Marie Kondo Your Life: Does it Spark Joy?
“Does it spark joy?”
The calling card of Marie Kondo, the Queen of decluttering who swept the world by storm (pun intended) with her book “The life-changing magic of tidying up”. Kondo created the KonMari Method, which is her minimalism inspired approach to decluttering your house to (re)discover items that ‘spark joy’.
I read the book and decluttered, minus her famous folding method of clothes — I just can’t bring myself to go that far. The book and method definitely helped and though I have a way to go in terms of living a minimalistic life, it has made me question my shopping habits and take care and pride of the space we have.
But more so, while I was decluttering my wardrobe, I couldn’t help but wonder — what if this was more a philosophy to take to life at large?
On Kondo’s own website, it says –
“The goal of tidying is to make room for meaningful objects, people and experiences.”
Wouldn’t we all like more meaningful people and experiences in our lives (let’s forget the objects for now)? Life will always have its challenges but isn’t the aim to have more joy?
In a world where we are continually over-stimulated and consumerism seems to be the new religion, perhaps decluttering our lives is one of the most powerful tools we can use to regain peace and space for the things that matter.
Bring on the joy!
Marie Kondo Your Mind
The mind. A weird, wonderful, wily and wicked place. Everything and I mean everything, starts with our mind — hence, with our thoughts. Whether we are aware of it or not, our minds are constantly buzzing in the background with thousands of thoughts per day; even more interestingly, studies have shown that our mental chatter is more than 70% negative and up to 95% of the thoughts we have are repetitive. Now stop and read that again. Isn’t that crazy? Our mind is so powerful and yet many of us pay little-to-no attention to it.
This process is illustrated best by one of my favourite quotes, Lao Tzu —
Watch your thoughts; they become words.
Watch your words; they become actions.
Watch your actions; they become habit.
Watch your habits; they become character.
Watch your character; it becomes your destiny.
So, the quality of our existence rests largely on the quality of our thoughts.
Does it spark joy?
Unfortunately, unpacking our mind is not as simple as pulling everything out of our wardrobe; a more committed, ‘in it for the long-haul’ kinda process is required. So, how do we Marie Kondo our mind?
Awareness is the first step.
We foster awareness by first paying attention to our thoughts and then the next step is curiosity, we get curious about things that arise and ask ourselves — “does it spark joy?” or more like a whole range of questions which sound like — where is this coming from, why do I feel like this, is it true, does this thought make me feel good, is it helpful or damaging, would I talk to my best friend like this? The type of questions we need to ask, depend on the complexity of the thought. But the simple act of flexing our muscles of awareness and curiosity, eventually begin to make this process easier.
This isn’t where I say — ‘just replace the negative thought with a positive one’ either. That is some Pollyanna false positivity bullshit. Yes, I am an optimistic person and think positive mantras can be helpful but more for the superficial stuff like switching “I am not a morning person” to “I AM a morning person”. Even still, the positive mantra is not enough, it needs to be followed up with action — the action then reaffirms the thought, the thoughts reaffirm the action and there you have it, a beautiful upward spiral that may even rewire the brain.
However, not every situation can be fixed with a positive mantra, for the bigger topics like self-worth, love, health, wealth, trauma… it is gonna take a little (or a lot) more work.
What if I altered the above statement slightly to “I am not a morning person because I am useless”. Putting a positive spin on this won’t shift the very heavy statement “I am useless”. That last part will require some work, it is a more deep-seated thought (belief). You see, we cannot simply replace these sorts of thoughts with positive mantras without taking time to get to the root of the reoccurring negative thought, otherwise it can be just as damaging — think suppression, avoidance, bottling it up ’til we breakdown kinda stuff.
Note: I also don’t like the term ‘negative thoughts’, I believe it is healthy to have some negative thoughts — they often point to an area we are struggling with or need to heal. But for the sake of ease, I’ll stick with the term.
Once we start to ‘unpack’ a negative thought, curiosity and compassion are key. Curiosity — why do I feel this way; compassion — it’s ok to feel this way.
So, with awareness, curiosity and compassion, we can start to Marie Kondo our thoughts, declutter our mind and hopefully create more space for joy — with thoughts that align with the person we want to be and the life we want to live. Thoughts — actions — habits — character — destiny. Boom.
Marie Kondo your to-do list
Busyness may just be the modern-day badge of honour but busy doesn’t necessarily equate to productive nor — healthy, grounded, happy, content…
“How are you?”
“Busy”, we respond proudly.
