Clutterbug - Real-Life Hacks and Tips to Declutter, Organize and Clean your Home Fast - How to Find Contentment by Blooming Where you are Planted | Clutterbug Podcast # 137

Episode Date: August 15, 2022

Let's talk about finding contentment by blooming where you are planted.  What I mean by this is making the best of your current situation.  Let's stop looking forward to tomorrow and let's start being grateful and content with the life we have today!   You can find more Clutterbug content here: Website: http://www.clutterbug.me YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@clutterbug TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@clutterbug_me Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/clutterbug_me/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Clutterbug.Me/   #clutterbug #podcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Are you happy with your life right now? Like right now, are you overall feeling pretty good about where you are in life? Or are you always wishing for the things you don't have or looking forward to tomorrow? Hey, clutterbugs. Welcome back to the clutterbug podcast where every week we talk about everything from cleaning to organizing to just generally finding more happiness and simplifying our lives. Today we're going to talk about finding contentment by blooming where we're planted. And I think this means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. But for me, blooming where you're planted means no matter what situation you're in, we're kind of looking at the positive or making the best of it. I always think of a flower growing out of a sidewalk crack,

right? Where it's like, or in a dark alley somewhere. And you see this just beautiful flower growing out of nowhere, because we are going to have situations in our life that are not ideal. We're going to have situations that we wish we could change, but we still have to be grateful and find happiness and contentment with the life we have today, or we're always going to be looking forward to tomorrow. So we're going to be talking about this when it comes to our home and blooming while we're planted in the home we have now. I'm definitely dealing with this at the moment, I want to move so badly. And sometimes when you, I mean, your thoughts shape everything about you. So when you start looking at what you want in the future, which in this case is a

little bit bigger of a house, a more private space so I can podcast or film videos and I don't have to tell my family to be quiet all the time, I get in this mind frame of looking at all the things that are wrong with the house we have right now and the things I want that will be right in the next house. And the more I do that, the more my mindset is this house is too small. It, you know, it's not good for our family. And I start feeling really negative about the house that I'm living in now. And everywhere I look, I'm noticing cracks and I'm noticing chipped paint and I'm noticing things that need to be updated and replaced. And I start feeling really bad about the that I'm in right now. And maybe you can relate to this and maybe you can't, but we're not always

going to have the house of our dreams. We're not always going to be in a situation that is ideal, honestly. But when we get in this negative mind, it's sort of like a cycle. It's a trap. The more we think about the negative things, the more we see the negative things, the more negative we feel, and it just feeds into each other and feeds and feeds and grows until we're really feeling just miserable on a day-to-day basis. So definitely blooming where you're planted in your home means it's not about renovating. It's not about, you know, completely gutting your house. It's about giving it a hug. What can we do to feel love towards our home? This might be just making a list of all the things about our home that we actually like. Or it could be taking time to clean or declutter or organize a space

or paint our front door, you know, a color we love, so that we start feeling really more loving, positive feelings about our home. Because our home is the foundation for our entire life. If you wake up in the morning and you look around and you think, ugh, I hate this house. I hate my bedroom. I hate this bathroom. Oh, it's so dirty. There's clutter everywhere. We're leaving the house, whether you go to work or not, we're starting our day with a really negative mindset. And we also feel that way coming home. We should feel so much happiness coming home, right? After a long day, like, oh, I'm back in my house where I can rest and relax.

But if we're feeling negative towards our home, you might find that you are making little excuses to avoid coming home or stay out a little longer or run more errands. And this all builds from our mindset. It comes from us thinking negative thoughts and not positive thoughts. So there's lots of things that we can do to bloom where we're planted in the home we're in now. I've definitely done this for years. I went years living in a tent. I was a homeless teen.

