will help you organize your thoughts in your brain, in your mind, so you can always wake up to a very clean filtered organized mind.

You have to, every day, take out the trash. That is what a thought download is. You download all those thoughts – it’s the equivalent of taking everything out of the cupboards and putting back in only the stuff that is really healthy, that really serves you, that really satisfies you. That is the process of organizing your mind.

So, get to work and do that. Do not be a hoarder. Do not let your mind be a mess."

You can get started on this by doing my Weekly Plan Challenge. It's totally FREE and a great place to start.

Done Is Better Than Perfect!

Set your thoughts to work by doing the Weekly Plan Challenge.

It's FREE. Sign up HERE.

As Always,

Keep it Sweet and Neat,

Stephanie

*I couldn't have written this blog without the help of my Master Coach, Brooke Castillo @ The Life Coach School.

 
 
 

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