3 Ways To Declutter Your Mind And Start Building You.

Extreme Strategies For Rapid Results

If you want to improve yourself, you’ll need tough love at the start.

Extreme strategies.

The good news is, they feel great! They work and you get results immediately and then exponentially. Try these three for a day — feel good? another day, a week, a month — still feeling good? You’re well on your way to becoming owning yourself.

Remove Yourself From Your Social Group

If you look at your life and you’re not completely satisfied — with your wealth, your health, your relationships, your self-worth — it’s likely because you don’t really know yourself and you haven’t been working towards the goals you really value.

The beginning of knowing yourself is getting yourself away from the people who define you.

They are the hall of crazy mirrors that distorts your self-perception.

You have to find the exit.

It can be tough to get away from them because you love them and you link your identity to theirs.

In the long run, it’s best for you, them, and your relationships to get out.

When I was 20 something and just out of University, I had a group of people around me who I loved but needed to get away from. They all encouraged me in my bad habits — smoking, pot, drinking, egomania, arrogance, cynicism — and put down the new things I wanted to do to save myself from all that.

I was trying to be a writer whilst living at home with my parents. Writing in the morning, busking in the afternoon, planning a ‘Buskers Tour of Britain’ (which I was going to write a book about) in the evenings while I smoked, drank, and played computer games.

My parents called me ‘Howling Rob’ which referenced both the madness of what I was doing and the fact my voice wasn’t/ isn’t that good.

My friends were getting married and finding jobs and having kids and competing with each other to be the most ‘successful’.

The one who was winning got very proud and threw parties full of drugs and swinging and machoism. They all agreed that his money was the new idol and that I was just ridiculous.

‘He just sings sad songs all day.’ (a friend)

‘There must be something really wrong with you.’ (my brother)

‘Marriage and kids isn’t for you.’ (my Dad)

‘You think you’re some artist and we all need to follow you.’ (another friend)

They became closer with each other and I was jealous and didn’t want to let go.

I was splitting up with a girlfriend too (which accounted for the sad songs) and my Mum sadly agreed when I suggested that I’d never find another girl as good as her.

She was great though, that girl, and said, ‘you’re really special’ in a way I knew she meant even though it came with a but and a goodbye.

The Busking Tour went wrong and the van I’d bought had engine failure and needed to be towed home after a week.

‘Classic Robin. Howling Ro-’

‘No, Mum, this is just the way you see me! Other people out there, at University, in town, they respect me and like me and what I’m doing… it’s not how you say it is. I’m not who you think I am.’

The world fell off its axel and for a second Robin Emery controlled his own reality. The Robin who worked hard on his dream unlike any of my friends or family, the guy who’d aced his A levels and Degree at a really good University unlike any of them, the guy who was never going to give up — the guy they were all jealous of, the one who they knew would upturn the old hierarchies.

I don’t blame them, looking back. There was a lot that was ridiculous about me (especially my pot habit). But the main problem was my lack of confidence in myself and that came from the mirrors of myself that I was surrounded by — they wanted to keep me small and weak. It suited them.

They wanted this because they loved me and I loved them so I wanted it too. I wrote a poem that made me cry, thinking about leaving my parents;

‘Can’t you tell by this mold that I love

Love the past almost to death’

Mold — old love that’s not good for you anymore. That’s what you’ve got to get away from because no good can come of it.

I went to China for six years and started again, trying to listen to the only voice that really wanted the best for me. My own. Trying to find it away from all of theirs. And to find people who actually wanted to talk to me.

I still see them now but I’m careful not to let them define me in the way they once did. The one who was winning back then earns less than I do now is getting divorced, has gone silent.

All those loud voices didn’t come from confidence, more like hysteria.

I’d advise physically leaving the country if you’re in a similar position. But you could just stop going to the parties. Stop relying on those people as your mirrors. Challenge them whenever they reinforce negative ideas about you that hurt your growth. Have difficult conversations with them telling them what you want in your life and from your friendships.

