by admin | Aug 28, 2022 | Declutter
Your home is alive and existing as energy. You are not separate from your home because it is a part of you. It is a reflection of how you think and feel, just as much as you develop by the way you personally interact with the space that is offered to you. The rooms of your home are a representation of how you think and feel, a reflection of your own energy.
Everything in life is composed of energy, of molecules and tiny atoms clustered together as different forms of 'stuff'. Wood and plastic are different materials, but each composed of a set of compressed atoms. Oak, pine, larch and sycamore are all wood types, albeit with a different composition. They each have their own form of energy and this is what you pick up on when you touch the different things in your home. Add to the physical makeup of each item, the emotional energy attached to every piece of furniture, glassware, DIY tool, or art work, books, clothing and bikes.
If your home is a place of harmony, love, hope and goodness, then it stands to reason that it should first be a place of sanctuary for you. It needs to be a space where you can be relaxed and completely yourself. For this to happen to the best degree possible you need to tailor the space you live to meet your own character, aspirations and to work with and support your own value system. This is where you spend your most relaxed time, where you are private and alone, as well as where you can relax with friends and with loved ones. A home is where you can be at your most vulnerable and most intimate. Here you can be completely true to your best you.
To fulfil so many functions energy moves, shifts, surrounds and connects the spaces within your home. You are sensitive to light, texture, movement, to stillness, to chatter and to music. In a location where you eat, love, bathe, create, worry, aspire and give momentum to ideas and projects, this connecting energy is everything. Distraction, concerns, low energy, sad areas, fluctuating temperatures, and anything which pulls you from living your best life at home will harm those aspirations, slowing down your creative and communicative elements. These sentient or emotional forms of energy will hold you back from the best. Visual distraction, untidy rooms, chaotic kitchens or unclean bedrooms and living rooms all conspire to prevent you living at your best levels of energy.
You cannot have friends round for drinks or a meal if the space for them is not made special, cleaned and tidied. The visual pull of dirty laundry in a guest bathroom, or of dirty and unwashed crockery on a kitchen surface, or of shoes and coats seemingly abandoned on the hall floor - none of this is good energy. Such presentation of your home space is neither uplifting, welcoming or special. Why do you tidy up for guests? Why do you want to create a clean and tidy environment for visitors? Forgive me for stating the obvious, but you put effort in so that the energy of your home is positive, welcoming and active for your visitors. That is just the publicly visible elements of your home and the energy associated with those situations.
Just as obvious is the energy present in your private areas of the home. Wardrobes, or laundry basket, or the drawers where you keep your underwear and handkerchiefs, ties and scarves or mufflers. When you open a drawer and it is a disorganised mess, you feel heavy and fed up, knowing that you now have to hunt around to find two separate socks and make a pair. Instead, if you open that same drawer and every separate sock has been paired correctly with it's other half, or your hankies are folded neatly and lined up behind one another and easy to see, how do you feel now? That sensation of ease you get when you know where everything is, this too is energy presenting itself to you.
There is much less stagnant energy in the drawer or the organised wardrobe. You are helping yourself by lifting the energy in your home. When you are not distracted by mess, clutter or chaos, you have higher energy to be you and to do what you want to do. Faster and with greater focus.
by admin | Aug 19, 2022 | Simple Self Help
Letting life get on top of you to the extent that you are personally, both physically and emotionally, dragged down by it is the beginning of a slippery slope. There are no hard and fast rules as each of us is different in our circumstances. However, it is easy to find yourself living for other people, for someone else's priorities or diary schedule, leaving very little for yourself. You get physically spent and come home at the end of each day, wiped out, exhausted, unable to make a move other than perhaps a grab for a drink and some fast-food and the TV remote control.
Time is just as much a resource as money and yet we still often struggle with the concept of paying ourselves first. Let me explain. When your income comes in each week or each month, if you will first take 10% of the gross amount and pay it into a savings account, before allowing the rest to be spent on the day to day bills, you know with total certainty that you will have one months income set aside in just ten months, two months in twenty months, etc.
You can recognise the sense of making an investment in your future finances starting now. With this being the case it is surely a simpler thing to invest in your own well-being, and to look at you and your own energy levels and see whether they are up and going up higher, or down and falling. But if I ask you to take your calendar and look at the commitments you have given to other people, what have you got in there for yourself? I am willing to bet that you have given so much away that you have little time in there for yourself.
You need to stake a claim for yourself and be in the place that allows you to nurture yourself and see your own growth. This is what I mean by putting yourself first in your diary.
At the start of this coming week, mark out the diary time you want to set aside for yourself and your values. Do this for the hobbies and activities you want to get on with, and on which you have constantly been procrastinating. There is no-one else out there who will value your own time as much as you can, yet you have to seize the moment and set aside that time as special for you. Do not allow someone else to dictate your diary after work hours.
