Clutterbug - Real-Life Hacks and Tips to Declutter, Organize and Clean your Home Fast - How Small Life Changes Can Have A Big Impact | Clutterbug Podcast # 82

Episode Date: January 15, 2020

Very small life changes can have a very big impact. In this podcast I share some amazing insights I've discovered from my new audiobook, "Atomic Habits" and how you can make very small changes for a big impact in your home.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today we're going to be talking about how we can make really big changes in our lives by making really small changes to our daily habits. Hey guys and welcome back to the Clutterbug podcast. Today we're talking about habits, but how we can make small new habits. Like I'm talking tiny habits that only change our life like one per day. but that can have a huge impact on our life. I'm a huge reader of self-help books. I've done this for so many years and it helps to motivate me. It's like stealing or borrowing a little motivation from other people when I'm reading or listening to an audiobook. And I've recently started listening to Atomic Habits. I picked up this audiobook and I kind of groaned because, I mean, self-help books tend to be boring. Let's be completely honest.

So for the past six months or so, I've been avoiding them. I haven't been reading them. And I've really noticed a huge correlation between my overall motivation and the fact that I'm not listening or reading as many self-help books. So I grab this atomic habits and I'm hooked. I'm going to give a breakdown to you of the things that I found the most helpful so far and how they can really apply specifically to your home, to well, every area of your life, but how applying these in your can have a really dramatic impact on your entire life. So in this book, the author really talks about how big of an impact a very small change can have.

So if you're doing something that's only going to make your life maybe 1% better, how over time that small change can grow into a really big, big, big change in your life. 1% better would be like spending 10 minutes going for a walk every day or spending 5 minutes doing a quick tidy up. You may be looking around your home and thinking, oh my gosh, I have to declutter. I have to organize the whole thing. I have to clean it. Or you might look at yourself and think, oh, I have 50 pounds to lose. Or I want to get in shape.

Or you may be in debt. And you're thinking, how am I possibly going to pay off $50,000 in debt? but again we're focusing on the end result so how can we focus on paying off 1% of that debt how could we how could we focus on just going for a 10 minute walk today how could we focus on improving our life in just a little minuscule way and what are those habits that we can start creating that are going to be improving our life in that small 1% way now he's going to explain it a lot better than I am and I honestly really recommend this book, but I know for myself I was, I don't want to say hoarder, but I was definitely drowning in clutter. All of my hidden spots were full. My house was a disaster.

I felt like I was cleaning all the time, or I would just not clean at all, and things would become an absolute pig sties seemingly overnight. There wasn't, you know, a middle ground for me. It was either my house was really tidy, but all my closets were shoved, but it looked tidy, or my house was a complete and utter pig stye. and in order to have it look tidy, I had to work my freaking butt off to get there. I changed that from having a home that just stays tidy all the time by making a really small change. It wasn't like I took a weekend and decluttered my whole house. It wasn't like I got organized overnight.

It wasn't like that at all. It was really small changes. Starting with every night before I went to bed doing a quick nighttime routine that involved a five-minute tidy-up, a five-minute pickup. It involved doing one small drawer at a time or decluttering just one grocery bag of stuff at time. And sometimes I would not even do something every day. You know, I'd sort of fall off the wagon,

but I'd get back on. And those small little changes, that small habit, added up to a really big impact. But the same can be said of our bad habits. If every day we get ready for the day and we leave, leave our brush or our makeup or our bathroom products all over the counter, if we do that every day, it's going to add up to a huge, gigantic mess. If every day we just do something small like not empty the trash can because it's not totally full. So over time, it's going to be a heaping

garbage dump all around the garbage can or on your counters. If every day we're like, oh, I'm not going to do the dishes today. I'll wait till tomorrow. Before we know it, Our house is overrun with rodents and bugs and smelly dirty dishes. It doesn't take long for bad habits to also add up and compound. So be mindful of that. Realize that every time you make a decision to take the easy way out or indulge in that bad habit, however smaller insignificant it might seem, that one cookie, or I'm just going to have a couple of treats today,

or I'm just going to have that one French vanilla coffee. If we do that every day, it adds up to weight gain. And if every day we just decide, you know what, today I'm not going to have that one cookie. Today I'm going to go without. I'm going to resist that donut. That's going to add up to a big change over time too. And of course the same applies to our home. If every day we're like, I'm going to take five minutes to tidy today,

over time we're going to see a big impact from that five minute tidy but if every day we decide oh i'm just going to skip it today and do it tomorrow that's going to add up to a bigger mess so it isn't our huge glaring bad habits that impact our life and it isn't those huge amazing habits that we have that make the biggest difference positive difference it's the little small things that we're doing throughout the day and we only have to make a small small little change to see a really big impact. The other thing that I found this book mentioned that was really, really helpful was to stop focusing so much on end goals.

I mean, I'm a huge goal planner, but I think everybody has the goal of having a clean and organized home, don't they? I mean, it isn't like people are like, my goal is to live in a hovel. No, of course not. We all want the same things out of life. We want to be debt-free.

