Do You Believe this Decluttering Myth?
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Hello, hello, and welcome to the Take Charge of Your Home Show, the podcast helping you trade in clutter and the messes for peace of mind and sanity, so you can have more time to make memories with your kids and the freedom to enjoy A nice evening to yourself every now and then amidst the chaos of never ending to dos, dinners, and diapers.
We're saying goodbye to the hot mess mom life and instead creating households that are both sustainable and supportive of the lives that we want to live and the things that we want to do. And I am so very excited to announce that we have several live events coming over the next two months between now and the end of May to help you break the clutter cycle.
Clean up the mess, get organized, and create a well run, functional household that puts time back into your day. Our next event is a live workshop taking place on Zoom on Tuesday, May 7th. It's called The [00:01:00] Proven Way to Get a Neat and Tidy Home in 2024. And you're gonna walk away with a step by step strategy for exactly what to do with every single item that is giving you trouble in your home. So if you have been trying to declutter and organize, but you feel like your house keeps getting cluttered all over again, You're definitely going to want to click on the link in the show notes to save your seat. Now, let's get back to the show
Your house is a wreck and it's dragging you down. You wake up in the morning and as you look around your bedroom, You already feel stressed, just thinking about everything that you need to do around the house.
As you walk to the kitchen to get yourself some water and a cup of coffee, you feel defeated by the dishes piling up in the sink. You see last night's dinner still sitting on the stove because you were too exhausted to put it away in food containers before you went to bed. [00:02:00] And so you get your coffee and your water and maybe some toast and you go sit at the dining room table and out of the corner of your eye, you can see the piles that are just taking over your main living spaces. And you quietly wonder to yourself if you're going to be living like this forever. You feel so guilty and so ashamed that your kids have to live in a messy cluttered home. And you feel like you're failing at running your household.
But most of all, you're tired. You're tired to the bone. You're tired of misplacing everything. You're tired of the constant tiding. You're tired of living in chaos and wasting food and ignoring the laundry and the dishes. You're tired of letting the shape of your household run your life. You would love to be able to manage your home and keep it clean so you can have free time to make memories with your family [00:03:00] and the peace of mind to fall, right to sleep at night. So you've thought about hiring a professional organizer, but, you know, that that's not really going to help you in the longterm.
You've considered getting a storage unit or even a second storage unit, but you really want to be able to manage your household day in and day out without offloading all of your stuff somewhere else. You've even contemplated throwing everything out and starting over fresh, but you know that the clutter will just come back eventually.
And that there in lies the problem. You've tried decluttering. You've actually decluttered several times. But no matter what you do, the clutter keeps coming back.
So first and foremost, I'm going to lift a weight off your shoulders as I remind you that a big part of why this is happening, why you feel like your decluttering, but your house keeps getting cluttered is because you're not decluttering the right areas. So [00:04:00] you are decluttering your living room over and over and over again. When the problem is that your kids have too many toys for example. Or you're clearing off your dresser and your nightstand every single week when you can't find a thing in your closet. So that's on the one hand, a big part of why your house is still getting cluttered.
But in today's episode, I want to take this a step deeper as we talk about the reason why you're not decluttering the right areas. The reason why you think that you're doing everything right, but it's not working.
And that's because there's a huge myth in the home life industry that decluttering is one size fits all. Now, of course, this is not exactly said, nobody's going out there saying this is the only decluttering advice that matters, this is what you should follow to a T of course, nobody's saying that. But it's generally implied. And the reason I say this is because everywhere you look forward to decluttering tips and advice and [00:05:00] methods, it's all the same.
It's all the same basic advice that all says pretty much the same thing that you need to get rid of your excess stuff, you need to let go of as much as you can, you need to sort it all into different piles, the four box method, keep, donate, relocate, and trash, and then, once you've finished de cluttering, you need to put it all back in an organized way.
And then you need to take all the items that you chose to get rid of and you need to get them out of your house. That's basically what the decluttering advice comes down to this basic advice. But unfortunately, that basic advice, it doesn't work for everyone because it was created for a generalized group of women.
And I've done my research trying to figure out like where decluttering became a thing. And there was not, I couldn't find anything online. Because it wasn't something that was developed by one person in particular. Obviously, because we've for centuries been choosing to purge that things that [00:06:00] we no longer need use or want, you know, even back in the 17 hundreds, if there was something that was broken or anything along those lines, of course they were going to get rid of it.
But as I was saying in one of our previous episodes about home organizing and how is the developed by, you know, professional organizers in 1984... home organizing was created to help people keep their homes from getting out of control. It was never created to help somebody organize a messy home and it's really kind of the same. It, this kind of goes hand in hand with decluttering. Like I said, nobody can really pinpoint where de cluttering started, but it became such a huge, popular thing in the last 20 or so years because professional organizers realize that a lot of their clients had accumulated way too much stuff and they needed to let go of the excess.
So all of this, the say the reason why decluttering became so popular is because professional organizers started [00:07:00] doing it hand in hand while they were organizing their clients homes. And so this basic advice that I'm talking about here, it was created for a generalized group of women who wanted to organize their homes.
They wanted to prevent their homes from getting too out of hand. And in the process, they had professional organizers help them let go of some of their excess things. Now, the reason I'm saying all of this is that home organizing, and then the rise of de cluttering, the popularity of decluttering and the, the, the basic decluttering advice that you can find all over the internet, it was not created to help people whose homes were messy. It was created to help people let go of the excess stuff so that way they could organize what was left.
