H.J. Rangas

Tips to Organize Your Wardrobe

Tips to Organize Your Wardrobe

Reading Time: 2 minutes

We all need our clothes, shoes and bags for our daily work but we don’t need all of them all the time. The changing seasons also means that we use a different set of our wardrobe for a different season. Here are 5 tips to organize your wardrobe. An organized wardrobe keep your stuffs in order and keep clutter at bay.

1. Store Off Season Clothes

If it’s summer don’t keep clothes for cold season on the rack or on your shelves. Store them away so you can keep them clean and not have to pick them up on the floor every time you’re choosing what to wear. This keeps them in good condition and saves space in your closet. You can then take them out when it’s the season to wear them and store the previous season’s clothes away.

2. Organize Your Closet

Sort your clothes and decide what organizers you need and what your closet or cabinet allows. For example, if your closet has a hanging rod but you want more shelving, then you can buy hanging shelving to store clothes you don’t want stretched out on hangers. You can do the same for bags and other accessories

3. Use a Garment Rack

To clear more space in your closet, use a garment rack to hang clothes you use most of the time such as your favorite jacket, blazer or shawl; your go-to jeans and blouse, etc. You can also hang your favorite accessories here such as your fave scarf, hat, sunglasses, handbag, etc. The floor space can be used to line up your shoes too.

4. Organize Your Accessories

Gather your accessories and sort them out. Do you have a lot of bracelets or watches? You can DIY an accessory organizer customized to your collection so you can easily display them on your dresser or DIY separators to organize them neatly in your drawers. You can also DIY or purchase a jewelry organizer that you can hang in your closet or on a wall to save more space. You can also hang your scarves and belts for easier access. This makes it easier to see what you have so you can easily decide what to use.

5. Display Your Shoes

If you have the wall space, use tension rods to display your shoes or get shoe organizers the you can hang on your door. This means you don’t have to go thru boxes each time you need to select what shoes to wear with your outfit.

These quick tips to organize your wardrobe might take some work but it’s all worth it. If you can see what clothes and accessories you have, you will be able to use all of them. Having them organized also lets you spend less effort trying to remember what you have and searching for what you want. Remember that you only need a few basic pieces in your closet to stay stylish and chic.


First published in Pinoy Smart Living on 04.20.2019
Feature Image: Original Photo by Yasmine Boheas on Unsplash

Posted by H.J. Rangas in Environmental, 0 comments
Success Starts with A Vision

Success Starts with A Vision

Reading Time: 5 minutes

Success starts with a vision.

Have you ever taken a journey where you know where you want to go and you just figured out how to get there along the way? This is generally the same way that a vision board works.

A vision board helps you
manifest your goals into reality.

I know that the example above is rather specific and that is because I have taken such a journey; a journey which at the time seemed like a dangerous endeavour. I knew I was taking a big risk but my vision of how wonderful my target destination would be kept me going and helped me overcome all my hesitation and fears.

At that time, I felt that my strong feelings of excitement and positive expectations also brought me good luck. I met the right people along the way who provided me with directions to get to my destination faster. Thus, my journey was a success because I had arrived at my intended destination. The experience I had was all worth the risk. By experience, I mean the whole journey, not just reaching my destination.

Man, alone, has the power to transform his thoughts into physical reality; man, alone can dream and make his dreams come true.

— Napoleon Hill, Think and Grow Rich

Visualization

Visualization is a powerful mind exercise. Even athletes use visualization to practice their race or game before the actual game. Most importantly, they visualize themselves succeeding, winning their race or game.

Science has also proven that even when you are just visualizing, the muscles in your body still move the way they do when you are actually moving physically. So if an athlete visualizes themself running on a grassy field, their muscles move the same way as if they are actually running on a grassy field. Most importantly, the brain does not differentiate between the visualization and the actual action. That’s why this is a good mental exercise for athletes.

The law of attraction is forming your entire life experience and it is doing that through your thoughts. When you are visualizing, you are emitting a powerful frequency out into the Universe.

— The Secret

Visualization is not just for athletes though. It is also very effective for achieving non-athletic goals like I did. Since the brain does not differentiate between a visualization and a real, physical action. The emotions you feel during both these activities are also not differentiated by the brain. And feelings are a major factor in visualization.

