Organization

Throughout my life I have been around many different types of people and many different businesses.  When you start to get exposure to different ways of life and behaving, it can really have an effect on you if your are inspired to learn and emulate what you see.  I have moments where I walk into other peoples homes and I am moved by what they have created and what they live in everyday.  It becomes common to them, but I always pay attention to certain things that my younger self would have loved to have that I didn’t.  I can actually remember the people and the exact moments when I entered a house and how the feeling I felt affected me.  It was never about how big the house was or anything about being wealthy.  While I am impressed by that because it is not an easy feat, and you can do much with that lifestyle shift, it was what the person did within what they had.

For many years of my life, I was so focused on my goals that I personally never paid attention or even understood that your personal space is not just a room.  I learned over time that it is an expression of how your mind works and what it sees and can see.  Your rooms are not just rooms, but spaces to create something that wasn’t there before, and what is In that space changes depending on who is living in the room.  Your collection of art, your memories, your style, and really your mind and how it works can all be seen and observed in your space. 

Again, I didn’t think this was a big deal because I traveled so much and was in and out of hotel rooms for months at a time for 8 years in Los Angeles.  I barely spent anytime decorating my personal space, I just considered it a place that I slept and ate.  I have been fortunate enough to stay in some of the highest rated most beautiful hotels in the entire world, and I remember I cried in a few of them as I opened up the window and looked out over the cities I was in.  I was so moved at what I was able to see and experience that I would have moments of pure gratitude that moved me to tears because my hard work put me in these positions to witness and experience something I wasn’t familiar with.  I am thankful of how I grew up, because it makes me appreciate any moment that I get that seems more “upper” class than I was used to.  And while I appreciate that upbringing, I don’t want to let myself off the hook in terms of realizing these hotels that I am staying in do not need to be temporary experiences.  I can create a life full of these experiences, because I know how much it inspired me to continue to create positive value for the world and even just within myself.  I am finding ways to do that everyday, and recently, it started in analyzing my personal space.

I will never forget traveling to choreograph a job in Salt Lake City, and when I walked into my friends apartment, it was an instant smack in the face, in the best way possible.  The apartment was absolutely beautiful and everything inside of it was well kept, insanely organized, and it was one of the most impactful moments of realizing I needed to pay attention to my space. 

What I didn’t realize was how much this was going to affect my idea of organization.  I thought that I was pretty well organized, and I am.  But what I realized was I was comparing my organization skills to people who weren’t as organized and creative with their personal space as I wanted to be.  And this had nothing to do with others, and everything to do with me.  It is not the judgment of how others keep their space, it was the personal responsibility of what I wanted to do with mine when this important realization clicked.  Of course I would seem organized in comparison to others who were not taking it as serious as I wanted to.  

When I decided to study the idea of organization, minimalism, and proper care of what I possessed, it completely put my mind into a new realm of understanding.  I then walked into peoples places, their cars, and realized it was a peek into their minds.  I realized if people walked into my space, it was a reflection of my mind and my abilities.  How well did I keep my space?  Was my car messy?  Did I clean up after myself when I cooked and ate dinner?  There is no right or wrong way to do this, there is only a way that you want to do it when you realize this is a function of how your mind operates.  I wanted to improve everything about myself.  I want my guests and friends to be inspired by my mind, by my space, and by my ability to take control of what I have the ability to control.  It is my personal realization of the outside that made me realize how profoundly this could let me express the inside.

While humans are unique, we are also very similar in nature.  We all know that we prefer clean over dirty.  We all know that we prefer organization to chaos.  We all know that we prefer interesting over monotony.  But these things take effort.  The difference in what is created is if we are willing to do something about it in our human behavior.  It is not about being neurotic and trying to have a certain image to other people.  It is about expressing the qualities that you carry within yourself so that others who think similarly, and want to be around certain mentalities, can identify what your mind is like by how you express yourself on the outside without a conversation.  There is no perfect answer to this, and we all go through phases of not having it all together, but what we do repeatedly is who we are.  There is no way around that.  What we do repeatedly, is who we are.  Not what we say, but what we do.  

Anyone can say that they are clean and organized.  But when you go into someones car and there are water bottles everywhere and trash everywhere, you might think that they just haven’t cleaned up yet and they have been busy.  Then you arrive at their house.  When you walk in it looks pretty similar, you then might start to possibly think about two things, at least I do.  One, they are not really clean and organized, even though they say they are.  Or, if they feel that they are, maybe they used to be even more cluttered, dirty, and disorganized than it currently appears.  Regardless, that thought process you are having, is occurring at the same time they are expressing their mind and their command over what they can control.  What someone does is way more exposing of their mind than anything they can say.  

A very powerful thought that has stuck with me since I learned it is “A change of belief is confirmed by a change of expression”.  When I really grasped how powerful this message was, I started to really look at how I was showing up in the world, with nearly everything.  Maybe it can do the same for you.  What it had me start doing was going through my beliefs.  What did I belief and how did I see myself?  Was I holding onto a thought of me that I did not want anymore.  Was I stuck in someone else’s idea of me?  Was I stuck in some idea that I learned to be useful at an earlier time but was no longer useful in my current life?  Was it holding me back from realizing certain things that I wanted to do and wanted to achieve?  Was my view on the world so different from others that I was missing my ability to relate because I believed that I had something so figured out that they didn’t.  All of these thoughts and more I put onto a piece of paper and took note of what I thought and felt.

Then what I did was review the ones that I now wanted to reject.  From there I asked myself what did I want to be like and this allowed me to create NEW behaviors in alignment with where I was going rather than where I had been.  A behavior is form of expression.  If I truly believed what I was saying and writing to myself and what I wanted to think and believe, then I had to see the results.  Results come from the action.  If I was just saying it, or thinking it, then I didn’t really believe it.  You have to actually see the behavioral change in order to realize whether something got through to your mind or not.  Without that, that is confirmation that it didn’t.  Maybe the seed has been planted, but it’s ability to shift your belief system wasn’t convincing enough. Because when you truly learn something and are impacted by it, it shifts not only how you see things, but what you do about it.  This is so powerful because this changes everything.  It allows you to understand that you have to put your money where you mouth is, and that if you are going to say and believe something, then you have to do that action in accordance.  When you do this, get ready, because things start to move in directions that you wouldn’t believe.  When you spend the time analyzing who and what you want to express and what it can do to help you in your life, you are now living through your ability to express, and this is such a beautiful feeling.  

Organization of your mind and organization of your external world are deeply connected.  Pay attention to what is happening and you might discover something phenomenal about how to declutter or how to create more flow.  They are more representative of themselves than you might have ever realized and they both influence each other.  What is on the outside is very reflective to what is going on on the inside and vice versa.  Taking some time to get structured and organized can help us become better at time management, stress management, and create a more “put together” version of ourselves.

The more organized you become, the less stressful and effective you can be in your daily life.