With the constant barrage of messages about ‘the hustle’ and modern society’s narrow definition of success, it’s no wonder most of us take on board more than we need or can handle. Think of it like an overflowing wardrobe, coupled with a compulsion to buy and maxing out credit cards to do so. Many of us take on too much and end up in an emotional and physical deficit. Then, naturally, we begin to feel overwhelmed, anxious frustrated or even angered by these obligations.
How do we declutter our stacks of obligations and reduce our never-ending to-do list?
Performance coach and author Brad Stulberg gives a 3-step method in his editorial for Outside –
1. List your core values or three to five things that matter most to you. These are the guiding principles in your life.
2. Take a rough inventory of how you spend your time and energy on an average day. If you can’t come up with an “average” day, just look back to the past week or two. What percentage of your time and energy is spent on activities that align with your core values? Which of the activities that do not align with your core values can you reasonably cut?
3. For every new opportunity that comes your way, ask yourself: “If I say yes to this, to what am I saying no?” This is a powerful question. It makes trade-offs highly apparent and helps you avoid getting overwhelmed by the acute excitement of taking on something new.
Unlike the KonMari method, we cannot simply trash everything that doesn’t spark joy in relation to our obligations but we can begin to prioritise how and where we spend our energy. I often come back to this 3-step method, the only thing I would add is that it doesn’t necessarily have to be ‘core values’ if this feels too hard to distil. More often, I refer to goals — my short-term and long-term goals. If on average, my daily actions aren’t working towards some of my goals, then I need to make some serious changes.
Often, the actions we need to take towards our goal, don’t in themselves spark joy at the time — i.e. getting up early feels miserable in the moment but good feelings come later when we achieve what we wanted. So, knowing that we are taking some small step towards a larger goal is what sparks joy. Many studies, including the much-quoted Stanford ‘Marshmallow Test’, show a high correlation between being able to delay instant gratification and success; i.e. can you sacrifice pleasure right now to work towards a greater goal or value?
I am sure we all have a lot of things on our to-do list, or actions we are taking on a daily basis that aren’t absolutely necessary and don’t bring us lasting joy. What can we cut?
I also love the question “If I say yes to this, to what am I saying no?” This part is like the KonMari method because once you’ve minimised your wardrobe let’s say, you aren’t supposed to add to it unless you also remove something. This is so powerful in our daily lives because we can all get excited by the prospect of saying yes; taking on a new project, helping a friend, we get a boost when we say yes but, when you add “what am I saying no to”, it adds more weight to the decision and makes us realise that our time and energy is finite. There is always a trade-off and more often than not, the trade-off is the things that are important to us — time with friends, health, emotional well-being, self-improvement, working on our own business.
When posed like this, we learn to place greater value and importance on our own goals and values, which in the long run will spark some serious joy!
Marie Kondo your relationships
In ‘The Compound Effect’, Darren Hardy writes –
“According to research by social psychologist Dr. David McClelland of Harvard, [the people you habitually associate with] determine as much as 95% of your success or failure in life.”
That’s huge! Or to put it another way, in the words of motivational speaker Jim Rohn –
“You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.”
So, do the people we spend time with, spark joy do they make us feel good, uplift us, support us, push us to be better?
If the answer is no, this should be a no-brainer… MOVE AWAY from them. We don’t necessarily need to trash all of these relationships but we can be more selective with our time or put in place necessary boundaries to ensure that we get the most out of our relationships.
Not everyone deserves a spot in your blanket fort!
Being an expat in a foreign country has been challenging to say the least. I essentially had to start from scratch and as hard as that process was, it was also an opportunity to break out of old habits and consciously create the kind of life I want to live, which includes who I want to give my time to. It’s taken time but now, the people in my circle definitely spark joy — they uplift, support and motivate me to be better. Working on yachts, my time is limited as it is, so the time I do have, I cherish. I ain't got time for bullshit — gossip, negative competition/comparison or energy vampires. And either do you.
Marie Kondo your friend list, I guarantee it’ll make the world of difference.
Voila, you have just done a super-charged Marie Kondo for your life!
And this, my friends, is how to Marie Kondo your life.
I am sure there are many more aspects of life that I could write about but this seems like a solid place to start. As I’ve said throughout, I’m also not promoting trashing EVERYTHING that doesn’t spark joy either; some obligations and people can’t be avoided and we will never completely dispel negative thoughts — BUT, some things can be tweaked, altered or adjusted to spark joy, like boundaries with friends or a new attitude towards a necessary obligation.
Just the simple act of paying more attention to the major areas of our lives can put everything into better focus and allow us to take more control of our lives — rather than just letting life happen.
This thing called life we have is short and precious, shouldn’t it be as fucken spectacularly joyful as possible (in whatever way that means to you)?!