The Rational Basis® of Happiness Podcast

The Selfish Path to Romance. Download chapter one for free at DrKenner.com and Amazon.com.

What about clutter? Are you a person who has clutter in your garage or in your tool shed or in your closets or in your bedroom or in your office? Is your house just a mess? Or are there pockets in your life, in your house that are just a mess? We're going to talk first about physical clutter and then about mental clutter, because physical clutter contributes to mental clutter. But mental clutter is more than just that. It's all the conflict that's going on in your life. The two may be too much that you've taken on, but first physical clutter.

Now, recently, we had carpenters come into our home, and they were replacing ceilings. So ceilings mean that rooms needed to be emptied, and that made me come face to face with all of my college notes, with all of my high school notes, with all of my junior high school notes—we didn't even call it middle school back then—with clothes from junior high school, with things that I haven't gotten rid of yet. And I had to take a look at them, including all my old textbooks and tons of books that I've accumulated over the years, some of most of them without the binders broken, even though I read a lot. And I had to say, this is really troublesome. I'm face to face with all this clutter. What am I going to do?

I took all my clutter from my office, all of my radio notes that I've had from years and everything. I just stuck them in my bathtub. So now I have the bathtub problem. It sounds like a Dr. Seuss story. So how do I clean the bathtub? Well, the carpenters needed to get over the bathtub, so I had to clean it out. I took everything out of the bathtub. It was a mess. I didn't know where to begin. To start cleaning all of these papers from courses that I've written. You know, I've just—I’ve been very productive, but I haven't cleaned up after each project. I just move on to the next project.

So I just started to go through things and toss and toss and toss, and it became wonderfully contagious. My husband and I looked at our bookshelves and saw great books there that we knew we would never read. We haven't read them in decades. We put them in Rubbermaid containers and just took tons of books out of our bookshelves and just kept the ones that were special to us, and we started offering them to friends, and we'll bring the rest of them to a library or donate them.

So think about your own life. Where is the clutter? The first thing that you need to do is to do what I did. Hey, I got to interrupt this, because we've got to pay some bills. 30 seconds, that's it. A very quick ad, and then Alan will be back.

Romance. Oh, I wish guys knew more about what we want from a relationship. Boy, I wish I knew more about what I want. Where's that ad I saw? Ah, here it is, the selfish path to romance, a serious romance guidebook. Download chapter one for free at selfishromance.com and buy it on Amazon. Hmm, the selfish path to romance—that is interesting.

So think about your own life. Where is the clutter? The first thing that you need to do is to do what I did. Be willing to come face to face with it. You can always find, in quotes, more important things to do than to clean up your clutter, but it's a weight on you. You have to look at it every day, or if you have to get something important and you can't find it, it's frustrating. So first, you need to set aside time; you come face to face with it. Then set aside time to make a plan. Start small. If I promise myself I'm just going to work on this pile of papers, it's more likely that I will continue cleaning.

You have to have a plan. You have to have a standard of how to get rid of things. My mother and Laura always said, if she didn't use her clothes within a year, they were out. They were history. They were gone now, except for her wedding gown or some special items. But for the most part, you just get rid of things. If we didn't read books in decades, they're out of here. We can always buy a new book.

So you want to take a close look at your own life and have a plan. Put aside time, as if it's a date with yourself, put aside time and then make a specific plan. What is it I want to clean? When will I clean this? Where will I begin? How much time am I willing to commit to it? Focus on the positives at the end—the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. What will it feel like to have this room cleaned, or this bookcase cleaned, or my desk totally clean? Milk that feeling because you want positive motivation. You don't want to be motivated by duty, like a critical parent standing over you, saying you've got to clean your room today. You're not going out until you clean your room. You don't want that.

You want, "I can't wait to clean my room because I can't wait to walk in and to see everything orderly. My bed made, books on the bookshelf where they belong and not a whole bunch of paper scattered about. My bills all paid." You want to give that to yourself? So I'm Dr. Ellen Kenner. You're listening to the Rational Basis of Happiness.

A few words on mental clutter. You can have—we talked about physical clutter—you can have a lot of things just bopping around in your head, totally disorganized, such as, you know, what about my relationship? What about my kids? I've got all these problems. I've got to get a cake made for the PTA bake sale. Notice, the cake for the PTA bake sale is the one that will take priority because it's the easiest thing to do. Getting your car washed is much easier than dealing with a marital problem, but it all clutters your mind.

