Want to be happy? Take out the trash

“If you want to grow, you gotta let go” is the mantra of life coach Gail Blanke. In her book, “Throw Out Fifty Things,” she shares tips on eliminating the clutter — physical and emotional — that holds you back, weighs you down and makes you feel bad about yourself. An excerpt.

Introduction
Whenever people ask me to describe my coaching “methodology,” I tell them I use the Michelangelo Method. Inevitably, especially if they’re human resources people, they look puzzled and say, “What the heck is that? I never heard of it.” And I always respond with, “Of course you have. You remember that wonderful story of Michelangelo who, shortly after he’d finished sculpting the statue of David, was asked by a local patron of the arts who had been completely awestruck after first viewing the statue, ‘How did you know to sculpt David? I just don’t understand ...’ And Michelangelo, being a straightfor­ward, honest sort of fellow, allegedly responded, ‘Oh, well, David was always there in the marble. I just took away everything that was not David.” And that’s my job as your coach: to help you let go of all the extraneous marble; to chisel your way through the stuff, junk, and clutter — physical and mental — that stands in the way of helping your very best self move into the next glorious phase of your life.

Our lives are so filled with the debris of the past — from dried-up tubes of Krazy Glue to old grudges — that it’s a wonder we can get up in the morning, never mind go to work, care for our children and parents, and just put one foot in front of the other. And living in the Information Age doesn’t help, either. We’re constantly bombarded from every direction by flying debris in another form: the news, the media. On television, on the radio, on our cell phones, online, and in the air, we’re deluged with what too often turns out to be life marble — garbage might be a better word: all the stuff that’s gone wrong in the world, gone wrong in ourselves, gone wrong in our lives. Or could go wrong. Oh, I’m not saying we don’t need to be informed. We do. We’re citizens of a planet on the move, and we must know what needs to be done to keep it spin­ning forward. But we can’t move forward, we can’t move at all, if we’re locked inside a block of marble, largely of our own making.

So what can we do? It’s time to chisel our way out, to blast through the stuff we’ve heaped upon ourselves, and step out into the clearing. It’s time. Now. I’m not kidding. The arteries of our lives are blocked, and that blockage threatens our ability to be happy, to make oth­ers happy, and to play our part in moving humankind forward.

Look, I come by this urge to let go and to urge others to let go naturally: My mother was a Virgo. You should have seen her drawers. If she asked you to get something for her, she’d say, “It’s in my bureau in the third drawer on the left on the right-hand side, in the back on the very bottom of the stack.”

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And she’d be absolutely right. I’m an Aquarian. Oh, I’m not saying we’re the slobs of the Zodiac — I mean, I put things away in my drawers — I just don’t always know what things are in which drawers. And if you’re a certain sign, does that mean you’re going to have messy drawers? Maybe. Anyway, once when I was about thirteen years old, my mother threatened to turn all of my drawers upside down on the floor of my bedroom to teach me to finally get them organized. Thankfully, she didn’t actually do it. (And unfortunately, my drawers will never hold a candle to hers.) But one thing she was able to teach me was to throw things out.

“If you don’t know what to do with it, or where to put it or why you ever bought it in the first place, or if looking at it depresses you, throw it out!” she’d say. “Never keep anything that makes you look heavy or feel heavy.”

As it turns out, my mom was right about a lot of stuff, and the throwing-things-out rule was one of her best. Oh, and whenever she asked any of us to throw things out, she meant for us to do it now, not later. We called it her Do it now or oh, brother! mood.

So it’s not surprising that when I coach people, I always ask them to throw things out. And not just a few things; I ask everyone I work with, at the end of our second or third session, to go home and throw out fifty things. “And by the way” — I usually look stern here — “magazines and cata­logs only count as one thing. You can throw out a hun­dred of them, but they only count as one.” People usually look at me with both horror and annoyance. (But go ahead and throw out fifty things anyway — you’ll feel like a million bucks.) “Look,” they’ll say, “I just went through my closets and I’ve already thrown out everything I can. Forget it.”

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But I don’t forget it. Just like my mother didn’t. And not only do I ask them to throw out fifty things, I ask them to make a list of what they’re throwing out. Actually, it’s not that hard to get into the swing of it. Look, you’ve had that single earring for years and you keep hoping the other one will show up. It won’t. Throw it away. You’ve got all those socks with no matches. (I know, they were in pairs when you put them in the dryer. I’ve always wondered what happens to them. Do they pop up in someone else’s dryer? I don’t know.) Throw them out. You’ve got that single leather glove but you think it’s not right to throw away a leather glove; it’s okay, throw it away. You’ve got all that makeup from your old look. Toss it. And you’ve got that drawer in the kitchen. You know that drawer. There are receipts in there from years ago, there’s a bunch of change in there, and, yes, there are old dried-up tubes of Krazy Glue. And you know what else is in there? Keys. There are keys in there that haven’t opened up anything in decades. But you think it’s not nice to throw away keys. They’re heavy and make a clanking noise when they hit the bottom of the wastebasket. Never mind. Throw them out. Throw it all out.

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