Clutterbug - Real-Life Hacks and Tips to Declutter, Organize and Clean your Home Fast - Make Your Own Motivation | Clutterbug Podcast # 47

Episode Date: April 24, 2018

Lacking motivation? Want to know how to get some? Stop waiting for it to happen and MAKE it happen.  You CAN make your own motivation and it's easier than you think! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey guys and welcome back to the Clutterbug podcast. Today we're talking about motivation. So thanks so much for joining me. Today we're going to talk about motivation and I guess have get some when you don't have any. And I pretty much never have any. That's the honest truth. I'm just a lazy person and I have ADHD and I'm scatterbrain. I'm. I'm scatterbrain. and I am the type of person that without external expectations, which means, you know, other people putting deadlines on me or holding me accountable, I have little to know hope in getting anything done. That's the honest truth. I'm just not that type of person to self-motivate. You guys know I'm a big fan of Gretchen Rubin's book The Four Tendencies, and it talks about the different personality

types when it comes to motivation and self-regulation and all of that stuff. And I'm definitely an obligator. I'm the type of person who if somebody else, you know, holds me accountable to something, or if I've made an appointment, or if I've scheduled to do something, or I've committed to someone else to have something done by a deadline, I'm more likely to achieve it. But if I give myself that same sort of deadline or whatever, I just, I just don't do it. I just hope, I'm not the type of person to hold myself accountable. So I work from home. I don't have a boss. I don't have anyone, you know, to be accountable to you. I don't have anyone to setting my hours or even having any expectations when it comes to what I should get done in a day. So I have a really hard time getting

motivated. And lately it's been worse than ever. I'm definitely going through a funk. Let's blame the weather. I mean, I'm always putting the blame on something. It's, I'm busy, or I'm not feeling well, or it's the weather, or it's, you know, all this stuff going on. But the truth is, it's me. And somebody made a comment the other day on Facebook, they talked about, you know, the difference between waiting for that motivation to come, waiting for it, and just taking it, just jumping in. And I am so guilty of this. I am so guilty, especially when it comes to exercise. I'm like, well, I just don't like exercise. I hate it. And I'm waiting until I guess I'm ready. I'm waiting until something happens and I feel that motivation to actually get out and start doing it.

and without that motivation I'm just like well it must not be the time or it's easy just to to throw it off and when I look at things in my life that I was successful at things that I'm able to accomplish the truth is there was never that motivation in the beginning there was never like oh you know this is I don't what I always hated cleaning but today I feel like cleaning and then you just start cleaning I mean sometimes that happens to a small degree, but for the most part, it was me finally like, all right, I'm going to put on my big girl pants and get this done. And what changed it from occasionally putting on my big girl pants, like, you know, once every few months and cleaning my house to perpetually staying in the habit of doing it

every day was forcing myself, even though I didn't feel like it, to do just 15 minutes. Like, that's it, Cass. That's all you have to do is 15 minutes. and setting the timer and then just doing the bare minimum but forcing myself to do it every single day. And it was a force and I was dragging it and I didn't want to. And I never had that feeling like excitement or, yay, I feel like doing it today. It didn't come. It wasn't there. I had to make myself do it like a parent would make a child make their bed.

And eventually, honestly, what happened was I didn't have to make myself do it anymore. It just became second nature, it became a habit. So I'm assuming it's the same way with exercise. Listen, I'm not sure. I'm assuming it's the same way with exercise. But the truth is I think it's the same way with everything in life that's hard. There are things that we do love to do. And maybe other people even think they're hard and we do them because we love them and we enjoy them.

But there's those mundane just have to be done things that we have to force us. ourselves to do. You don't have to like it. You just have to do it. And that's such a mantra that I think we all need to take into effect. I mean, we don't like to eat our vegetables, but we have to. Who actually enjoys brushing their teeth? No one, but we still have to do it. I don't like going to bed at night. There's the truth. I would stay up all night watching Netflix if I could, but I have to get up in the morning and get my kids ready for school. So I have to, you know, go to bed. I have to get up in the or there's these things that we have to do just as being human, as being part of adults. And unfortunately, taking care of ourselves and our home, taking care of ourselves and our body

physically, emotionally, and taking care of our home is part of those things. Now, we don't have to have it be some Pinterest-worthy, amazing space, but we do have to have it clean and sanitary. But there's another aspect that comes, I know for me anyways, that comes with when I made that transition to forcing myself every single night to just clean the kitchen, despite all the other cool stuff that I'd rather do, like, I don't know, anything else, let's be honest. Forcing myself to do that meant the next morning, I felt better about myself. I woke up to a clean kitchen and I wasn't stressed. I wasn't feeling overwhelmed.

