Tag Archives: get organized

Tears of Joy!

Last week I traveled 4 hours away to help a client of mine that had moved out of the area a few years ago. Although she tried to find a professional organizer in her area to help her, the one she found was new and was just as overwhelmed with the situation as she was. So much so that she has since gone out of business. Unfortunately, there are no other professional organizers in her area, so she reached out to me for help. Her initial email to me said “I know it would be a lot to ask you to come and help me, but I’m fairly desperate and have lost all pride”. How do you say no to helping someone when they say something like that, no matter how far away they are?

Since she had only unpacked the essentials, and left everything else out in the garage when she moved in 3 years earlier, I knew we had to start in the garage. As with any organizing job, finding the place that “clogs” up the rest of the home and unclogging it is crucial. The garage took the longest amount of time to complete, but it was also one of the most rewarding spaces because of that. Now all of the stuff that was in her house that really should be in the garage was able to be filtered out into the garage zones once we had them established.

Garage-Before-After

Garage – Before & After

Next we moved on to the kitchen space, then the closets, the living room, the master bedroom/bath, the laundry room, the guest room and the home office. We worked for 6 straight days, all day long and got through the larger part of her home. Letting go of things you love or thought you might use someday is always difficult and that was no different for this client. But with each passing day, she gave up more and more. She even went back and let go of things she had decided to keep only the day before. I was so proud of her and all of the hard work she invested in this process.

Kitchen-Before-After

Kitchen – Before & After

Home-Office-Before-After

Home Office – Before & After

Home-Office-Before-After

Home Office – Before & After

She had shared with me before I came that her master bedroom and bathroom were the areas that were bothering her the most. She couldn’t find peace anywhere in her home. She felt overwhelmed, stressed out and beat down – something I commonly hear from our clients. I knew the sense of relief she would feel when her master bedroom and bathroom were clutter-free and organized and so I didn’t let her see things changing as I was working. I wanted her to see it ONLY when those spaces were completed.

Once I had the areas organized, I let her look. Her mouth immediately fell open as she blurted out the words “I think I could cry”. With that, she threw the entire upper part of her body down onto her outstretched arms on the bathroom counter and began crying uncontrollably. I began crying. I knew how much relief I had brought to her life. I knew how long she had wanted that space back in control and peaceful. But her reaction was priceless and beautiful!

Bedroom-Before-After

Bedroom – Before & After

Once my client stopped crying, she stepped back and stared at me in disbelief and exclaimed “this is definitely your ministry, a life-changing ministry at that!”. I know it seems funny to most (and even to myself sometimes) to leave all of your financial security behind to follow what you believe God created you to do. But knowing you have the ability to use what you love doing to change people’s lives in such a dramatically positive way and choosing not to go for it makes absolutely less sense! 

Top 5 Things I Did Before Taking the Leap

As you’ve learned through this blog, it took me a long, long time to follow God’s lead and quit my full time job. By quitting I gave up awesome medical, dental, vision and mental health insurance, my pension that I would have been able to draw in 3 1/2 years and a guaranteed bi-weekly paycheck. Needless to say, I didn’t just run and take that leap of faith without some planning. Here are the top 5 things that I did to prepare:

Top 5 Things to Do

Prayer: I prayed the same prayer over and over for years. Through those prayers I believe that God slowly changed MY attitude and beliefs until I was finally convinced that this was His will and that I could do it. In my opinion, prayer doesn’t have to be perfectly scripted or said in a certain order or way. Prayer for me is just like having a conversation with God, a continual conversation regardless of where I am or what I am doing – driving, cutting the grass, cleaning the house, whatever.

Listen: Of equal importance to prayer is creating a quiet or still time so that you can hear what He has to say. For the greater part of my life, whenever I was in the car, the radio would be blasting the entire time. I had to have it on from the minute I got in the car, until the minute I got out. Not anymore. At least 50% of the time I’m driving, I drive without the radio on. It’s amazing what that quiet time will do for you. Listen to your intuition. Listen to your gut. Listen to your thoughts. Listen to what others say to you. So many times God speaks to us through others. Mostly I listened to the peace within me about the decision to leave.

Save: I saved enough money to pay an entire year’s worth of both my car and house payments. Those are the most important things and those are the things that would affect my credit if they weren’t paid. I realize the importance of impeccable credit and so I do my best to keep my financial affairs in order.

Got my finances in order:  I met with a financial adviser several times. It’s funny, she immediately said I should never leave my job. Five minutes into sharing my story with her of how God had been speaking to me, even she changed her tune. I refinanced my house with a lower interest rate, looked at all of my expenses and “cut the fat” as they say (turned off house phone, changed cable providers in order to drastically cut prices, etc). I made sure all of my debt was paid off other than my car and house.

Be proactive: Not only did I have anything and everything to do with my house and car checked over to be sure nothing was wrong with them, I did the same with me. I refilled as many prescriptions as many times as I could under my great insurance benefits before I left. I had a sleep study done. Had any dental work done that I needed. Went to each of my specialists and my regular doctor to make sure everything was going well with me physically.

