Marie Kondo Your Mindset: Does Your Life Spark Joy?

7 min readMar 2, 2019

Marie Kondo needs no introduction. Her bestselling book,The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing, has sold over 8.5 million copies since its publication in 2014 and spawned a cult of organisation across the globe. There must be billions of t-shirts, sweatshirts, and pairs of socks out there folded to her exact specifications and tucked away neatly on their edges.

Netflix released a new series, Tidying Up with Marie Kondo, on January 1st, capitalising on an abundance of enthusiastic resolution-ers with eight episodes of the pint-sized powerhouse casting her magic over homes in California.

Each episode features Kondo skipping from room to room, exclaiming “I love mess!” and being an adorable tiny Mary Poppins. She is legitimately changing lives here, from making room for a couple expecting their first child, to helping a grieving widow release some of her late husband’s belongings.

The show has brought her trademarked KonMari Method back to the forefront of peoples’ consciousness, and has sparked thousands of Instagram snaps of perfectly arranged shelfies, clean kitchen cupboards, and, most importantly, drawers and drawers of neatly folded clothes.

What is the KonMari Method?

In essence, the KonMari Method is a framework for tidying your home. Kondo advocates for a category-based approach, starting with clothes and moving through books, papers, komono (miscellaneous items), and sentimental items. Gather together everything you own into one big pile, and get rid of anything that doesn’t ‘spark joy’.

You don’t start tidying anything until you’ve discarded anything you deem less than joyful. After you have thanked your items for their service and gently bagged them up, you give every remaining item a specific place to live in your home. This, Kondo claims, will mean you tidy once, and then you never have to tidy up again.

“The space in which we live should be for the person we are becoming now, not for the person we were in the past.”

Marie Kondo, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing

A crucial step in the KonMari Method is to imagine the kind of life you want to live, and then to filter out your possessions in line with that vision. For example, if you see yourself as an uber-minimalist, you can discard all of those second-hand books you never read, because they don’t fit into your life. If you’re more of a bohemian type, feel free to keep all those macrame pot holders, because you know they will bring you joy every time you spy them on the shelves!

This is a great method for deciding how you want to live your life. Do you want to be the type of person who springs out of bed every morning, greeting the day with genuine enthusiasm? Would you like to be a top professional in your field, landing major clients and wearing power suits with coordinating nail polish? Is your dream to spend your days in the countryside, writing poetry on an old typewriter with an adorable kitten curled up on your lap? (I’m guilty of that last one!)

**The first step is to start living as if you already are that person.**

Now, I’m not saying you should do anything major here. Don’t quit your job to move to the middle of nowhere when you have no savings! Instead, begin by making your decisions through the lens of who you want to be.

Would a corporate CEO show up to the office in scruffy jeans and the t-shirt they wore for painting the bathroom? (Quite possibly actually, but it doesn’t set the most professional tone, does it?). Aren’t they much more likely to look polished and put-together, wearing smart clothing and looking clean and well groomed?

While you might not be at the top of the corporate ladder just yet, you can do something as simple as dressing smartly for work. It indicates (to others, but most importantly, to yourself) that you take your job seriously, which in turn will encourage you to do your best work, to live up to the image you’re presenting. Quality work will lead to respect and trust from your colleagues, which will lead to more responsibility, which should lead to a promotion and a higher salary.

See how those tiny decisions can create a snowball effect?

By acting as if you already are the person you want to be, you will become that person. It won’t happen overnight, but if you consistently make decisions that align with your vision of yourself, there’s no way you won’t get there.

First, decide who you want to be

Do you want to be a wealthy entrepreneur? Live by the beach and watch the sun rise every morning? Do you want to be a marathon runner? An author? An actor? A singer? An astronaut? Decide what kind of person you want to be.

It can even be as simple as “I want to be a morning person” or “I want to live a healthy lifestyle”.

Take the time to go inward and really decide who you want to be. If there were no restrictions on what you could do and who you could be (which, let’s be honest, there aren’t! Almost everything can be overcome!), who would you be?

Secondly, visualise how that person would behave

Say you want to be the kind of person who runs marathons. How would you behave? You would almost never skip runs if you could help it. You’d probably eat nutritious foods as well, to fuel yourself for all the miles you’re running.

An author? Write before you go to work. Write before you go to bed. Write on the back of your hand on your lunch break! If you were an author right now, you’d likely have some work in progress to be getting on with.

If you decide you want to be a morning person, imagine how that would look to you. Would a morning person stay up until 2am scrolling Twitter? Or would they have a well-oiled bedtime routine to maximise the quality of sleep they get, in order to feel great when the alarm goes off?

You get it.

Thirdly, follow through on those actions

Numbers one and two seem quite easy now, don’t they?

In order to become the person you want to be, you have to actually do the things that person would do.

You want to make your first million before you hit 30? You better get to work. Act as if you already run that million pound business. Develop the tireless work ethic. Put the time in.

Things don’t change unless you do.

How to KonMari your life

Imagine applying the KonMari Method, not to your possessions, but to your lifestyle. Imagine heaping up all your habits, instead of your clothes. Visualise the things you do, the way you act, the things you say.

Discard anything that doesn’t fit your ideal lifestyle.

If your daily smoking habit doesn’t fit with the image of yourself as a super-fit gym bunny, get rid of it. Checking Instagram for two hours everyday won’t get that company started. Gossiping about your colleagues behind their backs won’t earn you any respect in the office, which could affect your progression.

Think about the result of your actions, and whether or not they bring you closer to becoming your ideal self.

Now, here comes the most divisive part of Kondo’s method: saying thank you to your items before discarding them.

I’m not fully convinced about thanking my too-small jumpers before tossing them on the donation pile, but I fully endorse it when it comes to your lifestyle.

Don’t chastise yourself for the habits that have not served you. Thank them, and let them go.

It would be easy to allow this inspection of your lifestyle to become an exercise in self-loathing. “Why have I let myself hit that snooze button every morning?”. “I should be meditating for 30 minutes a day if I want to be the zen version of me”. “Ugh, I can’t believe how much time I waste on my phone! I’ll never get this business off the ground.”

Stop. Breathe. Breathe again.

You’re right when you think your two hour a day Instagram habit isn’t going to turn you a profit, but that doesn’t mean you get to beat yourself up for it. Thank yourself. You’ve seen amazing photos, you’ve connected with total strangers, you’ve been inspired.

You are not a perfect person, because that doesn’t exist.

Thank the habits and traits that you don’t want to carry into your future, and visualise placing them into a bag, tying it up, and throwing them away. Turn your back on them. Only take forward the parts of your lifestyle that spark joy.

Does the idea of meditation make you bored just thinking about it? Let it go. Let the whole idea of ‘being a meditator’ go. Does Zumba really light you up? Pop it on the ‘to keep’ pile.

Life is supposed to be joyful. Discard anything that isn’t.