3-21-24 From Chaos to Calm: The Journey of Decluttering and Finding Inner Peace
What is the purpose of this podcast? To help people decide which they need for personal success and how to make it work for them.
Live intro with hook - Hello my lovelies. Today we’re talking about decluttering your life, and I promise you, that this is not just about getting clutter out of your home. It’s a much bigger discussion about getting clutter out of your life in every way possible because sometimes the clutter in your home cannot leave until you get some other things right in your life. And even if you’re someone who deals well with your clutter, physical, emotional or mental, you may know someone who struggles with it, so stick with us, and if something resonates, be sure to subscribe, like and share this episode.
To start, I want to talk about the show Hoarders. When I first watched the show, I have to admit, I was like most people who judged the hoarder. I understood that some of the hoarding came from a place of mental illness, but I truly thought it was something people could and should just push through. After watching several episodes, I realized that at the beginning of every hoarding journey is trauma, and the episode that solidified that for me was an episode with an older woman who seemed to be doing well with the decluttering process until they started to clear her yard, and she flipped out and instantly became combative and uncooperative.
Thankfully they have a therapist on site to help, and what the therapist finally got the woman to talk about was being assaulted in her own yard by someone she knew that told her if she fought back or told anyone, the perpetrator would kill her young daughters that were in the house. You could see the absolute terror that the woman still dealt with, and it was heartbreaking.
When her grown daughters found out, they went from judgment to compassion for her situation when they realized their mother had possibly saved their lives, and it was something no one knew about until that moment. What a burden to bear alone.
From that point, the healing started for the woman living in the home and her daughters. It was from that point that I also changed how I looked at not just hoarders but all types of situations like this, and it has truly been life changing because the clutter around us is often a result of the trauma and clutter within us, and compassion is a much more powerful ally than judgment in the healing and decluttering your life department.
The thing to know here is that you can start with the physical manifestation, which are the piles of paper and messes around you, or you can start with the internal stress and chaos first, but unless you deal with the latter, it doesn’t matter how many times you clear the mess, it’s just going to come back. Any idea how I know this?
Listen, I’ve been told myself, just pick up after yourself, you just need better routines, and my personal favorite - it’s not that hard, just stick with it. Ugh! For those of you who follow the Moving Toward Better or Whole Home Reset Facebook page, you know those concepts are not what we focus on because we all know what to do, but for some reason we lack the capacity for consistent follow through, and that’s where the inner decluttering part of your life becomes so important.
Instead, when I teach decluttering, we focus on out of the box ways to help deal with the clutter issue in our homes and our heads because those traditional ways don’t work for us.
Do we need encouragement and a plan to conquer the physical clutter? Of course we do, but if we’re not emotionally able to deal with the mess, it doesn’t matter how badly we want to declutter; it just won’t happen.
What matters is finding a way to help people deal with their internal and external clutter and chaos in a way that works for them. That’s why I’m re-releasing the Whole Home Reset e-book, audiobook and course in the next couple of weeks, so we can all go through and purge our minds and homes of the clutter and chaos and make it easier when we do the next pass, and for those of us who struggle with the clutter, we know there is going to be a next pass for sure.
While clutter seems to be a universal issue, at least in the US, different personalities have different approaches, and when we lean into our strengths, especially for those who struggle with this process, we can make huge progress and set ourselves up for wonderful success.
For those who are new to the podcast, when I talk about personalities, I use the DISC personality model of behavior and refer to people as D or Driven, I or Inspired, S or Supportive, and C or Cautious. One important thing we often talk about with personalities is being in balance and out of balance because that definitely affects how people act and react, so let’s get to it.
For the D personality, you typically deal well with clutter and may even lean toward tossing things that others want and love because you see it as clutter. This happened for me after my dad passed. I went to visit my mom one day, and all of our family portraits were in a garbage can to be thrown out, and I was shocked.
When I asked my mom about them, she told me she didn’t need them anymore, but if I wanted to take them I could. I didn’t want all of them, but I did want some of them, and I still have them to this day. She, on the other hand, was mentally and physically done with them, so she was ready to release them.
Driven people want their environment to be efficient and organized so they tackle clutter with determination and gusto, sometimes to avoid difficult feelings . Remember that in balance and out of balance thing we talked about earlier? This is where the out of balance thing can come into play because when the items in a Driven person’s space makes them feel uncomfortable, even if it’s because of love tinged with sadness, the out of balance Driven person may be compelled to get it out of sight and out of their lives altogether rather than deal with the difficult emotions. That isn’t a judgment but rather an observation of how Driven people show up in grief, which means they’re inherently out of balance. Sometimes, pitching things out brings those difficult emotions to the surface, and if the Driven person is ready to process them, the decluttering process can be incredibly cathartic.
