Clutterbug - Real-Life Hacks and Tips to Declutter, Organize and Clean your Home Fast - How to Become a ”Naturally” Clean and Tidy Person in just 30 Days | Clutterbug Podcast # 31

Episode Date: December 16, 2017

You CAN train your brain to become a "naturally" clean and tidy person in just 30 days through the power of habit!  Learn why you are messy and how you can transform yourself into a tidy person in just one short month.  Pre-order my new book "Cluttered Mess to Organized Success" HERE Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey guys and welcome back to the Clutterbug podcast. Today I want to talk about habits. The good, the bad, and the ugly. I really think that habit is sort of the foundation of our lives. And if we have a lot of positive habits, we can have a lot of positive outcomes. And if we have a lot of sort of negative habits, obviously we're going to have negative outcomes. And what I mean by, I guess, a habit are those things that we're. do without even realizing that we do them every single day or on a regular basis. So obviously

brushing our teeth is a habit and washing our face is a habit and the people who are really into fitness, you know, working out every day is a habit. It's things you don't even realize that you're doing. Chewing my nails is a habit. That would probably be considered a bad one. So we have all these things that we sort of doing, I guess, subconsciously that are shaping our lives. It's the little things that we just do without even thinking about that is having a really big impact on our lives. So let's talk about habits and how to change them, how to start new ones, and what it really means when it comes to your home. Obviously, I mean, my whole channel and this podcast is about your house and becoming clutter-free just because it's been really life-changing for me,

for my anxiety, for my stress, for the way the house looks. I mean, that's a side effect. The really big thing that has changed is just my happiness level and the fact that I'm saving a ton of time not having to look for things anymore and I'm not feeling that anxiety that comes with having clutter. I still have anxiety when I leave the house, you know, I have a lot of anxiety when I leave the house. But at least when I'm home, I am definitely now anxiety free. And honestly, I didn't even realize that the clutter was causing me anxiety at the time. I was just so used to it. I was so used to every closet being jam-packed and not being able to find things. It was just the way I lived that I didn't even realize the difference in my mood,

in my stress levels until all of that was gone. Then it was like, I finally could just take a deep breath and relax and feel really, really happy and content in my home. I think the big change that happened to enable me to go from crazy drowning and clutter to a pretty clean and tidy house perpetually was a few key habits and changing a few key bad habits. So let's talk about those bad house habits that a lot of us have and I definitely had and sometimes I can fall back into doing this but I try to stop myself right away before it becomes a bad habit again. And the first one is leaving things out when you're done using it.

This is a bad habit. You make a sandwich, you leave the bread on the counter and the knife and everything else. So you brush your teeth, you leave your toothpaste, and your toothbrush on the counter. You get ready in the morning, you leave your makeup out. Even with me cleaning the house, I would leave my cleaning products out. So this is a bad habit. This is a habit that we've done, and it isn't laziness. Well, it is.

I mean, part of it is laziness, but part of it is that it's something that we've always done. We've just left it out. Maybe our mother's cleaned up after us. Maybe we really didn't care for a large part of our lives if it was picked up or not. So we have a habit of leaving our things out. So now we need to have a habit of putting things away when we're done with them. And like all great habits, you can completely start a new habit and have it be second nature and not even think about doing it in 30 days.

So it takes your brain 30 days to develop a new habit, give or take. After 30 days of continually picking up after yourself, you know, you make a sandwich, you immediately put the bread back, you put the peanut butter bag, or the meat and the cheese, and you tidy up the space. If you're doing this consistently for 30 days, you won't ever have to make yourself do that again. It'll be second nature for the rest of your life. And lo, everything's going to be tidier. But that's easier said than done, isn't it? I mean, pick up after yourself. Pick after yourself. It's pretty much like, of course everyone wants to do that. So why is it that some people can and that some people just can't.

