Spring Clean Your Mind
When was the last time you “spring cleaned” your mind?
What……….never??!!
What exactly does “spring clean your mind” mean? Well, if you think about spring cleaning your home or your place of work, it’s all about having a good clear out. Getting into the nooks and crannies that often get missed when you just do a daily/weekly tidy up. It’s about paying attention to those items that have just sat there for weeks, months, sometimes years (because time really does fly by doesn’t it) and organising them into categories of “keep, recycle, charity or bin”.
I love organising……….I’m a natural organiser and I love to do this in my head too.
If everything around me is untidy and messy, my head feels this too. When my head feels untidy and messy, I can’t think straight. I feel overloaded, overwhelmed and exhausted.
Imagine going inside your mind and finding a ‘control room’. Only you have the keys to enter your control room.
Inside you’ll see lots of levers, dials, buttons, screens, volume controls, filing cabinets that when you open them, go on for miles and miles, treasure chests……….there’s a lot! And it could be quite dusty too!!
Take a moment to breathe and look around your control room. Is it chaotic or a place of tranquility? What do you need to change / stop / start / delete? For example, I have a ‘confidence’ lever. At the moment it’s set to 5 but I know it can sometimes be at a 10. So I’ll adjust it to 8 and as I do this I’ll notice how it affects other programmes I’m running. I’ll adjust those too. On the screen inside my mind, I’ll see a confident me but I’m not feeling it, so I’ll make the screen bigger, make the image bolder, brighter and I’ll turn up the volume to hear my voice sounding stronger now, and I’ll add movement and a latino beat to get me motivated. As I do this and observe myself, I start to feel the confidence now. My senses are congruent with each other. My thoughts, my images, the sounds, my feelings, all feel more confident now. I’ve deleted any negative thoughts that try and creep into my control room. They go straight into the bin. Instead, I replace them with a new dialogue such as:
“I feel good, really good”
“I do confidence, I’m doing confidence, I’m becoming more confident with each breath, this is me doing confidence, I AM confident now”.
I’ve hit ‘delete’ on the negative images of me with drooping posture, looking down and trying to hide away. The image shrinks down to a dot on the screen and then pops as it completely disappears. I then replace the image of me doing something I know I’m good at and it immediately boosts my confidence.
I could spend hours here in my control room making adjustments, redesigning and cleaning. I could also just dip in and out when I need to. As long as I do something, that’s all that matters and this is what makes the difference.
Have a go and see what you can do and notice what changes you can make when you take control of your control room. Just remember to lock the door on the way out to ensure no-one else can access it.