Feel Your Success

We all know that our emotions affect how we act and even think. This is our usual programming, to be reactionary. With visualization, we try to be NOT REACTIONARY but be actively monitoring and modifying our thoughts to effect a certain feeling, particularly positive feelings. A vision board helps you focus as the images you choose constantly remind you of the pleasant feelings you associate with the images.

Our vision should elicit positive feelings in us whenever we think of them. Most of the time, we spend our mental energy worrying about how to achieve our vision, or in my example, how to get to my destination. This is the complete opposite of visualization.

When you visualize, you concentrate on sustaining the positive feeling of joy and delight that you will feel when you have succeeded in achieving your vision. In fact, you try to sustain the positive feelings by visualizing how it feels when you are already in the moment of your success. Use all your senses to make everything you have in your vision as tangible to your senses as possible. Aside from what you see, try to touch, smell and hear everything in your vision.

Prepare for Your Success

Visualize this way as often as you can. When you are not visualizing, do everything you can to prepare for your moment of success. This means, you still work out a plan, and you still make S.M.A.R.T. goals, You can still try everything you can to ensure your success but you don’t worry too much about the things you can’t control.

In short, you do everything in your power to prepare for achieving your success and leave the rest to sort itself out. And as you prepare, don’t forget to have as much fun as you can.

Trust Your Intuition & Keep an Open Mind

Keep yourself in this mindset and you will see that the resources you need will come at the right time, the persons who can help you will pop out of nowhere. Don’t doubt yourself for a moment, don’t doubt your vision. But also, be ready to accept the result in whatever form it may come.

For example, after I had succeeded in getting to my destination, we suddenly faced the predicament of how to get back home as the vehicles were only available until a certain time which we had exceeded.

I felt tired from all the walking but I did not want to feel defeated so I just immersed myself in the feeling of success I felt earlier instead. Moments later, a group of bikers passed by and stopped to offer us a ride. They showed us even more amazing locations that we did not anticipate before they dropped us off the bus terminal for our ride home.

In hindsight, it was risky to just hitch a ride with a group of strangers but we trusted our intuition. We were rewarded with beautiful scenery, a great time and new friends.

The key to serenity is trusting that the universe has your back.

— Gabrielle Bernstein

This is one of the secrets of visualizing. As you do your work preparing to receive your vision, your intuition also guides you to the right people, places and resources and uncannily, they are delivered to you at the right time too. When you experience these “coincidences”, you can’t help but feel as though you are the luckiest person in the world. Everything seems to be working out in your favor and most of the time, it does. But remember that nothing is a coincidence. The universe conspires in helping you achieve your vision. Everything happening to you is a result of your thoughts, of what you focus on, of your vision of your world.

I say most of the time because the Universe or God, Creator or whatever names you call that higher, divine power, works in mysterious ways. That’s why I mentioned earlier that while you hold steady your vision as you prepare for it, you must also keep an open mind to the way or form that your vision is granted.

Again, in my example, I expected that I would be able to get home but I did not worry myself on how I would do so. It was surprising to me that it would be in the form of a gang of motorbiking strangers.

So to recap, success starts with a vision; more precisely YOUR VISION. Visualize as though you are already in the moment of your success. Go to the state as though you have already achieved or received your vision. Don’t worry about the things you can’t control but have fun while preparing to receive your success. And last but not the least, keep an open mind for the way or form that your vision is granted. Remember also, to keep your positive feelings every step of the way. The best way to do this is to receive everything with gratitude.


First published on Pinoy Smart Living 09.01.18.
Photo by Artem Beliaikin on Unsplash.

Posted by H.J. Rangas in Emotional, 0 comments
Why Taking Care of the Environment is Important

Why Taking Care of the Environment is Important

Reading Time: 4 minutes

Your physical body is important. Your surroundings are equally important for your overall well-being. That is why taking care of the environment is important as well.

Part of our regular routine before we go about the day’s work is to brush our teeth and clean our body from head to toe. We also put on fresh clothes, comb our hair and wear comfy footwear before we walk out the door. We take the effort to look pleasing to other people as well as to look pleasing to ourselves when we look at the mirror. However, most of us are in such a hurry to go about our day that we often neglect our surroundings. Taking care of the places in which we move our physical selves is equally important. It is the same as how we regularly take care of our bodies.

