How to Organize Your Life and Declutter Using the Enneagram, Interview with Laurie Palau – Podcast
How to Organize Your Life and Declutter Using the Enneagram, Interview with Laurie Palau – Moms of Tweens and Teens
Hi friend, and welcome to the Moms of Tweens and Teens podcast. I am so happy that you are here and listening today.
Suppose you struggle with organization and clutter. In that case, if you are like, Oh my gosh, there’s so much to do, and I don’t even know what to do with my to-do list and where to start.
If you have a kid or kids who are disorganized and you can’t stand looking at their rooms, or if you look at other moms and you’re like, they seem to have everything together, what’s wrong with me? When I go to their home, it’s so clean, everything’s organized.
You will want to listen to today’s episode. My special guest is Lori Palau, the author of Hot Mess, a Practical Guide to Getting Organized. She hosts the popular weekly podcast This Organized Life, which has over 3 million downloads.
She founded Simply Be Organized, a lifestyle company that helps people live simply and work smarter. I loved this interview because Lori doesn’t just give us the how-to. She says it’s not about the bins. She gets to the why.
We talk a lot about the Enneagram. If you have not heard of it, you want to listen. If you have heard of it, you already know, oh my gosh, I want to listen to this because so much of our organization and clutter has to do with our personality type, what works for us and what doesn’t, and having empathy and understanding of ourselves, not just ourselves but also our kids and our spouses.
So, I loved the perspective she takes. We just go so much deeper in this interview, and I know you will find it helpful, rightful, and transformative, as I did when talking to Lori. So, let’s jump in.
Let’s dive in!
What You Will Learn:
- What is the Enneagram, and how can it be helpful for organization?
- How can understanding your child’s personality type be helpful regarding motivation?
- How can we empower our kids to be organized?
- The connection between Enneagram personality types and emotional and mental clutter.
- Organizing teenagers’ rooms, setting clear expectations, and providing specific instructions to help them develop habits for maintaining a tidy space.
Where to find Laurie:
Find more encouragement, wisdom, and resources:
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And here is the episode typed out!
Welcome to the Moms of Tweens and Teens Podcast. If some days you doubt yourself and don’t know what you’re doing. If you’ve ugly cried alone in your bedroom because you felt like you were failing. Well, I just want to let you know you are not alone, and you have come to the right place.
Raising tweens and teens in today’s world is not easy. And I’m on a mission to equip you to love well and to raise emotionally healthy, happy tweens and teens that thrive.
I believe that moms are heroes, and we have the power to transform our families and impact future generations. If you are looking for answers, encouragement, and becoming more of the mom and the woman that you want to be, welcome. I am Sheryl Gould. And I am so glad that you’re here.
SHERYL: Welcome, Lori, to the show. I am so excited to talk to you, and I appreciate your coming on.
LAURIE: I am so excited. I am very well. You might not know, but whenever someone asks me to come on the show and talk about the Enneagram, I get an extra little in my step. So this is gonna be awesome.
SHERYL: I found out that you not only do organization and clutter but also connect it to the why, our personalities, and our motivations. I’ve never had anybody on the show who’s talked about how our personalities and motivations play a role in our clutter.
I’ve been thinking about it ever since I was like, Oh, I think that explains why I struggle in this area, and it’s such a great empathy tool. And so many of our listeners don’t know what the Enneagram is.
And can you start there? How did you get into doing this with organization and clutter, and then how did you connect the Enneagram and come upon the Enneagram?
LAURIE: I’ll give my answer to all the questions. For all the listeners who don’t know what the Enneagram is, I’ll give a very high-level definition of it: it’s a personality typology tool.
So, if you’ve ever heard of Myers, Briggs, Disc, Strength Finders, or Gretchen Rubin’s four tendencies, there are all these different explanations for why we do what we do. What differentiates the Enneagram from other personality typologies is that it looks at motivation, not just behavior.
So many of us, it’s like, oh, you’re an introvert, you’re an extrovert, you’re this, you’re that, where Enneagram takes it back a layer, and it looks at your unconscious motivation.
So why do we do what we do? Several people can do the same thing, but their reasoning behind it differs, and that has always fascinated me.
