from The Winner’s Circle with Lou Tice
How much unnecessary junk is accumulating in your attic? No, not the one in your house – I mean your mental attic.
Since we are in the middle of what many of us call “spring cleaning” time, many of us sort out and discard possessions we no longer use and give them to charity or sell them at a garage sale. But have you ever thought about how valuable it could be if you took the time to perform the same kind of mental housecleaning?
Removing the superfluous, the unnecessary, the destructive, or the outlived from our mental attics is a vital part of making room for new possibilities. I know one man who often says, with his jaw tightly clenched and a no-nonsense expression on his face, “I know who I am!”
But we can’t possibly stay the same if we are living creatures. Each surprise, each unpredictable turn, each new venture, produces the potential for new insights, new responses, and new resilience. A willingness to change is a prerequisite for openness to life. And without that willingness, we become stuck in our need for stability and certainty. Eventually, if we stay stuck long enough, we stagnate. We exist, but we don’t really live.
Is there any junk in your mental attic that you would be better off without – a grudge, a hurt, maybe an outgrown assumption? A job, an outworn “must” or “should,” or an old anger? Why not clean it out?
I had an interesting question posed to me, “How do you clean out all the hurts and go about this mental housekeeping?” Fair questions that deserve answers.
Hurts are the most difficult things to get over, because of the emotional imprint we add to the experience, and then store that memory in our subconscious. Each time we remember the incident or situation, we also recall the pain and hurt, which just solidifies the memory. Some people spend their entire lives purposely remembering old hurts.
It takes a fair amount of work to put those emotional memories into a different perspective, and a lot of that work is self-reflection. Asking yourself the questions, “What else might have been going on, that I might have missed?” and “What was it, inside of me, that caused me to react in the way I did?” Sometimes, those self-answers are more revealing than we expect.
The good news is that, while we are taking the time to answer these questions (and any others that come to mind during these times of self-reflection), we are cleaning out old mental cobwebs, dusting off even older memories that we may have buried away, under other memories, and illuminating our mental attics.
Self-reflection is like uncovering windows and throwing them open, to let sunlight and fresh air into closed spaces. The light allows us to “see” each memory in full with no shadows, and the fresh “breezes” give us a chance to change our perspective.
What we decide to keep or throw away is up to each of us. Sometimes, an altered perspective allows us to toss the hurt or the pain, and create a new memory of a new lesson learned.
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