If your work hours are not productive for you, or if the schedule you work is proving to be counter-productive to leading a life of success and happiness, then you have some planning to do and a decision to make about what it is that you truly want your life to look like. When someone wants you to give them an hour of your life and asks that you give away this time for free, be clear with yourself that such a meeting has value and is either inline with your own intended success or is instead an unproductive distraction. Where that person requests an appointment and you have no wish to give your time away, say so, but feel confident about simply saying "I already have a prior engagement" without feeling the need to say what else you are doing.
Start this week and make a planning appointment with yourself. Could you put thirty minutes each day in your diary that is just for you? What about sitting down and blocking out one day each month that is your day? You could binge watch a series, go out with friends, take part in a class. You could do all three in one day. The point here is to give yourself some time for you.
It could well be the beginning of a wonderful new phase in your life where you begin to see and to experience that you are really free to choose to do those things that you love and enjoy. This will bring you so much benefit that you will find doors opening to you and new people coming into your life with every wish for your best.
by admin | Aug 14, 2022 | Declutter
The place you call home is a special place because you intentionally chose it. Of course there may be a few exceptions where you were given no option about living there, or because you inherited it. Bummer! Seriously though, you did choose to rent or buy or move to this place which you call your own space, the place you live and where you have stamped your style.
When you stand in the front doorway of this place how do you feel?
On the first day you saw it as an empty space and before you started to bring in your own things, can you recall the emotions you felt as you looked around? It's no accident that you live here.
Sure, there may have been a round about way by which you made the journey to end up in this location and in this apartment or house, but this is where you are. Deal with it and accept it. Now you can truly make the space your own.
The place you call home is connected with all the other spaces around you and the world you inhabit. It reflects you by the way you store things there and by what you bring into the home. As your habits and collections and accumulation changes, so too does the mood and energy of the home adapt to this. Your space is a being in the sense that it is a happening, adapting, changing place as a result of how you, your possessions and your guests, visitors and family members interact with it. Even if the items in the building do not change or swap around for months at a time and the general energy of the house is low, quiet and close to static, you are still moving in the space, the contents of the food cupboards are constantly changing, post is delivered, new items from shopping trips come into the space and other things are used, finished with and removed from the space. In this most basic way there is subtle change each and every day, even though at first glance we might not realise this.
Your home is alive and existing as energy. You are not separate from your home because it is a part of you. It is a reflection of how you think and feel, just as much as you develop by the way you personally interact with the space that is offered to you. The rooms of your home are a representation of how you think and feel, a reflection of your own energy.
Everything in life is composed of energy, of molecules and tiny atoms clustered together as different forms of 'stuff'. Wood and plastic are different materials, but each composed of a set of compressed atoms. Oak, pine, larch and sycamore are all wood types, albeit with a different composition. They each have their own form of energy and this is what you pick up on when you touch the different things in your home. Add to the physical makeup of each item, the emotional energy attached to every piece of furniture, glassware, DIY tool, or art work, books, clothing and bikes.
Ask yourself some simple questions and listen to your answers:
- Which area of the home do you feel happiest in?
- Where is the emotional heart of the building?
- Which part of the house do you gravitate towards when you feel unwell because in this space you feel cosy, safe and cared for?
If your home is a place of harmony, love, hope and goodness, then it stands to reason that it should first be a place of sanctuary for you. It needs to be a space where you can be relaxed and completely yourself. For this to happen to the best degree possible you need to tailor the space you live to meet your own character, aspirations and to work with and support your own value system. This is where you spend your most relaxed time, where you are private and alone, as well as where you can relax with friends and with loved ones. A home is where you can be at your most vulnerable and most intimate. Here you can be completely true to your best you.
by admin | Aug 10, 2022 | Simple Self Help
You created these wonderful little people. They came into the world because of you. Take the time to consider the many wonderful things you can do to make their life a little better for having been here.
I don't care whether you are still with their other parent, and what happened between you along the way. To a large extent this does not concern me, except that it does as the father of two children myself. In fact I get riled when I hear people say that a single parent, regardless of whether they are raising the child or not, is of less value than two parents who raise their children together. You created a child in love and you have a responsibility, no matter the distance that may exist between you today.
Leaving an emotional legacy does not mean something that they only consider or discover after you have gone, though that in and of itself could be a nice thing for them. Instead I mean that your child would one day feel they know you better if you can tell them what it was like for you when you were a kid, that they could derive confidence and knowledge from understanding how you got through the tough times, which ones made you want to give up and how you overcame the challenges that allowed you to be who you are today.
Does your child know what it was like for you to grow up in the street where you lived?
Do they have any idea about the crush that you had on that other child in the second year at school, or the way your class teacher would tell funny jokes and make up crazy stories on the school bus when you went to the swimming baths with your whole form from school?
Have they ever heard the songs that your own parents would sing you to sleep with at night, or seen the words to that song written down for them? I know I have and I am so much richer for the experience.
What about the plays you were in at school or the friends you had in the youth club, or the choir, the cadet force, the community walking holiday or the summer camp, or whatever story you have to tell them?
