De-cluttering Your Space

Volume 1, Issue 3: De-cluttering Your Space

(Originally Published February 12, 2019)

What’s New This Week

Welcome back and thanks for joining us in this week’s newsletter in the Winter Hearth Epic Life Playbook! Valentine’s Day is right around the corner, meaning emotions may be running high across the spectrum, whether for better or for worse. Many of us have come to know the joys and struggles that accompany such a holiday, and if either of those happen to be you, this is the perfect place to be. Following last week’s newsletter on Maximizing Your Life’s Potential, the theme of this week’s content is “De-cluttering your space”.

What may come to mind for most of us when we think of “de-cluttering” may be something like getting your workspace or desk organized, tidying up your email inbox, or even spring cleaning around your place of residence. But, as you’ll come to find, as is usually the case in this newsletter, there’s always more to it.

When considering your personal “space”, there are many parts of our spaces that exist for us as humans, though some of them are often overlooked. Briefly mentioned above is the idea of your external physical space — the space around you at any given moment. There’s a ton of information on the internet about getting organized externally, but when we start to consider a person’s internal space as opposed to their external space, that’s where things start to get a bit more interesting.

What do I mean when I speak of a person’s internal space? Broadly speaking, some of the main categories of internal space are:

• Emotional
• Mental
• Spiritual

These ideas present us with the question, “How can we expect to truly ‘de-clutter our space’ if we aren’t aware that parts of the space exist?” It’s like the idea of a person trying to clean an entire house, but that person is only aware that one room in the house exists. They have no working knowledge of the existence of the other rooms — or the states that those rooms might be in — so how could that person possibly clean the entire house? We’ll explore these questions and more in this week’s newsletter.

As always, there’s plenty of content here, so feel free to just take what you need.

Listen

SuperSoul is an amazingly intellectual podcast hosted by none other than the inspiring, insightful, and emotionally intelligent Oprah Winfrey. In SuperSoul, as well as in the Winter Hearth Epic Life Playbook(this newsletter 😊), one of the main goals is to discover and connect to the deeper meaning of the world around us. This week I listened to Episode 101 of SuperSoul where Oprah interviews Daniel Goleman, one of the world’s leaders in research and understanding of the concept of “emotional intelligence” and author of the best-selling, “paradigm-shattering” (as noted by the Harvard Business Review) book Emotional Intelligence. There is so much eye-opening discussion in this podcast episode, so make sure you check it out!

One of the most notable things we have learned from Dr. Goleman is the depth and impact of the realm of emotional intelligence. Goleman describes emotional intelligence as the way in which we handle ourselves and our relationships, and he breaks it down in terms of 4 domains (in this video):

• Self-awareness — knowing what we’re feeling and why we’re feeling that way
• Self-management — handling your distressing emotions in an effective way and tuning in to them when necessary to learn what we must
• Empathy — knowing and understanding what someone else is feeling
• Social skills — the ability to use the other three domains to effectively manage and nurture strong, healthy relationships

During the episode, Goleman and Oprah also go in depth with the concept of empathy and its different facets. In total, Goleman notes 3 major types of empathy:

• Cognitive empathy — Understanding how another person sees the world and what their perspective is; Understanding what mental models and language another person uses to perceive and communicate
• Emotional empathy — Recognition of the other’s emotional state
• Empathic concern — Beyond recognition and understanding of another person’s mental and emotional state, empathic concern is feeling the urge to assist that person if they are in a state of distress (noted by Goleman in the episode as the “basis for compassion”)

The episode also hits on the relatedness of these three internal spaces- the emotional, the mental, and the spiritual. In terms of spirituality, Dr. Goleman says that in order to personally understand this space, we have to take the domains of emotional intelligence “up a notch”, citing self-awareness as the trait that we need to develop in order to help us tune into the state of our spirit and effectively process our experiences (which, as he notes, can be achieved through deep reflection, journaling, and meditation, among other methods). Oprah adds that it is crucially important that we be intentional in taking the time to practice these self-awareness activities if we want to have a greater, healthier, and more meaningful experience in life.