So this basic advice, like I said, it doesn't work for everyone. And let me tell you my experience with it. I followed this basic [00:08:00] advice for years, this basic decluttering advice, this generalized advice. As a mom of four with swollen legs, while grieving my late mother, all while being emotionally attached to my belongings and not wanting to become a minimalist.
And because I was trying to declutter my home with those circumstances. That is one reason why it took me so long. It took me over two years to fully clear away my clutter because I was trying to follow that generalized advice.
So the truth is if that generalized advice worked for everyone, you would have been successful with de cluttering and organizing your home before now. But because of this basic advice, because of this myth that you've been led to believe that de cluttering is this one size fits all concept that works for everyone.
And for every home, because of that, you're, you're caught in what I call the clutter cycle. So the clutter [00:09:00] cycle is this never ending cycle of actions and behaviors that keep you doing the same things over and over again for maybe even years on end. It starts with paralysis mindset, when you really start to become aware of that your house is cluttered and messy, but you don't know where to start because you feel too overwhelmed. Then, eventually you decide to get organized as a quick fix. And you do the work and you make progress and you see results. Your flat surfaces are clear and tidy and you feel like you've done a pretty good job. But then, your house gets messy and cluttered all over again because you still have too much stuff, because you didn't let go of enough stuff to make a difference. Then, you get kind of irritated and frustrated and so you start rage cleaning, and one day you might throw a bunch of stuff out [00:10:00] and feel like maybe that's going to finally make a change. But then, the messes and the clutter creep back out all over again. And so you start to think that there's something wrong with you, that you're never going to make a change in your home. And that leads you back to square one where you have paralysis mindset again, and you don't know where to start because you feel like you've tried everything.
So, first of all, let's get one thing out of the way. This basic, generalized decluttering advice that I'm referring to- it's not your fault. This is what you have been led to believe. And the truth is that you're extraordinary and passionate and unique, you love your belongings, you don't want to become a minimalist, and there's nothing wrong with that. Unfortunately, you have not been given the right strategy to deal with all of your things, to optimize your belongings, and to get your house in order. And nobody ever taught you how to de clutter before now. So you've been left to try to put the pieces together on your own now as an adult with [00:11:00] kids, or maybe even grandkids, you're trying to put this puzzle together and make all these strategies work that you find from all these different corners of the internet, and you're doing the best that you can, and you're doing a really good job, but it's not enough to actually make a tangible difference in your home. So, if you can resonate with this, if you resonate with the clutter cycle and you would prefer to optimize your belongings as opposed to becoming a minimalist, that means that you need a more tailored approach to clearing your clutter, to taking control of the messes, and to finally getting your house in order.
And that's why I'm very excited to announce that we have a free virtual event coming on May 7th, where I'm going to be sharing the proven way for you to do this so you can finally get a neat and tidy home in 2024.
So at the end of this workshop, you will walk away with actionable strategies to clean up the mess and the clutter. You'll know exactly how to deal with every single [00:12:00] item that is giving you trouble in your home. And you will have the proven way to keep a tidy home consistently. Like I said, even if nothing has worked before now. And on that note, I hope you're starting to realize that the reason why nothing has worked before now is because this basic generalized advice that we have been taught that we have been led to believe is the holy grail, the only way to declutter, that advice doesn't work. Like I said earlier, it was created and really became popular as a means to support professional organizers as they were helping their clients get more organized and begin to let go of their excess stuff. But the hard truth that we must face here is that when your home is already very cluttered and very messy and totally out of control and, and a complete disaster, for lack of a better word, when your house has reached that stage, then those basic decluttering and organizing strategies that you find on the internet, they're not going to make any difference in your home. [00:13:00] But that's exactly what we're going to be diving into in this workshop. It's the proven way to get a neat and tidy home. It's the proven way to finally tackle the messes and the clutter so you can master the chaos in your home once and for all.
To get your free ticket, just click on the link in the show notes, or you can go to the maximizing momma.com forward slash tidy, enter your name and your email, and you will be all signed up.
This is life changing. It will change the way that you deal with your home for forever. This is what really helped propel my household forward. And it was really the, the dividing point between when I was struggling with my household and when I finally was able to start to see progress.
So my story really started back in 2016, I realized that my house was out of control and I needed to do something about it. So first we moved to a bigger home because I thought that we needed more space. And when that didn't solve the problem, I started [00:14:00] organizing every single inch, every cabinet, drawer, and every space in our townhouse. I organized all of it, but that didn't help either because I was still cleaning up after my kids and tidying up day in and day out. Then in 2018, we downsized into my late mother's home. And I realized that I would have to start clearing away and letting go of some of our things because all of our belongings truly did not fit into that house. And so over the next bout a year, year and a half, I was decluttering a lot of stuff. I let go of a lot of things, but my house was messier than ever. And I couldn't understand why. I remember you know, feeling so defeated. Like I was doing all the right things. I was letting go of a lot of stuff, but it was like, I wasn't decluttering at all. But fortunately since I'm so type A and so, so naturally organized and so strategic, I was able to look around at all the things that were giving me trouble in my home. And I was able to easily identify that [00:15:00] they weren't all just one type of clutter or one type of mess. And so I, from there, put them into three different categories and that changed everything for me. I suddenly knew exactly what to do with the clutter. I knew what to do with the things that I wanted to keep. I knew exactly how to tidy up without falling off track. And from there, de cluttering and organizing became a piece of cake. And that's what I'm so excited to share with you- this proven way to get a neat and tidy home in 2024.
So if you have been led to believe this de cluttering myth, it's not your fault, but we're going to make a change.
Make sure to go save your seat. You can access the link through the show notes, or you can go to the maximizing momma.com forward slash tidy. And I can't wait to see you there. Bye.