I always say I’m like a fake psychologist, but I’m fascinated by personality types. So, I was introduced to the Enneagram. It dates back thousands of years; if you go down an Enneagram rabbit hole, it’s not something new. In recent years, it’s just had a resurgence of popularity, especially in certain cultures.
I was introduced to it in 2017 when a popular book called The Road Back to You Again emerged. No, I got no stake in this game, but it gained a lot of interest from people, and I started hearing about it, so I read the book just out of curiosity.
The Enneagram has nine different personality types, each with its own characteristics. What I liked about it is that it’s not static; it’s fluid. So, essentially, there’s a little bit of each of the types in each of us, but everybody is one dominant type.
And when you read it, it stands out because it tells you the good and the bad. So it’s like, you read it, and you’re like, oh yes, all these great things, and then you’re like, they know that about me. So I found it very fascinating and very telling.
I started having conversations with people about it, just in my personal life, and everybody who read about it felt their mind blown. They’re like, Oh my gosh, where’s this been all my life? And so I just personally went down this rabbit hole. I started reading and listening to podcasts. I even went to conferences because I was just very fascinated.
I had no specific agenda to tie into my work professionally at the time. I have been a professional organizer for now, it’s 15 years, and I always looked at kind of the way of clutter – so, my approach to organizing always looked at the why.
And so when I came across the Enneagram, I was like, Oh, this is kind of interesting. And so the more I learned and got into it, the more I started saying, well, there were all these podcasts and shows and books about Enneagram in the workplace and Enneagram and parenting and Enneagram and relationships. And I wondered, where’s about Enneagram and organization, or Enneagram and clutter? And there wasn’t, and there just wasn’t information on that.
And I said, Well, I can see, based on the work I had been doing for the past, however, many years, about the different types of clutter, that there are definite connection points, and the Enneagram could be an incredible tool we can use.
It’s not an excuse, and it’s not the answer, but it’s an incredible tool for understanding the people in our lives and ourselves. So, I went down the rabbit hole of focus groups, talking to and interviewing people, and essentially developed a framework that we now use in the corporation when working with clients.
I teach other professional organizers how to use the Enneagram tool to understand their clients, spouses, and themselves and apply the strategies that work for them. We all know that not one size fits all, especially when it comes to organizing.
SHERYL: Also, organizing is like the clutter in your brain, which takes you off of what you’re trying to accomplish. And I just want to say to everybody who’s listening: I can’t remember it. Maybe I discovered the Enneagram about ten years ago and had a friend who was very into it. She’s a spiritual director.
And she’s like, You have to read about the Enneagram. What’s Enneagram? I just gotta put it to the side. And then, when I learned about it, it was a great empathy tool to understand myself and my husband, who’s an eight, which you’re an eight.
And I always admired him because he was very direct and straightforward. He just could cut through all the clutter of an issue and get right down to the meat of it, but he also is a challenger, and I would say something to him that maybe I didn’t like, and he would push back on that, and he would challenge that. And he was so direct after we got married. It was very direct. And I would be, like, wincing.
I would say, ‘ Oh, because I’m a two, they might be upset with you for saying that. You know, he never felt like he had to apologize, although he will apologize, but I would over apologize, and I was like, That explains a lot. And I could see the beauty in his personality in a whole other way, and then I could see his motivations and weaknesses, and you know how he needs to lean more towards the being vulnerable piece.
I also love it because it helps you understand yourself and where the growth lies. I can now see that a big part of it is that we want to help others, yet we end up needing boundaries. So, even with the clutter and connecting these, it is no wonder.
I like things neat, but I have paper bags in my closet. I’ll throw them all in a brown paper bag, and then I might not look at them, and it’s like, oh my gosh, that bill is overdue.
I want it all clean, but it’s more out of a relationship. Like, twos are very relational. So I thought, Oh, that makes so much sense that I want everybody to feel good in my home, so I don’t want the clutter. But then I let my relationships and taking care of people get in the way of me doing those self-care things, which is taking the time to organize myself. So it was fascinating to think about it.
I’ve got my grandkids living here right now, my daughter, and we’re in a rental, and it’s super small, and I feel scattered. And then I started thinking, and I want you to speak to this. Maybe that is because I’m so focused on everybody else’s needs around me that I’ve lost myself in this. And I find even working as hard; it’s not just about the space; it’s about everybody else’s needs around me that takes me off track and away from myself. So what would you say to that?