So how do these ideas help us “de-clutter our space”? In continuing with the metaphor of the person attempting to clean the house while unaware of the other rooms in the house, the first thing we need to do is realize that the other spaces exist. We need to realize and internalize these ideas in emotional intelligence and dig a little deeper to find out what we need to do to improve our own emotional intelligence. This episode is great for that, because the discussion goes into much greater depth than most articles or Google searches.

Throughout the conversation, they unearth many insights about the self and how we can “de-clutter” our mind, heart, and soul — the mental, emotional, and spiritual spaces that we ought to pay more attention to on a daily basis. At the core, these spaces are all intrinsically linked, and if one of these spaces is “cluttered”, that could bode pretty poorly for the rest of them, and especially for an individual’s composite health.

Check out the episode!

Guy Winch

Why we all need to practice emotional first aid

Learn

When we think of health, even composite health, what more commonly comes to mind may be the idea of physical health across the various systems of the body. If someone were to ask me, “Are you healthy?” I’d probably think for a moment about the last time I went to the doctor, the last time I had a cold, or recent aches and pains. I’ll be the first to admit that when people talk about health, I’m predisposed, perhaps drawing from my interactions with society, to think of physical health as “overall health”.

Thinking back to the metaphor of cleaning a house (you’ll feel like you know everything about this house by the end of this newsletter!), I briefly mentioned that someone attempting to clean a house without working knowledge of the existence of the other rooms in the house would reasonably have no idea of the states that those rooms are in. Once the person becomes aware of those rooms, they can gain access to them. Once they can access the rooms, they can finally assess the state of these rooms and begin to clean them up, working towards eventually cleaning the whole house. In the same line of thought, once we become aware of those internal spaces — the emotional, mental, and spiritual — we can access them, assess their respective states, and finally begin to work toward cleaning them up. We can think of the state of each of our internal spaces as that space’s respective health. Emotional, mental, and spiritual health(as well as physical health, of course) are all parts of our composite health that must be considered if we are truly looking to become healthier and happier, and to improve our experience in life.

In this TED Talk, Guy Winch, a licensed psychologist, advocate for psychological health, and author of the book Emotional First Aid: Healing Rejection, Guilt, Failure, and Other Everyday Hurts, unravels the concept of “emotional hygiene”. He explores the ways in which we can improve our methods for addressing the emotions that we all experience as human beings. The concept of emotional hygiene, (similar to the idea of dental hygiene, which most of us don’t go a day without addressing), is intrinsically linked to a person’s mental health, and he gives a number of great points on how we can practically “de-clutter” both our emotional and mental spaces. For more practical tips on emotional first aid, check out this article.

Level Up

This week’s Level Up section comes to us from the insightful mind of Dr. Jeanne Segal, a pioneer in the field of emotional Intelligence (not unlike Daniel Goleman whom we learned from in this week’s Listen section) and the author of a number of books on emotional intelligence. Her book “The Language of Emotional Intelligence” is one of those books that has changed my life forever. I read it for the first time in 2018, and its insights introduced me to many powerful ideas, giving me a new perspective on how I perceive the world around me and how I can better lead my own life (missed the segment on the power of introductions? Check it out here in last week’s newsletter).

Conflict is something that we as humans all encounter — whether it be conflict with another person or group of people, conflict with an idea or concept, conflict with a situation, internal conflict, etc. One of the most game-changing statements in the book comes when Dr. Segal states:

“Ironically, conflict offers us one of the best opportunities for improving relationships. When conflict ends in resolution, it stimulates brain growth and fosters safety and trust.”

