Ep 1 - Declutter Your Life, Invite Ease

 

For this first episode, we wanted to talk about why decluttering matters, because people are often surprised that this is actually emotional work! But when you declutter your life, you can invite ease, as I share experiences from my own life. You can listen right here, on Apple Podcasts, or you can read the transcription below. Enjoy!

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Hello, and welcome to the Tidy Revival podcast. I am your host, Carly Adams. I'm a home organizer based in Sacramento, California, and I am so excited to bring you the very first episode of what I hope are many episodes. I just, I can't tell you how thrilled I am to be here with you today, talking to you about what I love.

Declutter your life

And so, I'm just gonna jump into today's episode. We're going to get on into it. Today we're talking about decluttering your life and how it can invite ease. What I want to dig into for this very first episode is to talk about why decluttering matters, because I believe wholeheartedly that it does. The thing about decluttering is that it's actually emotional work. I think people are really surprised at how emotional it is versus, what I think a lot of people think it's going to be more about (the beautification of things), but it's really, really emotional. I'm going to back up my story because I've been a home organizer for almost five years now (organizing for longer). When I first got started, I was excited to help people in their homes. I was excited to help people simplify, but I also felt like I really needed to make sure that I wowed people with the systems that we were going to implement.

It hadn't clicked yet that the best thing that I could do was just make things super, super simple. I thought I needed to just, wow people with things that they'd never seen before. I also felt a lot of pressure to walk into a space and mentally have it figured out and “okay, I know the answer, this is how it's gonna be”. What I found was that over 90% of the time, if I walked into a space and thought of a plan, everything changed dramatically once we started decluttering.

I'm going to give you a couple of examples. I could walk into a closet, see a lot of bags and say, okay, this client is going to need a solution that really features a lot of bag storage, right? Because they obviously love bags. There are a lot of bags, but when we dig into it with the client and they realize that they don't actually love using bags. They love shopping for bags and it's something that brings them joy.

They love shopping for them. They love giving them to their friends. They love the experience of buying leather goods while on vacation in other countries. That could be a realization. So, if, as we go through, they realize, okay, I actually don't wanna keep most of these. I'm going to donate some, and I want to give some to my friends. I'm going to end up with a lot less than when we started. And again, these are client decisions. This isn't me walking into a space saying “get rid of these bags”. But then the solution that we end up with is going to be very different than what I might have envisioned going into it.

I realized that decluttering has to be at the basis of it all because what we truly use, want, need and love (you're gonna hear me talk about that all the time), that's what we should keep. The other things are things that we should examine, right? So, let's talk about decluttering as the foundation.

Decluttering as the Foundation

After a while of working in my business, it really clicked. Now, this is why I not only talk about decluttering as the foundation of everything we do in Tidy Revival, my home organization business, it's why I've chosen to focus on that. I mean, I love creating beautiful systems. Everybody loves beautiful afters. Everyone loves it. It's fun. It's beautiful. It's fantastic. But where my heart truly is, is helping people who are feeling overwhelmed with having too much stuff and helping them through it. This is why I talk about decluttering as the foundation of everything we do. It's the most important thing to me, helping people work through their stuff is more important to me than having pretty afters on Instagram.

So, we've found that when we declutter, we're able to create super simple systems - emphasis on the word simple. And if you follow me for long enough, if you are one of my students, if you are one of my clients, you will hear me talk about creating simple systems.

The goal is to make them as simple as possible, so more people in your household can help keep them up. And that they're not so complicated that parents have to be the gatekeeper of everything organization related, or you can't get any help, or nobody knows what's going on. We really want to simplify everything as much as possible.

Example: I've worked in a lot of kitchens where, when I get started with people, when we first look at the space, the main complaint is there's not enough storage space. Like “we hate this kitchen. There's not enough storage space. We think we might have to remodel, let's look into it”. It's really about the storage space specifically. - if there was more storage space, it would be fine. We wouldn't need to remodel, but because there's not enough storage space, then we feel like we can't. Then when we declutter, we've found the storage space.

