If you’re anything like me, and I know you are because you’re reading my blog, you sometimes resist making decisions, or doubt or fail to follow perfectly good ones you have already made.

Doing something about this can change your life, reduce the size of your bum, improve your relationships and get your home clean.  Yes, it’s that important.

I’ve talked about it before in this article here a while ago, and I have some more to say about it now.

Our lives are a series of decisions, and success is based on making good decisions, making plenty of them, trusting ourselves and following through on them.

This clutter and mess thing is like the chicken and the egg.  The external - our environment, is affected by what is going on internally - how we feel about ourselves, and is a reflection of it.  At the same time, our external environment influences how we are feeling on the inside.

When we feel lost, unmotivated, indecisive, down on ourselves and so on, this is often reflected in our environment, with things getting dirty, messy, disorganized and yuck.

It might start with a bit of rubbish in the car and a few papers laying around, laundry piling up, skipping exercise, and before you know it you’re being nominated for Hoarders and you have TV cameras documenting the state you’ve gotten into, (Ok, hopefully not that bad, if you do something about it now).

On the inside it starts with a decision.  

The decision to put off some task like the dishes, putting something away or attending to some paperwork will have been preceded by a feeling.  So where did the feeling come from?  

Is there an area of your life where you're feeling fed up, frustrated, or giving up? Perhaps deep down you know that there is some kind of fear holding you back.

Do your fear response mechanisms start to kick in when you even think about it?

It might be falling behind on a project (cough cough, aahhm...), an area of your home or office that's getting messy and dirty, goals related to your weight, study, or how you relate to your kids or your partner. Is it affecting your self esteem and even impacting on other areas of your life? Blegh!

It might be a small thing or it may have gone so far it's causing real problems. Perhaps it's something like:-

- Putting off exercising

- Over eating

- Obsessing with one activity to the detriment of other things that need attending to (for example your garden is perfect but you haven't changed the cat litter, or you watch a lot of movies but don't talk to your partner/kids/friends/parents...., or you frequently check facebook but don't keep up with your emails, or you go to the gym daily but your home is a tip, or you get stuck with computer games and don't cook decent meals......).

- A build up of paperwork stuff like tax papers, forms, bills, school notices and so on.

- The house is just out of control

- You never seem to catch up with the washing (laundry).

- Insert your thing here (actually, you can post it in the comments, or use the new Ask Yvette tab above)

 A little game I used to play with myself, to get past the old fear thing and actually say to myself what it was I really did want to achieve, was to write under the heading "things for the magic fairy to do" or "things to do when I have super-powers". 

The way each of us experience the world around us is unique and different from how any other person experiences the same things. This is important because our own individual representation of reality determines our thinking and our actions. Understanding this, and understanding that we have choices about how we experience the world and what meaning we give to our experiences, is vital to making positive changes for ourselves.

Information comes to us every moment of every day, millions of bits of information, every second, taken in with our senses. It's not possible for us to have conscious awareness of all the stimulus we are receiving, so we filter most of it out, noticing only what is "relevant" to us according to our individual filtering system.

The message here, is that there is tons of stuff we are not noticing, even though the information is all going in. Have you ever been

I've talked about it before, and I'll talk about it again, because my own calendar system is always evolving and cool new tools are always emerging.

Using a calendar is not just about keeping track of commitments you have made. It's one very important tool for driving your own life and keeping it on the path towards what matters to you. Be brave and fill up your calendar with fun things, necessary things, and things which will be unfamiliar to you but which you know will be good for you and good for the greater good. Your calendar can be a tool for stretching yourself. As we give ourselves opportunities to learn and grow, we are able to make a better contribution to our world. Yes, that's a bit deep, but it's good to look at the big picture "why" stuff as well as the fine detail "what and how" stuff. You don't just want to know what you're doing, you need to know why you're doing it.

To have your calendar or diary working for you effectively, you need to:-