Imagine this scenario: you are going about your business, doing what you need to do and something goes wrong. Perhaps you didn’t finish on time, maybe you made an error in judgment, your actions led to something breaking, or you neglected to pass on some crucial information.

Or – worse even – you may have managed to do something wrong that cannot be directly traced back to you personally, but you know it was the result of something you did. Now what?

Have you ever been to someone’s office or home, pointed out an area that seemed unusually cluttered and the reply was along the lines of “Oh, I haven’t even seen that!”, and the person you asked had forgotten about it again in no time flat?

‘Clutter blindness’ is the term we often use for this kind of effect: somebody totally cannot see the accumulation of stuff or very efficiently has managed to purge it from their view by subconsciously ignoring it.

When you think of the ideal bedroom, what comes to mind? For many of us that image will include a large bed, lush window treatments with nicely draped hangings, beautiful subdued lighting, space to move around and maybe even a comfortable place to sit down or simply leave your clothes in a manner that looks like it came straight from a fashion magazine. Right?

Sadly, the reality of our bedrooms often looks rather different, with fluorescent lamps highlighting every single bad choice ever made in this space. Now what?

I recently worked with a group of other men and we talked about work, life and other things that touch our personal lives, and we ended up talking about things that make us afraid, that we would rather not encounter at all or any more.

I have come across that particular issue on multiple occasions in the past, especially in the context of personal development, but also when it comes to my own experience in emotional and sentimental matters. A particular phrase has cropped up occasionally, and that is the idea of ‘a place of fear’.

Once you have identified the spaces where you can hide your stuff from being visible all the time, another question remains: what should you do with all the small, niggly things that have come to light when you shifted the large stuff into those dark corners?

You may have come across all manner of items that you couldn’t quite make sense of, from that random collection of rubber bands, thumb tacks and hairpins to miscellaneous blank greeting cards, from foreign coinage to printed photographs, notebooks full of what appears to be useful and/or important information. Now what? Of course, you could dedicate a drawer to just those items, but then you would really just open Pandora’s box for another go.

Whenever the subject of clutter or decluttering comes up, one of the first things to be discussed is storage. And that makes perfect sense, of course: clutter is stuff and stuff needs to find a place in your home, and the reason for the whole discussion about decluttering usually stems from a very simple point: we have too much stuff to comfortably store in the space we have.

Some of us are more lucky (?) in that respect: if you are blessed with a huge home with lots of spare rooms, an enormous loft and a range of garages and cellars, ‘too much’ is not likely to bother you all that much. At least at first…

There is something to be said for self-indulgence: sometimes we need to step out of the treadmill that our lives occasionally turn into and take time to ourselves. Because if we don’t, we’ll just end up in a downward spiral of drama, possibly questioning anything and everything and we might end up depressed.

‘Self-indulgence’ is just another word for ‘unwinding’, but the latter expression has a much more positive taste to it than self-indulgence, doesn’t it?

Habits can be like a double-edged sword. If they are of the kind that serve us to run our lives more efficiently (dare I say more happily?), we should welcome them with open arms, or course. On the downside, if they hold us back, make us uncomfortable or are constant reminders of something we’d rather not be reminded of, we should really do all we can to eradicate that particular habit from our lives.

So far, nothing new, this is what living with habits is all about: identifying them as a good or a bad thing, and acting accordingly. And this is where the crux already starts – it’s not quite as simple as that! How can you tell a particular habit is a bad one or a good one? And are all of them quite so clear-cut that you can easily tell? Some of them may be super useful to have in the workplace but completely counterproductive in your private life, what then?

When I am working with clients, different questions and issues come up, but sometimes I find they have one thing in common: they find it hard to let go of some notion they have held for a long time.

“There once was a middle-aged lady who had trouble sleeping because she felt she never quite finished her daily tasks, and her household was starting to fall apart. The trouble was, though, that he felt that his job was ‘never quite finished’…”