Remove yourself.

Block Out ALL Conventional Media

The media is toxic. Think of all the traits of toxic friends — self-interested, no concern for your best interests, promote your bad behavior, make you feel small or jealous, seduce you for their own ends. All of these are the media rule book.

Yes, we want a better, fairer world — but the noise of media is a huge distraction that endlessly (and disingenuously) recycles these messages is a huge distraction to us knowing and working on anything.

Media messaging eats up our time and flourishes in our heads with tropical luxuriance. It starts to define us, very often as a powerless observer, perhaps an angry one, or a passive fatalist.

What we really want is to thrust ourselves into a new desert, a new distrust, an emptiness and silence in which we can start to actually apply our minds to the questions of our lives.

Some quick tips:

· Check your email once a day at a maximum and deal with issues on the spot

· Don’t read news online (research topics if you’re interested)

· Don’t watch TV or movies

· Don’t follow sports

99% of the content of these places are sales techniques and useless distractions. If you let your mind be guided around by everyone else’s ideas it’ll never have any self-respect (or take any responsibility). The 1% of good content is not worth the entanglement. The good stuff is in your own head, buried under a super-abundant growth of culture-crap.

I’m three months into my Medium membership and I absolutely love that here you can choose a daily intake of voices and views that speak to you and help you towards your goals.

There’s also plenty of books that are good to read. Don’t let your mind be dragged around media feeds. Be intentional.

Strip Away The Self

That twenty-year-old kid who told his Mum he needed more respect if this relationship was going to work didn’t really deserve respect because he was too much in love with himself. He was a Marxist, a singer-songwriter, a writer, a hippy, a romantic, a progressive, a dreamer, and behind the elaborate mask he was a slacker, a drug addict, autistic, hyper-negative about everything, arrogant and deeply insecure.

Nothing against the first list of identity badges per se, but for me, I couldn’t work on my character until I let go of my costume.

Wealth, for me, was theft. Success was unethical. Will power itself was a destructive force — how in the hell was I meant to get my shit together with ideas like that?

I used to wonder why even though I worked hard I never quite succeeded — I trained with the England hockey team but never got a full cap; I got one mark off a First in my degree; I wrote songs and stories that were good but whenever I played/showed them they were followed up by an awkward silence.

The reason was that my psychological blueprints set me up for failure. Deep down, failure was the aim.

Failure fitted my identity — it proved it! It fitted in with the media messages about my helplessness! It fitted in with the view of me my friends and family had! It felt crap but that was just me, wasn’t it? A romantic dreamer, too good for the world?

B.S.

A slacker too scared to try.

My ego was precious.

The shield behind which I grew, the sign by which people knew me and I knew myself.

Leaving it is tough because you have to admit that you are just what you do and what you say not what you read and think about — you have to take responsibility.

But how?

1. Drop your main habit — for me, this was guitar playing. a very difficult one to drop as my whole sense of identity was wrapped around it.

2. Stop consuming the things that define you. Stop reading the type of books you love, or listening to the bands you love, or visiting the websites you always go to. Whatever are the habits that make up your personality. Stop them.

3. Start a new habit that’s healthy and aims at success. For me, this is writing in the morning.

4. Admit to yourself what would really make you happy. Is it more money, better relationships, better health? Plan a conscious route towards those goals, trying to work on each one everyday. Block out time for them.

5. Stick with the plan. A new identity will emerge.

Last Thoughts

For a while there, in lockdown, the world stopped and you got to live without the voices of family and friends, the chatter of media, the hassle of presenting your ‘ego’. Was it liberating?

It was the extreme nature of the moment that allowed that freedom — to keep it you have to take extreme measures.

Friends, Media, Ego — they’re self-supporting — if you leave one unchallenged they’ll all creep back and control you.

You’ll never rise above your own opinion of yourself so you have to be very mindful about what’s forming that opinion.

Declutter your mind like a gardener pulling up weeds.

What do you want to grow?