No Silver Bullets
When it comes to organizing your life it’s not that much different that organizing your closet. You need to start at the bottom get to the root of the issue and then go forward.
Like life, there is no blueprint for every situation. Organizing is not a one size fits all for everyone. Each person sees their stuff differently, and what I do is understand my client’s thought process. It’s not about me at all.. or the way I organize my things.
For example. when organizing paperwork for a client, we decide together what categories would be easy for them when they are looking for something. Every household, home-office, & home-papers are different. Some have kids activities, some have different businesses, and thus there can’t be a universal system and label for everyone.
I don’t just label files and tell them. This is where you put your bills. This is where you put that, etc.
I ask them. If you were to look for your home insurance- Would you look under home insurance? The name of the insurance company? or Would you want all insurances put in one file? If you had to for your bank info- Would you look under Chase? Banking? Checking? etc. Then I create the labels accordingly.
When clients are part of the process it makes it much easier for them to keep track of going forward. Otherwise, if I just labeled things on my own, then they would have to conform to my thinking process. The goal of organizing is to simplify your life so that it works for YOU.
They decide what would be easiest for them. There is no right or wrong when it comes to organizing. It’s like folding towels, everyone folds towels differently. But is there really a wrong way? It depends on the closet and space.
When working with clients, on an closet project, we take ALL the clothes out. I recently worked with a client who had a huge walk in closet. When I told her that we need to take everything out and start from scratch, she said “all of it”? I said. Yup.
We both took all the clothes out and put them on her bed, and then on the floor. The room was covered with piles of pocketbooks, dresses, and clothes. This client was not a hoarder, as some people use that word to loosley today. She simply needed to look at herself and her stuff differently. Plus it had been over 20 years since she went through her closets!
As we took the clothes out, I took several pictures of the process. The closet before and the closet after. Not for myself to say hey look how good an organizer I am. But for my client to see how she had her closet before. Sometimes when all is done, client’s have a way of forgetting how chaotic it really was.
It was simply a way of taking inventory of your life. It sounds silly to some, but I beleive when you have chaos in any area of your life, it trickles down to other areas, and often you loose focus on things around you.
After taking the pictures, I sat down with my client and we looked at the pictures I had just taken. She loked at them and said, Wow, I can’t beleive that’s me! I have become one of “those people”.
Instead of charging right into “closet detox mode” I had her take a good look at pictures of what her closet looked like before we took everything out.. then all the clothes sitting on the bed.. and then.. had her look in her beautiful walk in closet.
Before we started, I told her to take a good look at her closet, and when we go through the clothes, think, Is this worthy of being in my closet? Am I really going to wear this? and come to the conclusion on their own. Then decide..Could someone else use this more than me? And then donate it.
People often mistake what I do as the “Silver Bullet” to fix their chaotic lives.. What I do is show them the way, as there are no silver bullets in anything.
With each client, I leave a piece of my heart, and give them the courage and tools to be able to make decisions easier.
As I followed up with my client.. she told me how much I had helped her look at things differently. And her closet has remained in tact. She also said, I never thought about being worthy, and now I take what you said and really think about it.
By the end of the day, we had piles and piles of clothes to donate. Donating clothes to those in need might seem like a small thing, but believe me, it changes people’s lives, especially those who don’t have much. And a way of paying it forward.
No gift is ever too small.
xoxo
peace, balance, and love
staci
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