We want to have successful businesses. we want to, you know, have financial freedom, we want to have a tidy home, we want to have happy relationships. Our goals are all the same. And yes, writing them down definitely helps you achieve that goal more, but is it just having a goal that makes it happen? Or is it taking those small steps towards that goal that makes that happen? And how do we motivate ourselves on a daily basis to take those small steps, especially because a small step doesn't get us immediate results. We run for 10 minutes. We're just as flabby as we were before we ran. We tidy up for five minutes. The house is still a disaster. How do we keep being consistent? And a secret that they mentioned in the book

that I find so simple yet remarkably true is stop focusing on the end result. And, and a secret that and instead focus on our identity that's tied to that end result. So here's an example for me of how this really changed my life. For a really long time, I thought I was a messy person. I would tell myself and other people I was a disaster. I was just a naturally disorganized person. I was just messy. I was a basket case.

My house was a mess. That was my identity. That was part of my identity. whether I wanted it to be or not, I really believed that about myself, and I had evidence to prove it. I had a messy home. I would tidy my home and it would be messy again a few days later. I had evidence to support the fact that I was a messy person. And when I started doing organizing and cleaning and decluttering on a more regular basis, I started having evidence for the opposite.

I still felt in my heart that I was still a messy person, but every time I organized a drawer, or every time someone would walk into my home and say, oh, your house is so tidy, that was evidence that I was actually good at being a homemaker. And it felt good. And that end result, that identity of myself, it feels good. I want to think of myself as a tidy, organized person. and when I started to actually think that way about myself in my head, it wasn't that I had to push myself to do my 10-minute tidy up.

I did that because I was a tidy person. I'm not sure if I'm really explaining this as well as I could be, but hopefully I am. It was that little shift in mindset with examples to prove it and looking for those examples to change my identity from a messy person to a tidy person that made me a tidy person. Nothing had actually changed. Naturally, I still drop things as I go and I'm not a detail-oriented person. I'm not a micro thinker. I'm a macro thinker. I'm still that sort of flighty person, but I now identified as a tidy and organized person. And that doesn't

mean my home was always tidy and organized. But on the scale, I leaned towards thinking of myself as a tidy person and taking pride in that identity. I've met a lot of people who really are into exercise. My friend Mary Ellen, she loves to run and she calls herself a runner. She identifies as a runner. So it isn't a chore for her to get up and go for a run every day because that's her identity. It's something that she's proud that that's part of her identity. and so we need to look at how can we make shifts in our lives to change our identity? What are those things that we do that are negative that we identify as being part of our personality? And how can we shift that to a positive? How can we stop calling ourselves messy,

stop telling ourselves we're not good at keeping home, we're not good at cooking, we're not good at cleaning, we're not good at decorating? And how can we make small changes is to prove to ourselves that we are good at those things. And it doesn't mean perfect. It doesn't mean better than everybody else. It's just getting to a place where we can really change our negative thinking about ourselves and change our overall identity. Because the truth is when we have an end goal,

when we want to become financially successful, our identity is someone who's good with money. That's what we really want. We want to change our identity to somebody who's bad with money, to somebody who's good with money. So when we can change our identity by making small, easy steps, that's how we can have such a huge impact on our actual goal and actually achieve that goal. So it's just a different way of thinking about it. And I found that really eye-opening because without even realizing it, that is the catalyst of change in my own life. life was when I finally stopped identifying myself as a messy, disorganized, hot mess,

and started thinking of myself as a tidy person, started feeling pride in the fact that being organized was part of my identity. And of course, I still have imposter syndrome. And in course, I still feel embarrassed about my home and I don't feel like I'm actually that clean and organized. But overall, I identify as a person. more of a tidy and clean person as I do as somebody who tends to be messy. And so look at your own life and those habits that you want to change, those big goals you want to achieve, and ask yourself the identity that's associated with that. If you want to lose weight, if you want to get in shape, it's probably that you want to identify as a healthy person. So ask yourself, what would a healthy person do?

what decisions what small changes would a healthy person make and it doesn't mean you constantly have to run and work out and eat salads but maybe when you go to pick up that cookie you think that split second I'm going to have some carrot sticks instead because that's what a healthy person would do and over time you're going to change your thinking and become that healthy person so before you go to bed when you're looking at your kitchen and you're seeing dishes and mess and piles I want you to ask yourself, what a tidy person do before they went to bed? And the answer is going to be, spend five minutes and clean the kitchen. So go ahead and do that. It doesn't matter if the rest of the house is a mess or those piles of laundry. That doesn't matter. We're making one small

change towards your new identity so you can change that and achieve that goal. So thank you guys so much for listening. I hope you're feeling and motivated. And again, the book is called Atomical habits. I definitely recommend checking it out. I really am enjoying the audiobook. It's great to plop that on so you can still move around the home, maybe declutter a drawer or do the dishes or put away a load of laundry and kill two birds with one stone. You're improving yourself by reading a self-help book and you're getting things done in the home at the same time. Thank you guys so much for listening and I'll see you next time.