Can you remember that time when you learned that the world was not just the place where you lived, and that there was even more out there than you had ever dreamed possible?
How about the time that your grandparents showed you some piece of their own history, and you sat and listened to them telling you about how you were a part of that history yourself? It could have been a photograph, a map, a medal, a uniform, a programme from a play that they were in or an ancient playground game they had enjoyed as a child themselves.
Take the time to get this down and shared with your own children because one day they may well want to have a sense of belonging to the family and need to tell the story to their own children.
I remember a walk in the countryside with my Dad Peter, my Grandad Tom and my great Grandpa Charlie. For years it was a sort of imagined color movie scene, vague and blurred in my mind. Then when I was in my forties and had two sons of my own, my father found and gave me a photograph of that day and made it seem more real and more special than ever before. It also showed me that my memory of those happy times as a toddler had been right.
Just writing about that discovery brings tears to my eyes again today, but do you know what? The fact that the picture existed and my Dad gave it to me in an electronic or digital scrapbook of family pictures meant so much to me and I have shared these images with my own boys, explaining to them who was who in each picture and hoping they may one day be motivated or interested enough to do the same.
So get on with it soon. Put that scrap book together for them to have something special to hold onto, to look back at and know where they came from. Include in it some pictures you drew as a kid yourself, a photograph, a few pages from an old school report, some stories about your parents and the places you have lived, a diary extract, a letter from a relative, or a joke from an old school friend.
Leave them with something that reveals more of you and allows them to know what a wonderful human being they came from.
Take a chance and spend some time simply being yourself with them. Allow them the chance to see the open, friendly, loving and caring person inside you and they might just remember that moment for the rest of their lives.
And always, always, no matter how far you may be from them, remember their birthdays, for the day they came into the world was then and always will be truly special.
Just like them.
by admin | Aug 4, 2022 | Declutter
In our current state of digital connection and constant online access there is always a temptation, a distraction away from the core values we once driven by. How many hundreds of times have you sat at your laptop or device with the intention of taking 10 minutes to connect and catch up before getting on with the core task that you wanted to focus on and to achieve for the day, only to find yourself two hours later, adrift in the weird world of social media and without the energy or perhaps even the memory for that quickly forgotten priority? Apparently, we can check our mobile phone as much as 150 times in a day! Yesterday I read an article which claimed we spend 2 hours and 40 minutes scrolling through social media in a day! That's just an average.
Everyone wants your attention, from Facebook, to Instagram, to LinkedIn, Spotify, and Snapchat. You receive updates from coupon companies, cinema promotions, local events, requests for a Like from a business, an invite from a friend who is starting a side hustle. Someone likes a Tweet you made, so you look at their profile and their feed for anything of interest. The technology behind the cell phone in your hand is far greater than a corporate super computer from twenty years ago. Each time you check a feed or a status update your brain gets a dopamine kick that serves your need for more points of data consumption. Friends of friends or even perhaps your own friends are - according to social profiles - leading lives of incredible ostentation, shopping, overseas travel and perfect family lives. Or so it seems when you click and watch, click and gawp, click and waste your time.
You have the ability to use online access thoughtfully and consciously, so why don't you. If you work eight or nine hours a day and come home to look at your screen while eating instead of connecting with family, if you lose hours every evening in wandering from one digital feed to another, then you can lose dozens of hours in a week. That same time, when used with deliberation and intent, can deliver to you additional free time for family, for love, for the accomplishment of your goals and for the investment of your energies into activities and hobbies that you love.
Spending time in these chosen blocks of time is what makes you who you are at your best, allows people to enjoy your company, and gives you that connection to the values you hold so important and which - if I were to ask you about them - you could reel off easily. What matters is not being able to talk about them, but having the ability, capacity and available time to spend your energies in such actions.
Rather than engage constantly with your screen take time to consciously look at the world we inhabit, to have eye contact with people as you walk on a street and travel on a bus or a tube. To look up at the signs and art and window displays and at the great kindness and beauty around us. To connect with people rather than pass them by without even realising they were in the same space as you.
You can create some simple rules for yourself, or guidelines if you want to be less dramatic or at risk of your own control.
Here are some practical steps to reduce time lost forever to the state I refer as 'device addiction'.
1. Switch your phone off for certain times during the day
2. Don't have it in your bedroom at night.
3. Have regular times when you are not accessible by phone.
4. When you are in one call do not put the first person on hold to take the second call.
5. Use voicemail as an aid to help you reduce stress, only pick up messages on a regular basis, perhaps twice a day or four times a day and not just because your phone beeps to tell you there is a message.
6. Have separate email accounts for different roles of your life so you only check the one that is relevant at a given moment.
7. Check your personal email just once a day. It really can wait.
8. Check your work email at certain times throughout the day, perhaps twice in the morning and again twice in the afternoon.
9. Use a footnote in your outbound emails that suggests the timescale within which you will review and respond.
10. Set up an auto responder to incoming email that clearly states your availability or lack of availability to respond.