If they’re not ready to process those emotions, the physical decluttering gives them temporary relief, but there will be issues later. In the case of my mom, she missed a drawer of my dad’s clothes while cleaning out and found them a few months later, and it brought up a whole new set of emotions she thought she had dealt with, so before you pitch everything, know that the physical is only part of the decluttering process.
With the I personality, clutter can become part of who you are in every way, often because of the prevalence of ADHD in the I personality as well. I’m not saying that all people with the Inspired personality have ADHD, but there is a reason the Inspired people are more likely to have assistants and timers and alarms to remind them of what needs to be accomplished in their lives than other personality types. Again, I do not say this as a judgment of the Inspired personality because this is my primary personality type.
While working on this podcast, I set my timer because I had a lunch date with a longtime friend, and as excited as I was about our lunch, I’m also acutely aware that I can get involved in some activity and completely forget about lunch and my need to prepare for it.
I also had a meeting this week with a coach I’m convinced has a good portion of I in her personality mix because she had not one but two alarms set to make sure she was on time to her next meeting and she still had to hustle to get there on time because two I personalities can talk the entire day away if left to their own devices.
That’s why, though, when it comes to decluttering, the Inspired person will always do well to have some type of social interaction to help them with tasks like decluttering to Inspire and motivate them to action.
Body doubling and co-working are the Inspired person’s best friends when it comes to tasks like decluttering, especially when it’s a task they would rather not be doing. The other thing to remember is that the I personality typically has a brain that jumps around, so while the task oriented D and C personalities may prefer to focus on one area or decluttering task at a time, the Inspired person generally does better with variety.
In my case, I’m currently decluttering my office, and for the first couple of weeks, I focused specifically on a pile that had erupted on my desk. It included some financial pieces, some business ideas I had jotted down on paper but never filed in a place I would follow through on them and some older learning opportunities that I wanted to consolidate my notes to make it usable content for myself and the people I help. The variety of that kept me interested and engaged with the declutter, 15 minutes per day, until this week.
Now, I’m alternating that desk work with clearing the cabinets and bookshelves in my office to make it a more usable space rather than a dumping ground for things we don’t know what to do with. If you’re interested in that, I’m going through a Feng Shui journey in my own home, and I’ll be posting about that on the Moving Toward Better website and YouTube channels, so subscribe and come along if you’d like. The link to both are in the show notes or look up Moving Toward Better on Google and you can find both on the first page.
Emotional and mental clutter is a very different thing for the Inspired personality than the Driven personality. While the Driven personality is task oriented and will go through even mental clutter like a checklist, for the Inspired personality, everything is connected, but rather than thoughts being like the white lines on a road going mostly straight with a few curves like it does for the Driven personality, the thoughts of an Inspired person would look more like a bundle of yarn that’s been pulled out of the container and left in a heap. Can you unravel it? Absolutely, but there will be twists and turns along the way, and everything is connected in a way you may not understand until you start unraveling it. Even then, the connections may astound you.
For the S personality, you love harmony and stability, so a decluttered and organized home and life suit you but getting there is often a huge challenge for you because of your devotion to your loved ones and your deep sentimentality. You want to declutter, but the process sometimes seems so huge, you have no idea where to start, and once you do, you keep finding things that remind you of other things, and then you want to keep everything, whether it connects to a good memory or a bad one.
That’s why you also thrive with someone to help you declutter and organize because you can become blind to your own chaos, thinking something has big value when it really only has some sentimentality. I get it because I’ve held onto several things far longer than I needed to because of their sentimental value to me, and I’m not saying you have to chuck everything out the door, quite the contrary. But if someone is helping you organize and declutter and they find something under a pile that’s a foot high, is it really getting the loving attention that it deserves?
Let’s talk about piles for just a moment. Again, I get it. Piles happen, especially if you have adhd, and what neurotypical people don’t understand is that you pretty much know what’s in any given pile at all times, but you’re also taking up valuable real estate in your home and in your brain, and I’ll be talking about this a bit more next week when I talk about some productivity life hacks that may be different than what your parents did or do.
