Organize Your Mind, Organize Your Life. Harvard Publications Health

feelings will act like brakes on your forward motion. If it was an embarrassing or damaging incident that prompted you to pick up this book—whether losing your keys again or losing a job because distractions got in the way of performance—well, you need to put it behind you, starting right now. The past is the past. What’s done is done. Time now to take the lessons of what happened; apply them to tppen and develop a fresh, open and positive outlook toward the future. Here’s a little pep talk I give to my clients who are stuck on mistakes they’ve made in the past. If need be, you can use this “mistake mantra” to absolve yourself:

      I forgive myself for the mistakes I made. I’m not perfect—no one is—and I’m committed to learning and getting better. In fact, the past experience is my wise teacher, and I will apply the lessons well.

      Enough with the mistakes. Fredrickson has identified the most common positive emotions. Here are some you can work on:

       Cultivate curiosity about and interest in the challenge of change.

       Seek inspiration from others who have been successful.

       Be grateful for something, anything.

       Savor small moments on the journey.

       Enjoy the pride of doing something well—appreciate even small steps forward.

       Celebrate early wins. It’s very easy to ruminate on the negative. It’s less familiar to focus on the positive.

       Have fun. Making positive changes in your life can be extremely enjoyable. We don’t mean to make this sound like a lark; it’s not and your reasons for wanting to get yourself “together” may be serious. That doesn’t mean you can’t discover joy in the process of changing. In fact, you probably will!

      BUILD A SUPPORT TEAM

      It’s hard to change when your environment is working against you. A chaotic or noisy desk or office can be highly distracting. Or your spouse may be raining negativity on your time together. What can you do?

       Engineer support: Clean your desk or office. Ask your spouse to suspend the critique and say affirmative things for the next ninety days (after that it may become a habit!).

       Tell a friend or two that you’re working on making some changes and ask them for support, via regular phone check-ins or e-mail reminders. Find a buddy with similar issues and work on your vision and goals together and meet regularly for mutual support.

       Celebrate progress together for more reinforcement. That could be with a spouse or a close friend. Ask your children to help and encourage you, perhaps by cleaning common areas of the house so you’re not distracted. It’s so much easier to change when you’ve got a team cheering you on!

      CREATE A VISION FOR CHANGE

      Creating a clear vision of your ideal destination is an important early and ongoing step for your journey. Neuroscientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have shown that when people reflect frequently on what their positive future selves will look like, they are more likely to make choices in their long-term interest rather than shortsighted ones.

      Who do you want to be? What do you want your life to be like? What’s the best thing that will happen when you’re more organized? Let’s answer those questions.

      The first step is to accurately understand where you are now. Self-awareness is a necessary precondition for change, and so your first step is to explore what’s working and what’s not working when it comes to the state of your organization at home and work. Reflect on where you are right now, and look at it honestly. Get real but don’t beat yourself up. Appreciate that the past is your friend and focus on how it helps you go from here.

      To help you figure out where you are, here are a few questions that allow you to put a number to something that isn’t easy to quantify—where you are now and where you want to end.

      Now you have a better sense of where you are, where you want to get to (your target) and how far that is from the current picture. From Dr. Hammerness’s chapter, you’ve also begun to understand some of the factors behind organization (and lack thereof), as well as the things you need to aspire to in order to change that. Now it’s time to create a vision, one that inspires you and one that makes you feel hopeful and optimistic. As your coach, I want to help walk you through this “vision creation” process, which is specific and clear and can be enormously effective. We do it through a series of questions that we call a Vision Grid.