Shift 2: Clean Up
by Charles Barnard
“You are not going anywhere until you have cleaned up your room.”
“I’ll do it later, I promise.”
“No, you will do it now, and you will play later.”
You all can associate yourselves with such a conversation I have no doubt. Short little sayings like, “put things back where you found them,” were things I heard often and sadly didn’t heed well in my youth. Some bad habits formed. Working with middle school students for nearly thirty years and remembering well my middle school years there is something about that age that makes doing simple things like cleaning up our rooms or putting things back where they belong challenging. It does not mean it isn’t necessary training. When we don’t clean up regularly, we begin to live in a cluttered environment. Cluttered environments are not good for us.[1]
Keeping your life clutter free is not necessarily easy for everyone and it does require taking responsibility and discipline. Clutter also includes our memories. We must keep our minds clutter free. The clutter of our minds that can have the most profound impact on our health and performance is the clutter of limiting decisions or beliefs and unresolved negative emotions.
Our brains are amazing. One of the jobs our unconscious mind has is to keep us healthy and one of the ways it attempts to do that is to tuck away unresolved negative emotions. Negative emotions do have a purpose and a lesson for us to learn, but we are not always ready to learn that lesson and process it at the time of the experience so they get stored in our memories. It is especially true of young children who are not yet old enough or mature enough to learn the lesson behind the emotion and event. What ends up occurring is a chain of like negative emotions, a gestalt, forms. These emotions from earlier memories will often pop up at seemingly odd times and that is our brain’s way of letting us know we still haven’t processed this event and filed away the lesson that needed to be learned. These stored up negative emotions is clutter that interferes with our ability to be at our best. We need to clean it up.
Besides the negative emotions we also make decisions about what we believe we can and cannot do. Decisions that limit us can truly cripple our human potential. The decisions are generally rooted in an event that would be prior to age of seven. Similarly to emotions, decisions are made about what we believe and we then attach other limiting beliefs to those and create clutter. Let me describe an experiment I often use to illustrate.
Scientists placed fleas in an uncovered petri dish. The fleas were easily able to jump out of the uncovered dish. They then put the fleas back in the petri dish and this time covered it. The fleas repeatedly jumped and hit the cover. Over a period of time the fleas stopped jumping as high. When the scientists removed the cover, the fleas were no longer able to jump out of the petri dish.
The story of Roger Bannister also illustrates the point. Running a mile in under 4 minutes was long thought to be humanly impossible. People tried but no one could break that barrier. Then on May 6, 1954 a twenty-five year old British medical school student did the impossible. He ran a sub-four minute mile. On June 21, 1954 John Landy broke Bannister’s record. His record held for only three years. Once Bannister broke the barrier on what some thought was impossible, it became believable so others were able to do it too.
Limiting beliefs may be associated with negative emotions such as fear. Regardless they need to be cleaned up.
Let me give you two case studies to show the power cleaning up your memories. While both people were athletes the cleaning up impacted one person’s athletic performance while the other’s academic performance improved dramatically.
Mark was a very talented high school baseball player who had the size and arm to have played at some of the smaller division 1 baseball programs. He ended up at a good D3 baseball program at a good college in his home state. The college coach was obviously very happy to have a D1 talented pitcher on his roster. Expectations were high for Mark his freshman year. Mark would live up to those expectations for about six or seven innings and then he would implode. For two years this happened and it impacted Mark on the field, in the clubhouse, and in the classroom.
Once Mark cleaned up his past and dealt with a significant limiting decision he had made at the age of six, yes, six, and addressed negative emotions such as fear and frustration, Mark freed himself of obstacles that were interfering with his performance and mental health. When you are experiencing stress, you can’t access your full potential which causes more stress. You can see the negative cycle. With those obstacles removed, Mark was able to let his talent take over and the late inning implosions disappeared. He became the pitcher of the year in his conference for the last two years of his college career.
The other athlete was a track athlete who struggled in the classroom, particularly in math. He believed he was “dumb” in math and couldn’t understand math. Once he took responsibility for where he was at and cleaned up the limiting beliefs and negative emotions, he was freed up to begin learning math. In a two year period, he went from the 10% percentile in a nation-wide normed math test to the 50% percentile and in one year improved two grade levels in math. Once he had taken responsibility and cleared up his past he was ready to make the third shift – applying HEAT.
[1] Sander, Libby. “What Does Clutter Do to Your Brain and Body?” NewsGP, Royal Australian College of General Practitioners, www1.racgp.org.au/newsgp/clinical/what-does-clutter-do-to-your-brain-and-body. Accessed 25 Jan. 2019.