I've seen this happen so many times - we've found the storage space in things like cabinets filled with appliances that people don't actually use, or even with a lot of items that are kept out of habit or guilt, gifts received that people don't actually want, but feel bad about it. space reconfigurations (prioritizing things in a different way and figuring out what could actually go elsewhere).

What would make more sense elsewhere? What is taking up prime real estate that doesn't need to, because it's not used frequently? Also, I can't tell you the number of times I've seen a cabinet filled with paper bags from the grocery store. They just accumulate. They're taking up a whole cabinet. It's very common. If you are like nodding along It's very common, just so you know. So we're able to create that space and get it back and realize that we do have plenty of space and don’t need more. Storage space wasn't really the answer, the answer was examining what we have and figuring out what serves us, and figuring out what doesn't right.

Through that process, we’re able to simplify day-to-day life. Honestly, it feels like magic sometimes. I really enjoy helping people, through that process. So that's why we're digging into it here. It's super, super, super important to me.

How this has affected my home life

Now I want to talk about how this has affected my personal home life because it's one thing to hear how it affects other people, but I know that it's going to be important for you to understand where I'm coming from too, especially if this is the first time we're meeting. I know that you may not know my backstory, and that's fair. I know that I'm (likely) going to get into it way more in the future too. But something that you should know about me upfront is that I am not an organized person, naturally.

Anyone who has known me for a long time can tell you, my three sisters will tell you, my parents will tell that you, none of this comes naturally to me. These are learned skills, which is why I feel confident other people can learn them. I had to learn it also.

Long before I was an organizer, I was chronically disorganized in every aspect of my life. Everything from time management, clutter, and finances. Everything. I didn't have good systems and it was very, very stressful. I had a lot of stress and anxiety around all of these areas in my life that didn't have systems and were just a mess and kind of on the brink of collapse at any given moment.

It wasn't until I started decluttering and organizing that I found so much ease along the way. I'm going to give you one example (of a thousand): getting ready in the morning, I remember vividly that getting ready in the morning was like a full-blown affair. Every single day. It felt painful. It felt stressful. I constantly felt like I had a closet with nothing to wear. if you're nodding, and you can relate to this - I feel you, I felt that every single day I felt like it took me so long to find an outfit that went together that I felt fit me, I felt confident in, and/or fit. Whatever the occasion, it was a lot every morning - it was just a mess.

A few years ago, around the same time that I was deciding to become an organizer, I still hadn't really delved into the seasonal wardrobe situation. I'm sure I'll dig into this much in more depth at some point, too. But in 2017, I ended up doing some extended traveling with my husband and it was really eye-opening because of the extended travel. I ended up being in a couple of different climates for long periods of time with one bag. I thought that was going to be the most painful part of the whole process, but it wasn't at all. It just actually freed me up in so many ways to just get ready easily every morning. I didn't have to think about it because everything that I had brought was so carefully curated, it had to be so that I could fit it in this bag. It wasn't even a large suitcase. I'm talking like a backpack - a backpacker’s backpack - but a backpack, nonetheless. I used it to travel for five weeks and then seven weeks. And there were two different climates. When we finished with those travels, I was completely hooked on the concept of having a capsule wardrobe.

Capsule wardrobe details

It just made everything so much easier. I was like: “okay, well, I can expand it a little bit from having just a backpack now that I'm landed and everything” and I have not looked back. So, what is that five years? Oh my gosh, five years (that flew by!) and I've had a capsule wardrobe - like a seasonal wardrobe switch.

I do it four times a year. It has changed my life. It has simplified things. I can pick an outfit in less than five minutes - it's no big deal because every season, what is in front of me fits, it's in season, and it's weather appropriate. I know I love it. I know I look good in it. I know I fit in it. I know it doesn't need to be repaired and it's a smaller collection, but it's curated There are some things that maybe don't make the cut for that season, but what's in front of me is what I have to select from. I'm not selecting from everything that I own, and the extra items are stored somewhere else.

