Free Organize Your Mind, Organize Your Life by Margaret Moore Page A

summit shot you can findin National Geographic or online. Don’t scoff at the power of small “totems” to motivate you big time).
 
Make a list of the first five small steps I’m going to take on this project.
 
Reorganize my workspace. Not necessarily a complete, ergonomic redesign. Again, it will be just a small adjustment: I will finally move that stack of reports that have been sitting on my desk for weeks. I’ll clean off my computer screen. I’ll reposition my chair, so now I’m looking at the picture of the mountain I’ve hung up!
 
(This is less a functional change as it is a way for you to take a fresh look at things and to help rededicate this workspace as a place of action, confidence; a place where you are now going to start being on top of things!)

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    In the next chapters, after Dr. Hammerness explains further each of the six Rules of Order, I’ll show you how you can specifically adopt these principles of organization as your own. You can also adapt this sample vision grid and tailor it for your own use—or use it as a template to create a vision of how you’re going to conquer the organizational challenges in your life.

CHAPTER 3
Rules of Order/ Tame the Frenzy
    C ONTROL YOUR EMOTIONS OR THEY WILL CONTROL YOU” are the words of a famous Chinese proverb. We begin our Rules of Order—our first step toward getting our lives better organized and more in control—by working to better manage our emotions.
    We are human because of our capacity to feel and to experience an emotional life. But, right from the beginning, emotions can block the entrance to our path to becoming better organized. Emotion and cognition—feeling and thinking—must be integrated in order for us to function at our best. In this chapter, we discuss the remarkable neuroscience of emotional control and how achieving a balance of feeling and thinking is a fundamental prerequisite for the organized brain.
    Emotions are as varied as we are: the so-called “primary” emotions—anxiety, sadness and anger—are, like the primary colors, basic and inviolable. But just as on the artist’s palette primary colors can be combined into dazzling new creations, so, too, can our emotions meld together to form every hue imaginable.
    Because of the great range of feelings, some theorists have organized emotions around two set dimensions, each encompassing a broad range of feelings: valence (pleasant to unpleasant) and arousal (calm to excited).
    Others, like the famous psychologist and author Richard S. Lazarus, separated human emotions into several distinct categories. There were the “nasty” emotions (anger, envy, jealousy), the “empathic” emotions (gratitude, compassion), “existential” (anxiety-fright, guilt, shame), and those provoked by life conditions, both favorable (happiness, pride, love) and unfavorable (relief, hope, sadness, depression).
    No matter how you categorize them, emotions take many names and come in many forms: worry, panic, tension, stress, sadness, despair, frustration, irritation, exasperation. Emotions can be felt, and emotions can be voiced. Emotions can take the form of a sudden surge of anxiety or a frustration that grips us in a moment. Emotions can be experienced as quiet ruminations others don’t see. Sadness, anxiety, anger—the blue, yellow and red of our emotional color scheme—can be interrelated, can feed off each other and can take turns in disrupting your organized plans, your organized brain. To extend the artistic metaphor, these emotions can take the orderly hues and shapes of your life and make them look like a Jackson Pollock canvas.
    For those who feel disorganized, overwhelmed or caught up in a frenzy, those “basic colors” of the emotional palette are typically their root emotions. While we’re all familiar with them—perhaps all too familiar—I thought it