I remember the first time I got my apartment. I was 19 years old and it was the first time that I had ever, I hadn't lived at home since I was 15. But at 19, it was mine. It was the first apartment that was mine and I had no furniture. And I remember picking things out of the garbage. I had a shopping cart that I carried. like this old couch I picked out of the garbage like looking back it's so gross right but I was so proud and I found a kitchen table and I found an old television stand and anytime I would get paid

and have a little bit of money left over I would maybe get a picture or a throw pillow or you know even a new tea towel for my kitchen and I felt real pride and love for my home even though it was a run down horrible apartment with dumpster diving furniture. I bloomed where I planted. I spent time to make it the best that it could be with what I had. And that generated and cultivated a real love for my space. And sometimes I fall away from that. And I have been lately, I've been really focusing on all the things about my home that I hate. And I haven't been spending time to really nurture and love it. I haven't been deep cleaning it. I haven't been taking time to freshen it, even if it's just fresh flowers for your table. Little things that we can do to hug our home, to love

and nurture our home. So it loves and nurtures us back. But aside from our home, we have to do the same thing in our life. In our life we need to bloom where we're planted. They say that pressure and stress creates beautiful things, right? So diamonds withstand incredible pressure during their creation. Clams have this like annoying sand that they turn into a pearl. Caterpillars. I mean, how much stress caterpillar goes through creating that cocoon and having to break free to be a beautiful butterfly. And there are some plants and flowers that only grow and bloom after a fire. So after everything's been burnt in a fire, it's called the Baker's Globe Mallow. And it's a flower that only blooms after an entire forest has been destroyed by a forest fire. So all of the trees and

everything's just ravaged. And these beautiful pink purple flowers appear all over the landscape. Like they cover it coming out of the ashes. This flower requires really, really, really high heat to break out of its outer shell of its seed. So that's why they only grow after like a wildfire. I love this, right? Sometimes you have to feel. feel the heat. Sometimes you have to feel the pressure of life to really appreciate the good. To really even create the good in your life, I think of all the best things that have ever happened to me. And they've come after my biggest mistakes. They've come after my biggest failures. And when we live a life trying to constantly avoid pain and avoid failure

and avoid anything that feels uncomfortable in any way so we don't have to be anxious about out life, we're living a small life. We're missing out on opportunities because with big risk comes that big reward and with pain comes the pleasure. And when we lean into those uncomfortable things and things that feel, I don't want to do it, when we push through that on the other side is usually huge success. So stepping out of our comfort zone, doing uncomfortable things, doing scary things and I know it's not pleasant but it's growth it's real growth and so when I look around at all the people in my life who are really successful who I look at and think wow I want to have a life like yours when I talk to them they've all had big things they've had to overcome

they've had big challenges and they've made big hard tough decisions and they've done incredible things that are so terrifying to push through that fear to get to the life to get that life and so i think of that i think of them as blooming where they're planted i think of them as those beautiful baker globe mallow flowers who had to be put under pressure who had to be stressed who had to be scared out of their mind and doing it anyways to get that beautiful bloom, that beautiful life. So I guess what I'm saying is a few things about blooming where you're planted in life. It's about embracing the challenges. Sometimes life is just tough. We're not sugar-coating it here. Sometimes life just throws you so many lemons and I know they say, make some lemonade, right? Which is very cliche. But the truth is,

it's really important that we see these negatives and these challenges as an opportunity to stand up and change our lives for the better. How many people do you know that you can think of that complain all the time that have that victim mentality? Oh, I would have this if only that didn't happen or it's not fair. It's my boss's fault. It's my spouse's fault. It's my ex's fault. So many reasons why we don't have the life that we want oh I'm single I'll have all of these things someday when I find my soulmate or someday when I find my dream job or someday when I have my house or someday when X, Y, Z, then I'll be happy. This is such a human condition. It's such a human condition. I think back about so many challenges we've had in in our life, so many challenges.