LAURIE: I would say absolutely. There’s so much I want to say based on everything you said, but yes, when it comes to clutter in general, take the Enneagram out of it; the stuff is rarely the problem.
The stuff is the result. It’s not the root cause of it. So much of what we judge ourselves on is what we see on the outside. But, as you said, the emotional or mental clutter, or the overscheduling of what I call calendar clutter, all of these other things lead up to why we feel unsettled.
It’s really about how it makes us feel like I have people that I will walk into their home and there are piles of paper, and they’re calm. It’s not a pain point for them. They might be what I call clutter blind, where they don’t even see it, and so, you have other people that it stresses them out.
The biggest connection point is where I feel that it’s my biggest aha moment. I will say it is using thoughts, feelings, and actions, which are the three centers of our intelligence, right? We all use three different decision-making tools.
What do we think? How do we feel, and what do we do? And you hit the nail right on your head when you were talking about you and your husband. How eights are doers, we’re action-oriented people, and we don’t for better or worse, and it can be both, depending on the situation, necessarily consider feelings when making decisions. We are what is the goal? What do we need to do? How are we going to get there?
And it is very action-oriented. And then our next line of defense is, what is the process we’re going to do? So we go into action, then thoughts and the last thing on our radar is feelings. Twos are the opposite. Twos are all about feeling. And so your first response will be, how do I feel? How do other people feel? And primarily, how do other people feel?
Because twos are very focused, action is the least on your totem pole. So, when you think about them and use your example of the paper in the closet, that makes perfect sense. It aligns beautifully because the procrastination piece of it, for twos, is, I’ll get to it later because somebody else needs me; something else is taking priority.
So your motivation, for lack of a better word, procrastination, isn’t because you’re trying to, like, be lazy. Other things are taking precedence. So this goes down the line, and then it winds up coming back to bite you because then you’re like, the bill is late. This is like all these other things because you, by default, have put all these other things at the front. Move these other things to the front of the line. Does that make sense?
SHERYL: Oh, gosh, it makes sense. And I’m just like thinking, Gosh, it makes so much sense, because he’s a doer, and he’ll be like, even with my business, he’ll be like, Oh, are you doing this, and are you doing that, and are you doing this? And it stresses me out, but it’s beautiful because he’s thinking about that, but it’s not based on feelings. And I’ll be like, whoa, whoa, and I feel pulled in many different directions. And he’s just like, get her done.
LAURIE: You need, and again, I hate the word balance because we all know that, but for lack of a better word, you need to blend the two. After all, I have learned that my blinders are right, so my intuitive blinders are not. I’m all about eights, which are all about justice. What’s right?
We’re leaders a lot of times, as you said. We’re very direct. It serves us well; as a parent, I will tell you that that can be a lot for your kids. Oh, and about your kids, right? So, and I look back at I was the strong mom, I was the doer, and I got this done, but that warm, cozy, nurturing side that you probably excel at is not my default, not that I don’t have it somewhere and I can’t be there for my kids, but I was always action-oriented.
You have a problem; let’s fix it. It wasn’t like, let’s sit in this. It was, well, let’s go. And sometimes, in relationships, you need that. I look back and say this very vulnerably because I’ve learned to be more aware of that since learning the Enneagram; I wish I had this tool as a mom of young kids or teens and tweens. I didn’t learn the Enneagram until my kids were almost grown and flown by the time I connected the dots. My oldest was in college. My youngest, my was she was in high school, but those formative years were done.
I look now; I can almost cringe in certain situations about how I handle things, knowing my personality, knowing their personality, and being like, Oh, I would have done this differently because it was probably like oil and water.
So, my advice, right? If you guys take anything away from this conversation, it’s never too late to learn new tools, but this is great for you. It’s not so you can fix it, but it’s not so you can judge. It’s not so that you can have an excuse, but it is just to make yourself aware of how you come across to people.
My kids would describe me as scary and intimidating, and I’m like, I’m not scary and intimidating. I’m just direct. I’m just honest. I’m that friend that people come to when they tell me the truth. Like, how does this look on me? Do you think this is a smart idea?