It's like every habit. I'm going to get up and go for a jog every morning. I mean, we say that. We want to. But how do we actually start doing those things? Especially when it comes to a habit like picking up after yourself all day long, that's not even something you can do once. Every time you brush your teeth,

you have to put your toothbrush and toothpaste back. Every time, you know, you take your clothes off. to put them in the dirty clothes instead of putting them on the floor. We're constantly using belongings in our home. So we constantly have to be in that mind frame of picking up after ourselves. So how do we do that? How do we remind ourselves basically 24-7 to change a habit? And that is really where the difficulty comes.

And that is the difference between someone who has a really cluttered messy home and for someone who has a really clean home. The person with the clean home already has. that habit second nature and the person who's living in a really messy house has the habit of leaving things out. So let's change that. Let's swap those habits for those messy people so they can be in the habit of being cleaner or tidier. And there are a couple of tricks that we can do to make it a little bit easier because changing a big habit like that is huge. It is huge. But I want you to remind yourself it's only for 30 days. You only have to work.

at this for 30 days and then you won't have to give it another second thought. You will just naturally do it to a degree. This is my disclaimer. I have to, as opposed to say, there are times where I'm like, oh, I don't want to, you know, I make a huge mess doing a craft and it's awesome and I'm crafting my butt off. And then at the end, I'm like, oh, I don't really want to put all the craft supplies away. So you're still going to have that little groan about those bigger messes that you make. What I'm talking about are those tiny things that you do. You make yourself a coffee, you put in the sugar, you stir it, you set the spoon down on the counter. Instead, without even thinking, you're going to put that spoon in the dishwasher. That's the type of habit that I'm talking

about, not the habit of putting away a load of laundry instantly. That's a bigger thing. We're going to talk about the little thing. We want you to instantly, the things that take a minute or less, get in the habit of doing them immediately. So that, I mean, that leads me into the one-minute rule. So for 30 days, I want you to focus on the one-minute rule. If something takes you a minute or less to do, do it immediately. Immediately. And you probably want to write the one-minute rule on a piece of paper and put it on your fridge, put it in your bathroom, put it in your bedroom, some are really visual as a visual reminder of the one-minute rule. And again, you only have to do this for 30 days.

You're going to mess up. There's going to be times where you just don't even think about it and you set that spoon right on the counter or you brush your teeth and you just leave your toothbrush out on the counter instead of putting it away. That's going to happen. But let's set up some visual reminders to remind ourselves of the one-minute rule to try to really get that into our brains. The other thing we can do is on our phones, on our tablets, on some device, we can set a perpetual, like an alarm to go off every hour, every 60 minutes, just when your home time, like set it between, you know, maybe 4 and 8 o'clock,

to do a five second tidy. So the alarm's going to go off and it'll come up and it'll say, tidy up. And you'll be like, oh, when you'll look around, you're like, why did I leave that chip bag on the counter? or why did I not put my coffee cup in the dishwasher? Why did I leave it sitting here? So having an electronic reminder can really help us sort of change and adapt that behavior because it isn't going to be in the forefront of your mind.

It isn't going to be something that you're going to remember all the time. The other thing we can really do to help us remember is have like a buddy, a partner in the house. And kids are actually really good at this. if you give your children a job of sort of being the boss of you in this area, as annoying as it's going to be, they're going to jump all over this. So if you tell your son, can you remind me, you're going to be in charge. You're going to be my self-discipline for the next 30 days. If you see me using something or doing something, can you remind me to put it away when I'm done? Ask your spouse. Ask someone else that maybe you're living with to help you if you're living with other people. and for whatever reason it's way easier for other people to to point out your errors than it is for you to

even realize you're doing it and it's definitely um it's definitely a small way that you can help retrain your brain and i guess that's what a habit totally is you're training your brain so visual reminders audio like audio reminders so a buzz and alarm or having you know support of friends and family to help. It's short-term pain for long-term gain. It is going to be a challenge for 30 days to change this behavior, to constantly pick up after yourself. But I can promise you once it becomes second nature, you won't have to work at it anymore and your life will be different. You won't have to come into the kitchen and, oh, I have to put away all the things that you, you know, have left out through a day of just making sandwiches or, or cook.

