Reply To: Exercise 6: 10 People Closer to Your Field
Method Initiative Exercise 6 – 10 People Closer to the Problem
1. A list of the advice from ten people relevant to your project.
2. An improved version of the project based on that advice.
3. A list of any referrals to people who could help.
4. Your reflections on the experience.
Problem:
Environmentally conscious adults who want to minimize their belongings are feeling overwhelmed.
Solution:
Help willing and open people to become aware of the root of their issue – inventory inflow. Begin reducing overwhelm by digging deeper into what may cause their emotional attachments to bring awareness to the physical way it is manifesting. After pausing or minimizing inventory inflow, help them to connect with resources for sustainably reducing their inventory.
Advice 1 – Do a quick google search on why people keep lots of stuff
Advice 2 – Figure out how you have conversations in a way that people don’t feel attacked or that what they’re doing is wrong
Advice 3 – Explore the idea of doing it in a group
Advice 4 – Have more conversations with people close to me. Do you feel you have too much stuff? Why? Emotional connections? Be cautious pushing people to go deeper than the coffee table conversation without being too pushy or too nosy. Approach conversations with a positive and curious manner and demeanor.
Advice 5 – Consider watching “I Will Teach You to Be Rich” – The host digs into their money psychology. He digs it out in a way that is really non confrontational. He sounds like a therapist the way that he talks to people.
List of Referrals
– None so far
Reflection:
This week was really hard. I definitely hit a speed bump. I reached out to all of my communities via my online platforms that I’d been proactively active in and came up quite empty. For many weeks prior though, I was simply executing the exercises for the sake of executing them, and I was unsure how to ‘iterate’ as I’d mentioned before. Several conversations with others though reminded me of the ease and difficulty of decision making. It’s been helpful to be reminded that there is no ‘wrong answer’ and that one must simply keep making choices based on their values. Acting in accordance with one’s values lead to a stronger compass that enables better and faster decision making with practice. Hence, the need to act and decide, even when running away or mind-numbingly acting for the sake of acting feels easier.
The slowness of the week allowed me to explore the advice of the one person I talked to. I discovered that accumulation behaviors are often tied to creating certainty for a person. Very similar to addiction. Trauma or something in life creates the uncertainty and then the individual finds certainty in something. In the physical realm it can be belongings. From a psychology perspective, people can even find extensions of their personality or identity in their stuff.
On the exercise itself – I’m coming around to the idea of continuously iterating and changing to heed the adage of ‘Try shit’. I’ve been reminded that
1. people are busy
2. people aren’t always free when they say they are
3. it takes reaching out to more people than 10 in order to achieve the 10
4. continuous follow up is super necessary
More to come once I’ve talked to more people!