You guys, I know I've talked about this so many times before, but I spent five years growing my YouTube channel called Malatoose 79 and I finally reached a point where I realized I could make money doing this. I got my first paycheck. It was more money than I made doing my daycare. And I was like, this is incredible. Oh my gosh. I'm so lucky. I felt so much joy. And the very next month, I got a message from Google from YouTube saying, we are canceling your channel. You can't get adsense. There's invalid clicking. And that's it. Back then, that was it. I would never make money from Malato's 79 channel ever again, and I still don't to this day. And I had over a hundred thousand subscribers at the time. Five years I had worked on this day in and day out, never making a dime

with the dream of someday. It finally happened and it was immediately taken away. I was devastated. Devastated. I cried my face off. It was awful, but it was also the best thing that ever happened to me, to my business anyways. Because, after, wallowing for a little while I was like I can do two things I can quit I can tuck my tail between my legs I can feel sorry for myself or I can start again and I started a new channel called clutterbug and and I had to start it under my husband's name because that's the way Google works and I couldn't switch the subscribers over it doesn't work like that I'm starting from scratch it took two more years to get back up to where I was two solid years not getting paid a

dime. Best thing I ever did. And I know this isn't something everybody can do. So let's talk about another thing that happened in our family. My husband and I got married very young. We had our daughter. Then we had our second daughter. We had our home. We finally got two vehicles. I felt like, woo. You know, life's going really well. Brand new baby. Then 2008 came, which was this huge financial crisis here in the city that we live in. And my husband lost his job. I was on mat leave and and I was only running a little daycare. I wasn't making very much money at all. There was zero way we were going to be able to pay the bills.

There was nobody was hiring. Nobody was hiring. And unemployment insurance that we would get for Joe, having lost his job, didn't even pay the mortgage and our food. What the heck were we going to do? It was desperate times. And I didn't know what to do. And I was terrified.

And my husband said, I think I want to start a business. Like, what a nut job. Start a business in the middle of a recession when nobody's hiring so scary. We took out a business loan from the bank and he started an engineering company. And within five years, he had grown that to a multi-million dollar company because the recession closed so many other engineering firms that by the time he got started and was like getting clients, there was no competition. Losing his job was the best opportunity. It was an incredible opportunity. to take a scary, terrifying chance and turn it into an amazing thing. But this isn't what we normally do. Normally, we complain. We kind of hide away. We get depressed. We close ourselves off.

We feel sorry for ourselves. We have that victim mentality. But what we need to do is see these challenges as an opportunity to bloom, to change our circumstances, to take a risk to be uncomfortable. I am not recommending that you guys quit your job and do anything like this, but what can we do? How can we look at something in our lives that we are not happy with and how can we make it better? What can we do? What can we do? It doesn't matter if it's scary or anxious. You know, trust your gut. What can you do to take action on your life? Stop complaining. Stop making excuses and take action.

Before I talk about the final, and my favorite way to find. contentment, to bloom where you're planted, to appreciate the life and find joy in every day. I have an incredible tip that actually works, but before we talk about that, I have to thank KiwiCo for sponsoring today's podcast. KiwiCo is a monthly subscription box that comes just for kids, and it's all about discovering STEM. So science, technology, engineering, art, math, but it's really seriously fun. Every single month my kids get a box and this month, this month's project, they are actually building adorable little robots that pick up dimes and like pop them in their mouth. We love this because Joe's an engineer and we want our kids to really find this fun.

But it's hard as a parent. It's hard to get kids off a tablet and really doing educational learning activities. But KiwiCo takes care of it for us and everything we need for this project's come in the box. We don't need any supplies. They do it by themselves. It has step-by-step instructions. It's so fun, and they have something that they can be proud of at the end of this. It's something for all ages, and right now you can make the last of summer more awesome with KiwiCo. Get 30% off your first month, plus free shipping on any crate line with the coupon code, clutter at kiwico.com.

That's 30% off your first month at K-I-W-I-C-O-N. dot com promo code clutter so the final way to really find contentment to bloom where you're planted is to be grateful and every i know i'm rolling my own eyes when i'm talking about this but i hired a life coach and i had a therapist for about two years and every time i was talking to them i was so negative they both pointed this out to me i did not realize i did not have the self-awareness to realize how negative I was, but I was always like wishing for tomorrow or striving towards the next thing, whether it was, oh, I got to write this book or I'm going to do this podcast or I'll be happy when I get to a million subscribers on YouTube or when I get that television show or when I get,