By taking care of all of these details so carefully, I think I warded off a lot of problems and was well prepared for whatever or wherever this leap of faith would take me. So far, so good!

From Hopelessness to Happiness

My motto in life has always been that you do what you have to do. But it still amazes me to think that I spent 27 years of my life in a job that I absolutely hated from day one! If I am being 100% honest though, I’d have to admit that without that job I would have probably never been able to provide for my children by myself as I had to. So I try to be thankful for it anyway.

However, since my job went against everything that I am innately, and everything I believe in, it ate away at my spirit every day without me even realizing that for many, many years. My strongest and deepest desire is to help people, to make their lives simple and easier. To reach out to the hurting, and remind them of their greatness and beauty, and the power within themselves to do amazing things with their lives!

Our Internal Power

Our Internal Power

That’s a pretty hard thing to do when your job is answering the phones for a major utility company and you know that your hands are tied on how much you can truly help the caller. No matter how much a customer begged, yelled or cried, the hard cold fact was that I could only do so much for them. Top that with poor management that only focused negative attention on their employees and helped to continue the toxic environment by gossiping with fellow employees to slander other employees, rather than to build on people’s strengths and equip them to work as a team.

Working as a professional organizer is the extreme opposite of that. I get to do work that changes people’s lives in a positive way. I get to play an active and supportive role in the lives of people that are hurting. I always say that we are our own worst enemies and I see this on an almost daily basis in the work I do now. I have the privilege of helping to pick people back up, get them back on track again and remind them of their own unique greatness and the amazing beauty and power within themselves.

Not only is the physical part of the work fun and rewarding, but the relationships and bonds that are created in our work are AMAZING! It’s not unusual at all to hear from clients about how much our work together has changed their lives in a positive way. But the following snippet from an email I received recently from a client that I have worked with since I opened my business doors 7+ years ago had me in tears! It has been a real blessing to be a part of her journey from hopelessness to happiness.

Before & After

Before & After

“None of this would have happened without YOU! I interviewed 5 other professional organizers before I met you. I wish I could explain just what came over me when I realized that you were the one person who would be able to get me whole again. I can still see the expression on your face when we met, your eyes, your perception, your assuredness. I guess I felt peace. Peace even within all of the chaos of my house. That was because you were looking at ME and seeing ME separated from all of the clutter. You knew the clutter wasn’t me, it was just stuff. You knew I wasn’t the clutter and the clutter wasn’t me. But until then, I thought I was. Until I met you, I felt like I was a hopeless failure. You have taught me to appreciate myself for the most mundane, ordinary parts of my personality. I’m very blessed to be in your Ark. You are a powerful Noah!”

The Power of Planning

If there’s anyone that understand the value of being organized, it would be me. I’ve always been an organized person who found organizing to be both easy and therapeutic. And for the past 7+ years, I’ve worked as a certified professional organizer helping others get organized. I know how great it feels to know where to find things when you need them and where to put them when you’re finished with them. I also know how important it is to have systems in place for keeping things organized. I’ve had the pleasure of helping others get their home, office and lives organized so that they could enjoy the things in life that really matter.

I also know that planning and visualizing your goals plays a huge role in the process of getting organized. So much so that it’s the first thing we do when we meet with our clients. I’m a big planner but I’d have to say I’m an even bigger doer. Sometimes slowing down long enough to truly map every single thing out just doesn’t look as exciting to me as just doing it, so I just jump in.

Mental preparation

My struggle with organizing has been to try to organize all of the great business ideas and goals I have because there are so many of them. They are scribbled down here or there and repeated here or there. It can look and feel so overwhelming to try to map things out when there are an overabundance of tasks, ideas or stuff to organize. Another hurdle to getting them organized has been the distraction of my everyday life of running a business. Since the first day I started my organizing business, Simplified Living Solutions, I’ve worked 2 very full time jobs. Although I’ve been able to organize these thoughts, ideas and plans in a way that I could always find the information, I’ve never had enough time to capture them all in one place so that I could organize, prioritize and break them down into doable steps.

I have been working on doing just that for a while now, trying to block out any other nagging distractions that would normally pull me away from doing just that. Today, I am finally starting to see a sense of semblance after pulling together every little note I wrote down for the past 7+ years and beginning to organize them. It’s exciting and empowering!

It’s so funny to me that I’ve struggled with this because I spend my days teaching, empowering and coaching our clients to do this very thing. They often feel overwhelmed at the thought of it. They often don’t know where to start. And they often would prefer to just ignore it as much as they can. I have found myself feeling the very same way about this project because it all seems so big. YET, I know that getting started is the hardest part. AND, I know the wonderful feelings and structure that getting organized brings. It’s also very motivating and empowering to sort through everything, keeping only those things that you need, use or love and freeing yourself of all of the other “clutter” so you can focus on the things that really matter.