Get Rid of "Emotional Clutter" to Empower Your Success

During the 30 years I've been working with people to help them reach their goals, I've found that one of the greatest obstacles to their success is "emotional clutter." Getting rid of emotional clutter is one of the fastest ways to empower your success.

Emotional clutter consists of negative emotions from the past, self-limiting beliefs, and the failure to enforce boundaries to keep other people's emotional clutter from spilling over into your life.

Negative emotions are emotions like anger, sadness, hurt, fear, guilt, disappointment and anxiety. These are emotions we often feel when we have a negative experience. These emotions become part of your emotional clutter when you hang on to them long after the experience is over.

When that happens, we often react to a current situation with year's worth of stockpiled emotions, leading us to react much more intensely than a situation warrants. If people tell you that you over-react, take a closer look at the negative emotions you may be carrying from past experiences. If you still feel angry about something that happened years ago, it is likely that your emotional clutter is getting in the way of your living in (and enjoying) the present moment.

Emotional clutter is also comprised of limiting beliefs. This is any belief that stops us or limits us. Usually they form in response to some negative experience, when we form that belief in order to reduce pain. Unfortunately, once you form a belief, it tends to become unconscious and out of your awareness. Even if the belief is negative, you look for evidence to make it true, even if that means ignoring positive things about yourself or your situation.

Examples of limiting beliefs are "I'm not good enough;" "I don't deserve success;" "I don't know enough;" "I can't do it;" "I'm a victim; and so on. A limiting belief can be almost anything.

Just like physical clutter piles up and takes over your life, making it tough to see what resources you have, emotional clutter keeps you stuck in unsuccessful patterns of thinking and behaving.

The limiting beliefs can absolutely crush your success, because you subconsciously believe them. They limit you from being all you are capable of being and keep you stuck believing that what has happened in the past will determine what happens now.

People sometimes don't recognize that they have emotional clutter, although they feel stopped by something. The negative emotions and limiting beliefs that make up emotional clutter can be difficult to eliminate because they are outside of our awareness. They are unconscious and operate very much like a computer virus, chugging away below the surface, messing things up.

Tackling your emotional clutter can help you get unstuck from the obstacles, emotions and beliefs from your past. It doesn't have to be a long process. The key is to begin to look at your emotional clutter, and be willing to let it go. nn(c) 2009 Linda S. Pucci, Ph.D.