Take a moment to let that sink in.
It takes fairly deliberate effort to successfully resolve a conflict, but when we take a closer look, each conflict really offers us an opportunity to more deeply understand the other person, group, idea, or whatever else we may be conflicted with. Throughout the rest of the chapter, Dr. Segal continues to explore the concept of conflict and how we each develop different relationships with it based heavily on the situations that we’ve encountered in our respective lives. Moving into the practical application, she notes the importance of the skill of “taking conflict in stride and resolving differences in ways that build trust and confidence”. So how does this work?

In essence, there are 4 emotionally intelligent skills that enable a person to take conflict in stride and resolve differences in ways that build trust and confidence:

• The ability to quickly reduce one’s own stress levels
• The ability to experience and manage one’s strong emotions
• The ability to recognize and practice nonverbal communication
• The ability to meet challenges with a sense of humor

If you’re able to learn these skills (which you totally are, because you’re an amazing human being), you will in turn have the power to:

• Stay focused in the present, untainted by fear or pain from your past
• Choose your arguments, recognizing what is worth arguing about and what is not
• Forgive others, realizing that “resolution lies in releasing the urge to punish, which can never compensate for our losses and only adds to our injury by further depleting and draining our lives”
• End conflicts that can’t be resolved, understanding when it is time to disengage from a conflict

This is such a great and applicable book, full of instructional activities and insights that you can use to concretely develop your emotional intelligence. The content extracted from the book here, as well as the rest of the content in Dr. Segal’s book, will go a very long way in helping you finally make those rooms spotless (remember the cluttered mental and emotional spaces in the house metaphor?), and keep them that way for a long time to come.

Photo by Toa Heftiba on Unsplash

Fireside Spotlight

In last week’s Fireside Spotlight, we saw a piece called “To Do or To Be?” which explores the nuances between the different modes of our existence. This week’s piece is a poem entitled “From the Heart”, which highlights the state of a heart or “soul” that has a deep story to tell. The owner of this heart has been through quite some hardship during their lifetime, and we as the audience get a brief glimpse into the state and story of this heart. Thinking back to the ideas presented at the beginning of this newsletter, see if you’re able to resonate with the story using any of the 3 forms of empathy noted by Daniel Goleman (cognitive empathy, emotional empathy, empathic concern):

From the Heart

Oh sacred, hallowed and hollow Heart,
Tell me, where lies your Truth?
Long gone are the days of blessed Hope,
And the days of your stainless Youth.

Where, now do you seek your poise,
Knowing Folly is not far behind?
What soul is willing to test its resolve
With a love so unrefined?

Dark dreams and devilish desires
Drip into the chasms of the Heart.
How shall we ever find our way out
From beneath the endless sky that thou art?

I listen as you sing to the moon and the stars
Your tender, melodic malady.
Sing, oh sacred and graceful Heart,
Your divine, undying rhapsody.

- Elgin Davis

Walk It, Talk it

Thanks again for joining us this week in the Winter Hearth Epic Life Playbook! Learning more about the different internal spaces has been very enlightening for me this week, and it’s my hope that you walk away from this newsletter with a greater understanding of those spaces and how you can use that understanding to take your life to the next level. In the words of Dale Carnegie, “Knowledge isn’t power until it is applied.” How can you apply the ideas in this newsletter to your life? How can you use it to gain power in living a more epic story? Talk to your friends and family this week about something you found interesting in the newsletter.

This weekly newsletter is a labor of love, so if you enjoy reading it each week, please share it with your friends to assist us in reaching our goal of helping the world engage more deeply with the human experience :)

Your Greatest Chapter Awaits

Until next time,
Elgin

Have feedback? Content you want to learn more about?

Feel free to drop an email to winterhearthstudios@gmail.com to get in touch with me, I’d love to hear from you!

Hey, I’m Elgin, and I love to create. I’m the creator of Winter Hearth Studios and the Winter Hearth Epic Life Playbook, a space where we explore the depths of the human experience, discovering the keys to crafting a better life and inspiring you to Live An Epic Story.

I’m currently a 4th year student at Harvard University studying computer science and design, and in my free time I love to travel, draw, read, and pursue bold, exciting adventures.

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