or a few dishes here and there, that adds up. It adds up really quickly. And the other thing is, you're probably thinking, what about the rest of my family? They're not picking up after themselves. The truth is, we have to do this for everyone in the family, but it begins with you. And maybe you're the mom, maybe you're the dad, maybe you're the kid listening to this podcast. But we can't help others change if we haven't made that change yet ourselves. So the first thing we do, is create the habit for ourselves. And then we can help other people in our family adapt that exact same habit, the exact same way, but you being the helper. And yes, you're probably going to have to nag your family. You're probably going to have to set up visual reminders for them.

But eventually, 30 days, they will be able to change that habit as well. And if you explain it to them like that, that you're not nagging them just because you're like, you want a clean house. it's because you want to change a fundamental habit that they have so that for the rest of their lives, they don't have to worry as much about clutter and mess and cleaning. You're going to give them really a gift and talk about it as a positive thing. They're going to be much more open to jumping on board and dealing with the hard work that comes with instilling a new habit. You've probably heard of people say that they're a naturally tidy person or they're naturally messy.

And I find this so funny. And I say this too. I've said this in the past. But the truth is that being tidy or being messy is a learned behavior. We can basically blame our parents if we're messy. It is a habit that we've developed probably very young where we just drop things where it laid and we never had to get into the habit of picking up after ourselves. And then fast forward a couple of months.

it only takes 30 days of us perhaps being messy as even a toddler without correcting that behavior for it to then be a habit. And a lot of people say, oh, you know, they're naturally messy or it's hereditary or they've been messy their whole lives and we're sort of stuck then into this box. But the truth is it's completely a changeable habit. And obviously, if the longer we've had this habit, the harder it is going to be to change it, but it is changeable. So we're going to blame our parents if we're messy but we're also going to realize that if you're a parent that we can create the tidy habit in our children we can give them that gift very young that they can carry with them their whole lives and they'll grow up telling people that they're a naturally tidy person and

they were just born that way and and they'll never know to thank us for for instilling that in them when they're young but it definitely is a lot easier to create a new habit when you're a young person But that doesn't mean it's impossible to do when you're older. It just means for 30 whole entire days, we're going to have to ride ourselves or get friends and family to help us use visual reminders, use, you know, auditory reminders until we get into the swing of things and it's second nature and then we can brag about being naturally tidy people ourselves. So I want you to give it a try and thank you guys so much for listening to this

podcast. This podcast is brought to you by my new book. No, it isn't, but I'm shamelessly plugging my new book, Cluttered Mest, Organized Success, and it's basically based on the exact recipe that I followed from transforming my life from super messy, just slob and have no idea even where to start when it comes to cleaning and organizing into somebody who, I'm using air quotes, is a naturally clean and organized person. It's not natural, but I have trained. tidy and organized person. And not only that, but now I'm able to make my living helping others. So I have all the lists that I used and schedules and routines because for me, that was the secret. That was the secret to just training me was using paper, visual reminders,

and forcing myself to create new habits, new routines that transformed my life. It really wasn't that hard. It really wasn't that hard. It was the simple fact of getting started. Momentum kept me going and it has carried me to where I am today. So thank you guys so much for listening. I hope you enjoyed and you can pre-order that new book cluttered mess to organize success on any bookstore. Amazon. Barnes & Noble is actually shipping early so you can get it before Christmas. If you order from Barnes & Noble, it's on sale at Target this week. And the Kindle version also includes the free printables. So you can pay the like $7 for the Kindle version

and still get over 100 of the printables and all of those beautiful custom labels that come inside the book for one low price of just $7. I know it's an infomercial. I'm sounding like that one. Anyways, thank you guys so much and I will see you next time.