For me, it's just cleared up a lot of mental bandwidth. There are a lot of things that we don't realize… even the micro-decisions of deciding what to wear every morning when you're looking at a lot of options that don't necessarily need to be part of the decision-making. For example: if it's the middle of summer and you're digging through 15 sweatshirts, your brain is still saying “yes, no, yes, no. yes, no.” every single time you're touching those items. So to just remove the things that don't actually make sense and need to be part of the equation, just frees up your mental bandwidth. Like I mentioned about getting ready. Boom. Done.

Now the process that I use, that's not going to be the right choice for everybody. If you're listening and that sounds painful, you feel like you're more of a fashionista, you want to have more selection? I get it. It's not the right choice for everyone. And that's fine. My job isn't to tell you, "This is how I do it. This is how you should do it too." You're gonna hear me talk a lot about the word should - I don't like it. It can be very triggering for people to be honest. At some point I'll be talking about why you need to not be shoulding all over yourself because it's just dangerous. We have enough in our lives where you think: “I should be doing this. I should be doing that” - it's a guilt-ridden word.

No - screw that - we're not doing it. But I will tell you how I do things and how I feel they work for me and how they've helped me. And you can decide for yourself if that sounds good or not, if it doesn't sound good, if it sounds painful, don't do it because you live in your house, I don't live in your house. I say that to people, clients, and students all the time. So yeah, lot of ease around getting ready in the morning, and again, that's an example (one of a thousand) of how my life has changed since I've streamlined things: since I’ve decluttered first and then found a simple system that works for me.

In addition to ease, the other reason that this work is so important is that it's actually emotional, right? That's the whole purpose of this podcast is to talk about the why behind the work. Cause that's more important. Even than the how. The how is really important because that helps you get it done. But there's a lot of information out there about the how, so I wanted to start this. To talk about the why.

A lot of stuff that goes into the clutter around us can deals with trauma, with difficult chapters in our life, with guilt, remorse, shame, and of course the word that you're gonna hear more than anything else, because it's the word that people say to me when we start working together, however, we work together. Overwhelm. Overwhelm is the number one word that I hear when I'm first connecting with people. So, my role is to help people work through the physical items. And sometimes that means that we're recognizing when we should bring in others, therapists, specialists,

What the podcast isn’t about - and what it is!

One thing to know about this podcast is that we're not going to talk about hoarding. So, if you're listening now and you're hoping to hear about hoarding, it's not gonna happen - only because that's not the type of work that I do. I do get inquiries (all organizers do) about hoarding situations, but it's more specialized work. And so those potential clients are, or potential students are people that I'm referring to other folks who specialize in that work. So you won't hear me go into it. We will talk about a lot about clutter. We will talk about, even in the realm of what we call in the biz: extreme collecting, but not hoarding.

It's a spectrum. and at some point, it goes into a realm that we don't work with here. So no matter if you're dealing with a little clutter, a lot of clutter, as you're working through your physical items, you're gonna find that you're working through your emotional blocks too.

Right? Emotional blocks hold us back. And sometimes they can manifest in clutter, and they just go hand in hand, right? So my goal for you is to remember, as we get started, that you are not alone. Truly. I see the same kind of stories play out again and again with clients and students.

My goal for this space is to bring you some of those stories. And some of these people. Maybe we're working together. Some of these people may be just people that I know who have been going through it and sharing their experiences. I also, undoubtedly will be talking about some organizing tips along the way, because I can't help it. I can't help it guys, I'm really excited to bring you conversations with some of my colleagues in the industry, with things that we see all the time. I'm just excited. I'm really excited to have you here. So, thank you so much for being here. If you enjoyed this episode, please be sure to subscribe, so you'll always have access to the latest updates and episodes.

Until next time, remember that…

 
 
 
 

Links mentioned in this episode

 
Tidy Revival Podcast, Decluttering, Mindset, OrganizationCarly AdamsTidy RevivalDecluttering, emotion