Out of Chaos an organizing newsletter

Unsticking

Sometimes we are just stuck. We can’t lose that 5-pounds, or establish that journal writing habit, we keep staying up with Netflix instead of going to bed early so we can go to the gym in the morning.  Or we just can’t seem to deal with the piles of papers growing on our desk.

There are a lot of ways to tackle getting unstuck.

Sometimes you can change your perspective, like if you decided to forget about losing weight and just tried to concentrate on eating healthfully instead. Or lower the bar, like changing your journal writing goal from: 3 pages first thing in the morning to: pen to paper everyday.  You might decouple your desire to go to bed earlier from needing to go to the gym and decided that just going to bed early is a win. Shake it up. Go sideways like a crab. Anything is better than nothing.

Another strategy is to ask for help. Ask a friend to come over and just sit with you while you tackle the pile of paper. (Or hire an organizer.) By asking for help you have committed yourself to sitting down and starting. And honestly, that is the hardest part. One of the things I love about Yoga with Adrienne, is that she frequently says: “You are here, on the mat, the hardest part is over” which feels true.

Or break it down into tiny steps. Maybe you are thinking you need to redo your entire pantry but it is daunting. You’ve imagined you need to pull everything out, wipe down the shelves, check the expiration dates, put things back in a better order. Maybe just start with a shelf. See how it goes, maybe it’ll be easier than you thought and you’ll do more. Or maybe you’ll decide you can just do one shelf a day. Either way, you are unstuck.

The dread and resistance we build up around certain things sometimes seems out of proportion to the actual task. It has been my experience, both personally and in my work, that once people start, whatever it is, it isn’t as hard as they thought.  I tell my workshop participants to spend 10-minutes a day on the area they are working on. Often, they report that once they started they were on a roll and spent much longer, but it always helped the counter resistance to remind themselves: “Just 10-minutes”.

So, lower the bar, change your perspective, break it down into teensy-tiny steps. We don’t have to do it all today, or perfectly, but we’ll feel better if we do something.