Your Home

When you wake up, do you tidy up your bed? Do you put your laundry neatly away? How about your dishes, do they pile up in the sink? Do you clean, organize and declutter your home often?

A clean and organized home is an important factor in keeping yourself healthy. Sure, a little mess here and there is acceptable. But if everything is disorganized, you cannot go about your daily life in a good mood. Remember that the state of your bed, is the state of your head. The state of your home is the state of your mind.

You start the day getting frustrated because you can’t find your shoes because of all the mess in your room. Then you end it with more frustration when you can’t find the remote to your TV at night. How do you think this will affect your mental state throughout the week, months and years?

TIP

Start as soon as you wake up by tidying up your bed. Try to declutter and organizing the rooms in your house each day until the clutter is gone. Your goal is to have a more spacious, clean and comfortable home.

Your Work Place

Whether you work at home or in an office, a clean and organized work environment is essential for productivity. It is also needed to boost creativity. You may not be a able to control your whole office’s cleanliness and organization. However, your own desk should be a good example to your co-employees.

TIP

Make sure to include tidying up your desk in your routine. In fact, make it the start and end or your work day. Before you work on anything, organize the materials on your desk, even your drawer. You can also organize the files on your computer. Organizing your files will prevent a cluttered desktop when you start your work and it’s easier to find your files.

Your Community

Your community is not just your immediate neighborhood but also the places that you go through as you travel to work or your destination for a vacation. Even in these places away from where you live and work, taking care of the environment is also important as it will impact your own home as well if you don’t keep it clean and healthy.

Think of a flood or a typhoon bringing back all the trash that were thrown into the river or ocean or a fire started by one uncaring camper who threw away a lit cigarette that burned a whole forest. These disastrous events could be prevented by just caring enough to keep the places we travel through and visit cleaner instead of dirtier.

TIP

Take only memories and leave nothing but footprints. Adopt the policy of taking nothing and leaving nothing behind in the places you visit for your vacation, team building, or other travel adventures. Take as many photos as you can’t but leave the animals and plants alone. Don’t leave any of your trash or camping or swimming gear either. Take them with you when you leave and dispose of them properly when you get back home.

Your Planet

There is only one planet Earth and we should be taking care of it not only for our own sake but for the sake of our future children. The climate change is an important issue and everyone should do their part in being a solution to this problem.

When the earth is sick and polluted, human health is impossible… To heal ourselves we must heal our planet, and to heal our planet we must heal ourselves.

– Bobby McLeod (Aboriginal activist and poet)

Nature has its own way of cleaning up the planet and we should let it take its own course instead of exacerbating it by our careless habits. For example, wildfires are part of Australia’s natural environment but the recent forest fires have become worse and are happening at unexpected times so that even the animals in the forest were unprepared. Many animals have died and those living are now left homeless which also means that it will be harder for the animal population and the forest to recover. At the same time, it has raised temperatures in the residential areas up to 42 degrees Celsius.

What we are doing to the forests of the world is but a mirror reflection of what we are doing to ourselves and to one another.

– Mahatma Gandhi (Indian and civil rights activist)

We can consider the drastic changes in weather patterns as the planet’s response to how we are not taking care of it properly. Plastics are polluting are oceans and killing marine life and unrecyclable (non-biodegradable) trash is multiplying with nowhere to go with landfills all filled to the brim. The summer heatwaves and delayed rainy season are just a manifestation of the worsening state of our global environment and we should do something about it before it’s too late.

TIP

There are many ways to start helping the environment. The policy to REDUCE, REUSE and RECYCLE is good habit to practise especially in these times. However, you can add one more to that – REFUSE.

Refuse to contribute to anymore pollution in our environment and refuse to be just an onlooker from the sidelines. Instead, be a mindful resident of this planet.

Be mindful of the ways you can help in reducing the problems and be an active part of finding and advocating for sustainable solutions to keep our homes, community and our planet healthy and safe.


Photo by Evan Krause on Unsplash.

Posted by H.J. Rangas in Environmental, 0 comments