I like being organized.  I enjoy the feeling of knowing that everything is in its place and when I go looking for the scissors it will be where I left it: to the left of the knives in the cutlery drawer.  I like being organized, but I must have got the recessive laziness gene that didn’t manifest itself in my parents. Perhaps it skipped a generation.  The key to overriding this gene, I’ve found is communication, but the only person you need to communicate with is you.

I’m not advocating sitting on the bus mumbling to yourself, but I am suggesting you have a frank sit-down with yourself to think about what it is you want to accomplish and how you expect to accomplish it.  A notepad and writing implement are not necessary, but can come in handy to jot things down.

Visualisation can be a very powerful and useful tool for a lot of things in life, so why not in this area.  If you’re having a tough time keeping things organized around the house, then sit down for a few minutes a day and create a picture in your mind of what you think your kitchen, bathroom, storage room and the other less-than-organized rooms of your home should look like.  Sometimes it’s difficult to hold that kind of image in your mind for long, so try adding movement to the picture — make it a movie.

Walk towards your clear counter, towards the sink that has no dishes in it.  Open your cupboards and see how neat and organized they are, every pot in its place and every dish neatly stacked.  Move to the pantry and see the oils all neatly placed on one shelf and the cereals on another.  Move something from one place to another making the pantry that much neater.

Move out of the kitchen into the bathroom.  See how the shower door is closed and there are no towels on the floor.  The toothpaste and toothbrushes are neatly in their place.  Towels are stacked and there are no empty rolls of toilet paper around.

I think you get the picture — or the movie.  The idea is to see your home as you want it to be.  See things as they should be.  See things as they can AND WILL be.  All actions must start with a thought.  Your brain must first decide it is going to pick up that cheese wrapper  sitting on the counter, before your hand makes the move to place it in the garbage.  Visualization is just thinking on steroids.   See it in your mind and you will see all the possibilities, all the great things you can do to put things in their proper places.

Once you’ve visualized, once you have that movie in your mind of what your home will look like, it’s only a matter of making it look like that.  You know what needs to be done.  You have the before picture sitting in front of you and the after picture in your mind.  You just need to fill in the middle parts.  Yes, yes I know this is the part involving the work — but with the clear roadmap now in your mind and the powerful motivation of seeing the final product — the doing part will be that much easier.

Seeing really is believing.

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 1st, 2008 at 4:42 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.