So it's the same type of skills you need: to set aside time, to plan, to think. That's the key. If you take anything from this, it's setting aside time to think about what are my top priorities in life. Jot them down. If the marriage is the most painful issue, what is it about my marriage? Not just prioritize, but get specific. Is it that my husband and I don't communicate well? How do you improve that? Do you want to put aside time for therapy? Do you want to buy a book on couple skills? There's a book on my website, DrKenner.com, that you could get to work on your marriage.

Is it your kids? Do you need parenting books? There are also books on my website that I recommend. But you need to get specific about what's cluttering up your mind. Is it that you're dealing with elderly parents and you don't know whether you're right or wrong to visit them as frequently or infrequently as you do? Those are the types of things that will clutter your mind. You definitely need to prioritize, get specific, and then move into action. Action begets more action.

So hope that helps. There's some kids who supposedly had some incredible special needs. These are called Indigo Children. There's one story that was in our paper, the Providence Journal, about a girl who had went to a birthday party and she wanted—she asked her mother if she could bring an orange, and the mother said, an orange to a Chuck E. Cheese birthday party? Well, what do you know? The birthday girl asked for an orange.

Now, is this just coincidence, or maybe the girl—they talked about oranges on the phone at one point, or does this girl have the power to see the future? Well, the mother who came up with or who's perpetrating this Indigo Kids thing came from a hodgepodge of faiths and beliefs. Her mother was a nun who left a convent to marry a Jewish father. She goes to psychic fairs. She co-owned an alternative healing center, and she gets a lot of money by promoting Indigo Kids.

So whenever the Indigo Kids are—some kids that supposedly have very high self-esteem, there are kids who are unruly, are impatient, won't take honor and guilt. Well, these sound like normal kids. The fact that they can see the future is totally, totally, totally bogus. Nobody has any senses that you don't have. They have the five senses. But parents who are incompetent, parents who are not clear thinkers, and who are con artists are promoting something called Indigo Kids, kids who have an indigo around them. They were born after 1975—that's all bogus. So never be taken in by these con artists.

And here's a little more from Dr. Kenner. There's such a thing as dullness of heart, acceptance, and letting go. Sooner or later, we all give up, don't we? Maybe you all do. It's my idea, the original sin. What is giving up? And that's from the Miracle Worker. That's Annie Sullivan, who does not give up on Helen Keller.

So think about your own life. Are there people who have been on the sidelines saying, you know, we all give up, don't worry about it, honey? And they try to make it sound palatable, sound good, that it's okay to give up on some really important dream in your life that's still doable, that you're aspiring to, but they say, ah, just relax, enjoy life. Well, guess what? If you relax and enjoy life by giving up your goals, I will guarantee you that you will not enjoy life. If you have rational goals and you give them up, you will feel the intense, almost knife-like pain of self-betrayal. You'll know that you gave up your goals. And you'll look at people who are pursuing their dreams, their goals, whether it's in hobbies, careers, or romantic relationships, and you'll be jealous. You'll be envious of them, and then you'll coax them, "Oh, you should relax. Take life more easy. Don't be so productive. You know, just sit back and smell the roses."

Sometime, you'll be telling them the same things that people told you. So never buy into that. It's your life; it's your own. It's your only life. And so make the most of it.

For more Dr. Kenner podcasts, go to DrKenner.com and please listen to this.

Here's an excerpt from The Selfish Path to Romance by Dr. Kenner and Locke.

Modern life is often hectic, especially for couples with children, and even more so for dual-career couples with children. It's nearly impossible to become sexually aroused when you are exhausted. A Newsweek article on sex and marriage told the story of Maddie, who had enjoyed sex with her husband, Roger, but her increasingly busy life—children, career, and so on—left her too tired for intimacy. In an effort to be romantic, Roger would typically light a candle in the bedroom, but Maddie told Newsweek, "I would see it and say, Oh God, not that candle." It was just the feeling that I had to give something I didn't have.

Sex was low on Maddie's priority list and had become a duty, an unwanted obligation. Being intimate out of self-sacrificial duty when you're tired is guaranteed to take the joy out of sex.

Download chapter one for free at DrKenner.com and Amazon.com.