I don't know, X, Y, Z. And the crazy thing is, every time I actually accomplish those goals, I immediately didn't care about them anymore. I didn't even take a day. to enjoy it, it was what's next. What's next? And it isn't just my job that I feel that way. It's, it's everything. You know, I'm, oh, I really want this new shiny thing or a new purse or a new television or a new bed or a new, I want to paint the whole house or I want a new kitchen. Not that I've got a new kitchen, but as soon as I get anything like that, I immediately look to the next thing I want. I think this is human nature. I think a lot of people do this, but when we do this to the extreme, we're left feeling empty. We're left feeling unhappy no matter what we get. We grow to

our fishbowl. It doesn't matter how big our lives get, how big our goals get, how big, how much things we buy. We always need and want more. And that's a really sad way to live your life. And what I've really found, and my therapist and my life coach, they all said the same thing, which was there's never a top to the mountain. It will never be enough if we cannot be grateful for what we have right now. And I know if you're listening to this, you probably think easier said than done or, you know, maybe for you or must be nice. But we all feel this way. No matter how much we have, there's always someone with more. We have to be grateful. So how do we do this? How do we change our mindset? Some people are great at this. I am not so great at this. I am not so great at this.

I have to have a gratitude journal. So I have a notebook beside my bed and I have an alarm in my phone and on my Alexa that reminds me to write down three things that I'm really grateful for. And I'm not always great at this. Some days, I'm really just resentful and I'm in a nasty mood and I'll just like, oh yeah, I got to write things I'm grateful for. I'm grateful I didn't murder my husband today because he was being a super dick, you know. I mean, sometimes I do that. I'm not going to lie. Sometimes it's a really passive aggressive, eye-rolling thing and sometimes I just skip it but most of the time I really have to rack my brain and I think I'm so grateful I get to work from home or I'm so grateful for my garden and the fresh

vegetables and that I get to bake zucchini bread and make zucchini fries and make fresh pico de gallo. I'm so grateful for that and then I think back the day and I'm like oh I'm so grateful I got to cuddle myel Milo in bed and we got to watch Star Wars again together and something happens in my brain I feel happier. I feel grateful. I'm making my mind choose positive thoughts instead of negative. For whatever reason, brain chemistry, I don't know, evolution. There's got to be a reason. But human nature is to often think of the negative. Think of what we don't have, what we need next. I guess it's survival, right? We need to think this way. We need to think about what's coming next in life and like we're in a rush to get there. but a gratitude journal can really make us so happy with the life we have today.

I want you to think back to when you were younger, 25, 26. This is when I started having like baby fever and I was like, I just want to get married. So, and I remember just, you know, I can't wait until he proposes. And then when Joe proposed, I couldn't wait to get married. And then I couldn't wait to buy our first house. I couldn't wait to have my first child. And then immediately was like, I want to have a second child. And then it was like, I need a bigger house.

I need a better career. I need, it was always what's next. There was never a moment of just like, yes, I made it. Now I'm like, I can't wait till I retire, right? And then you retire and what? You can't wait for the cottage. You can't wait for the next vacation. You can't wait for the next XYZ.

That's crazy. And then you can't wait till you die. I don't know. The point is, I'm going dark here, but we need to be mindful. We need to be proactive in being grateful for what we have today. because man life goes fast it flies by and if we're always focused on tomorrow and what we're going to get someday and we can't wait for that and we'll be happy then we're never going to get it we're never ever going to get it the happiness not the stuff the stuff will come but we will immediately

replace the happiness that we feel with that stuff with what's next and we continually chase something that unfortunately the truth is we might not ever get if your happiness is tied up in the someday the getting married the having kids that buying your own home the starting a business the whatever what if that doesn't happen for you then you'll never be happy finding contentment blooming where you're planted starts with being grateful and loving and nurturing the life and the home and the whatever today that you have right now. So write a gratitude journal. Clean something today. Maybe declutter something today. What can you paint? What can you organize? How can you rearrange your bedroom or some furniture? Can you rearrange some artwork on your walls? What can

you do to love your life and love your home a little bit more today? Because there is something really magical about loving the life you have today. Doing something small, doing something really small. to either improve your home a little bit or improve your life a little bit or even just writing down the things about your home or your life that you're so grateful for today, it has a huge impact on your happiness. So thank you guys so much for listening and I'm going to see you next time.