How to Declutter Your Room
So, you’re trying to work out how to declutter your room in the best and most efficient way possible. I often get questions of this nature by email or in talks about the decluttering or organising of a particular room or space, and I’d love to share my thoughts with you today.
Decluttering your room and getting tangible results depends on, to some extent, the type of room. Every room has its own layout and size. Different rooms have, of course, different functions, and therefore different challenges. Each room may be inhabited by a varying mix of people of varying ages and with varying lifestyle needs and personal, if not contrasting, tastes. A mix of organisational systems and storage solutions is adopted in each of these individual rooms.
Where we can miss the point
I have to say though, in the focusing on some of these more practical considerations when decluttering a room, we unfortunately often miss the point. Some examples of this include our quests to find the latest organisational tips or the best-reviewed storage solutions for a particular space. In getting caught up in the finer detail of the functional aspect of decluttering any room, the worry is that what really counts eludes us.
Over time, if you feel you haven’t mastered how to declutter your room you can lose confidence in your own opinions and come to rely on family, friends or experts to continually guide you. Although we all have the ability to make decisions and to determine what’s right for us, somewhere along the way we have sadly forgotten our wise intuition and the value of listening to ourselves. Part of this is our fear of making mistakes in our decluttering. But our biggest fears are always really about how we’d cope if something happened, rather than the thing actually happening itself, if that makes sense.
The worst case
I find when we can step into Worst Case Scenario for the briefest moment, we get to try on the energy of our greatest fears and feel them for just a second. In doing this, we usually recognise very quickly that we’d be able to cope if they became manifest. So, we’d be able to cope if we thought we’d made a mistake with our decluttering and gotten rid of something we felt we shouldn’t have. This Worst Case Scenario technique is an exercise I’ve used a lot personally and with clients and students, and it really does work in flipping the powerful subconscious mind and helping us break through a block.
Of course, that’s not to say that we don’t need some help along the way in learning the information, skills and mindset to enable us to declutter each room. But the help you get in learning how to declutter your room or home should be focused be on educating and empowering you to trust in your own decision-making from that point forward.
How to declutter your room and win
If we don’t feel good in a room, we need to work out why. Only we ourselves can know this. We tend to seek logical information in its simplest and most stripped-down form. Satisfying the analytical left brain is the nature of being human. But as how we feel is often the furthest from logic, we usually don’t understand or give weight to the emotional aspect of decluttering.
The trick with decluttering your room is in identifying what’s no longer serving you or weighing you down in a space. Are the photos in your living room making you sad? Are the clothes with tags in your bedroom on making you feel guilty? Is the paperwork in your office making you feel overwhelmed? Learning how to declutter your room is about first overcoming any unhelpful emotions before you start into the physical decluttering process – only this is what guarantees freedom and relief, or real results.
Find out about my The Declutter Academy if you want to learn how to be a professional organizer or even just master your own decluttering so you can transform every part of your living space and life.