For now, let’s deal with the idea that the fewer piles you have, the easier it is to manage and organize your home, so let’s make a pact to work on decluttering and actually process our paper clutter rather than just going through it and acknowledging everything that’s in the pile.
That way you create a home that’s calm and cozy rather than chaotic and cramped because you and your family deserve to live that way, every day.
When it comes to mental and emotional clutter, this can be the biggest stumbling block for the Supportive personality because they want to remember everything good and forget everything bad, but both need processing so we can get through the good and the bad without one taking us back to a time when a good thing in our past may have turned bad.
You see, I’ve always loved sports, playing and watching them, but much of my past is steeped in memories that weren’t always pleasant. When I was younger, I struggled playing sports because in addition to my coaches, my father was always telling me what to do, and sometimes he was smarter than the coach, so I would listen to my father and get in trouble with my coaches. Other times I would listen to my coaches and get in trouble with my father, which is probably why I ended up participating in sports that my father knew little about. That way I could listen to my coaches and not get in trouble at home.
When I grew up, though, I had to declutter the memories of what my dad wanted versus my coaches and learn to listen to my own inner voice, and to be truthful, I’m still learning that today. Decluttering the mind for a Supportive person takes patience and the knowledge that the S personality will never be the boundary creating powerhouse that the D personality is, but they can learn to create and maintain boundaries and free their mind from the demands of everyone in their life.
Moving on to the C personality, you are the lovers of an organized and decluttered space more than anyone, and when you are in balance, no one is better at creating that, but others might be shocked to find that there are plenty of Cautious personality people who have hugely messy homes, not because they like it but because they procrastinate when they don’t feel like they have the time to do things perfectly to their logical conclusion and that never happens. That is the C personality out of balance.
Even in balance, the C personality will take longer than most to get organized because they prefer an environment where everything is in its place, and they’re willing to invest in that, like the friend of mine who, even with three children, made sure that after her children played a game all the pieces were put back in the box in their proper place, which is probably why she still has most of the toys her children played with even though her children are now grown with children of their own, and now her grandchildren get play with those toys and games too.
I, on the other hand, have a Monopoly box with the remnants of three different games from three different eras because my adhd brain never thought to put everything back in its place every single time we played the game. I thought I was being clever to put as much as I could find in a plastic zipper bag, and I feel lucky I have even a few toys from my children’s younger days to share with my grandchildren.
The other thing about the Cautious personality is that the things that become clutter in other people’s homes do not become clutter in theirs. You all know I talk about my sister in law a lot, but her holiday decorations are a perfect example of this. My sister in law loves holidays, and if memory serves, she decorates for Valentine’s Day, St Patrick’s Day, Easter, 4th of July, fall (because that’s her favorite season), Halloween, Thanksgiving and Christmas. And when I say she decorates, I’m not talking a wreath on the door and a table centerpiece, I’m talking about decorating her front door, porch, fireplace and hearth at minimum with several of the holidays being multiple rooms and outside. It’s amazing and wonderful, and it’s so well planned and organized, it makes my head swim, but I love to visit her and see those decorations year after year, and I know she takes good care of them because they look brand new.
Now, on the mental clutter, as adept as the Cautious personality is with physical clutter, they often struggle with the mental clutter because they are as detailed with dissecting thoughts, ideas and concepts as they are with organizing. Sometimes that serves them well, and sometimes it doesn’t because they often feel like they know how things should go and when they’re not going that way, they expend a lot of energy on trying to figure out how to make things right, and when they can’t, it’s distressing for them. That’s where coaching from people like me or in more severe cases, from a therapist, can truly help the incredibly detail oriented C personality work through their issues for amazing success.
So, do any of these resonate with you? Are you completely organized and loving it? Are you in complete chaos and need help with getting things together, or are you somewhere in between? If you’d like help with your productivity or decluttering journey, go to the Moving Toward Better homepage, book one of the newly resurrected free 15 minute DISCovery calls and let’s talk about it. It’s a quick call to see what your needs are and how we can best serve you. It’s a great way to get you on the road to self discovery that can change your life for the better, starting immediately. Sign up and find out for yourself. Love you all!
Show Notes
Decluttering your life is a mental, emotional and physical activity, and it’s about more than having too much stuff. If you need support in that, I can help with that. Visit the Moving Toward Better Home page to learn more about working toward your best life based on your personality and getting the support you need to get your home in order with the Whole Home Reset, coming March 2024.
I participate in the Amazon Associate and Influencer programs which means if you make a purchase, I may earn a commission at no additional cost to you.
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