I wasn't feeling just like, like absolute crap about myself. It set the tone for the day. and so there was a lot of positives coming from this habit and it meant that I no longer had to scrub hardened on food that was a couple of days old trust me I've been there and done that I've thrown out pots and pans because I've left them for so long they were so beyond cleaning I've thrown out dishes I've lived off of paper plates I've had where I've had to go to the laundromat with garbage bags and garbage and garbage bags of clothes because absolutely every article of clothing I owned was dirty. I've been a complete and utter slob and drowning in clutter and garbage and

just despite my best efforts, I never was that person who could keep up on cleaning because I was waiting for that motivation. When I, what really changed was forcing my self. to do a little bit every night no matter what and that slowly became a habit like brushing your teeth and it slowly transitioned to forcing myself to do a load of laundry a day and forcing myself to now pick up after myself so when i'm done doing with something if it takes a minute or less putting it right away and now this is second nature i mean honestly i don't even give my house a second thought it's just perpetually staying clean and organized and and and that's all there is to it but part of of me has forgotten. I've forgotten how I got here. Do you know what I'm saying?

And yeah, so that Facebook post about you don't have to like it, you just have to do it, and stop waiting for those feelings of motivation to come and just grasping it and taking it is so very true. And what you're going to find, I think, when you force yourself to get started and get going, you force yourself to create that motivation for yourself instead of waiting for it to come, is that it's going to get you started. But the momentum is going to keep you going. That's what's going to keep you going. And habit is going to be what makes it a long-term success. So you guys know, we've talked before about Marie Condos, the, you know, the happiness, the, oh God, I'm forgetting the name here. I'm totally blanking. All of you are probably cringing.

Marie Kondo wrote the life-changing magic of tidying up there. I knew it. I just have a terrible memory. She wrote that book, and it has changed so many people's lives. But for me, I just, I love the idea of the book. But I could not find the motivation to, like, grab every article of clothing I had in the house and make a huge pile. And when I did attempt to start that stuff, a big huge declutter like that, I ended up getting in over my head. I ended up making a big mess and then getting tired or life got in the way and I couldn't

finish it and I was left feeling really defeated so I wasn't going ahead and doing it again, you know, the next weekend. I was like, well, I'm never doing that again. I just totally made my house look worse by trying to declutter. So while this, that method, that method of like one weekend decluttering everything in your house has worked for so many people. I think it's amazing. It may not work for everyone. And so the approach that I took was way slower. It didn't have as big of an impact. That's for sure. But it was like a 15 minute a day, a drawer a day, a shelf a day, decluttering 21 things a day. And over time, it took a long time, not like a weekend, like the Marie Condo method. It took a really long time. But I got there. I still got there. And the best part of that

method. I'm not saying it's a better method. I'm not like, this is better because it totally, again, depends on the person. But I think even if you've done the Marie condo method, the benefit of taking the 15 minute a day approach and scheduling yourself that time every single day at 8 o'clock from 8 to 8.15, you're going to work on your house. And this doesn't include dishes. This doesn't include, you know, that's just part of making dinner. You make dinner, you eat dinner, you clean up the dishes. I'm talking about actual like cleaning and putting things away and tidying every single night for 15 minutes. When you see that you're doing that every day, it's about habit forming. It's about it's about making that a brand new habit. It's about making the new habit of

picking up after yourself as you go. That's going to have you have a long-term success and not fill your house up again. I can't tell you how many times, you know, I've talked with people who who are in hoarding situations that have had friends or family or even professionals come in and empty their house, like take everything out, donate it, leave them with just the minimum, just to have those people fill their house up again in a matter of months or perhaps a year. Like, it's just, you know, it's a band-aid. It's not a long-term solution for changing what got you there in the first place. And if you are dealing with clutter or a mess or dirty dishes, it isn't just,

the fact that you have too much and you have to, you know, purge into clutter, it's the habits that got you in that situation in the first place. Maybe it was over shopping. Maybe it was that you just weren't putting things away as soon as you were done with them. Maybe it's that you weren't making purging part of your regular routine. There are habits that got us into the situation that we're in now. So we need to create new habits to get us out and to make sure that we never go back. And it's habits that really make life easy. That's what this is all about. For me, it isn't about having a clean house so it looks clean. It isn't about having it. It's not about how it looks at all. I mean, that's a benefit. I think it makes me happy to have a clean house. But what's more important,

what it's really about is having less time spent cleaning. It's giving you more time in your day. It's giving you less stress and more happiness. It's about improving the quality of your life, not just the appearance of your home. So yeah, I'm totally getting off topic, but when it comes to motivation, if you are like me and you're the type of person who is waiting for it to come, waiting for it to feel it, let me assure you that's probably never going to happen. And we have to take it. We have to force ourselves. We have to parent ourselves. We have to put on our big girl pants and do the crap in life that we don't like to do because we have to. And so that's my message today.

Put on your big girl pants. Let's do the dishes. Let's make a nighttime cleaning routine. Let's just get it done. So we have time to do the things in life that are way cooler than cleaning our house. And eventually, I promise you, I promise, if you do this every single day, even if you skip a couple days, that's okay. but get right back on the wagon and try every single day before you know it it's going to be a habit like brushing your teeth and you're no longer going to have to wake up to a messy home i promise you

for real because if i can do it you guys i like the biggest slob if i can do it you totally can do it so thank you guys so much for listening um let's seize the day together let's accomplish something today that we've been putting off and and and make our own motivation. Thanks for listening and I'll see you next time.