Like I’m that honest friend, and I try to do it with kindness and compassion, but they know that my authenticity is a thing for me, so I’m not going to sugarcoat it. And everybody needs that, but they need it in moderation. And I was always at a ten and probably should have been a seven.
SHERYL: And, well, I love the fact that it’s never too late. I also love that about the Enneagram because now you understand yourself and that your growth edge is to lean more into those feelings and the empathy piece, and that’s helped my husband understand the Enneagram, too.
I also love the wisdom of the Enneagram. That’s a really good book where you can add your type, and then it tells you, like, how can you grow? And so you know that about yourself, we have strengths and weaknesses, and that’s how we’re wired.
But it was funny when you said scary and intimidating because that’s how my kids would describe my husband. But he’s so soft internally; he’s this big, soft guy inside. So when you get to know him, you know that’s all there. So they’ll say he’s not as intimidating as he seems initially.
I have to laugh at that, but this is also super helpful for our kids and teens, like you mentioned, to understand how they’re wired. They can be wired differently than we are, making it difficult for them to understand how they organize themselves.
And at this age, as tweens and teens, their brains aren’t fully developed. They struggle with the prefrontal cortex, which is the executive functioning. So, a lot is going on. And moms will come to me, and they will both say, I don’t understand why I’m, like, a hot mess, like, to the point of your book, we’ll talk about that I’m a hot mess, and I look at other moms, and they’re doing it so much better. They just seem so organized.
And then they’ll talk about their kids and how they are so disorganized, and they feel frustrated by their inability to pull it together. So I get both of those issues come up a lot. So how can we navigate through understanding, like how we’re organized and how our kids work? What would you say to that whole thing?
LAURIE: That’s so super common. Again, I always compare it to the thief of joy. I didn’t say it; Teddy Roosevelt said it, but it is such a thing. There’s so much truth in that. And as moms, it is almost instinctual to look at our worst flaws and see where somebody else is thriving, right?
So we see the worst parts of ourselves and look to other people and go, Well, her house is cleaner, or she’s the meal prep queen, or her kids are this, and I feel inferior, right?
We take our weaknesses and look at somebody else and epitomize them. The reality is, they’re probably struggling somewhere else, as I might say. I feel inferior in my career, and I look at somebody else, but they do take out every night because they can’t cook or whatever it is. So that’s all. Everyone’s got their strengths.
So, the first thing we have to do is stop. We have to be intentional about stopping because we’re all wired to sit there and pick ourselves apart, so we have to make an intentional decision not to do that. I think that it has to start with ourselves, first and foremost.
Second of all, I think it’s really hard for people. Organization, in general, is a learned skill. There are some people, just like some people, who are naturally athletic or naturally musically inclined, but more often than not, you are taught how to play soccer or basketball. You are taught how to play the piano. Yes, some people can come in and just play by ear, but that is not the only way that you can learn.
You learn to do these things by taking lessons, practicing, and having healthy model behavior. You learn to cook because somebody cooked or you are interested in it. The organization is no different, and somewhere down the road, the messaging got broken, in my opinion, where people thought I should just know how to do this.
And if you grew up in a home where things were disorganized and cluttered, and you didn’t have systems, and your parents held onto things, it is understandable that you will continue that behavior. Now, yes, again, you can be the one you know. You can be the outlier, but we need to give ourselves some grace and look at my experience when I worked with people.
This is, again, way before the Enneagram. I would talk to them and say, What would you tell me? A little bit about your life: What was your life like growing up? Oh, my mom threw everything away. Oh, my mom saved everything. My parents weren’t present. I had to do everything. So, I look at that as clues.
When it comes to organization and as moms having to teach our kids and model that behavior, we have to look at what type of behavior we are modeling for our kids first and foremost. And if you don’t have those tools, expecting your kids to have them is next to impossible. And I’m not saying that to beat people up.
I’m saying that you should give yourself some grace. Maybe you need some help, or you both need some help to learn those strategies that maybe were not taught to you, so that’s the first place. And then again, to your point where everybody has a unique relationship with clutter.
Clutter is personal, and some people, specifically certain Enneagram types, have a visceral reaction to it. They see clutter, and it stresses them out, makes them anxious, and unsettles them, as I alluded to earlier.
Some Enneagram types are a little bit more clutter-blind. They’re a little bit more able to shut the door or put. Blinders on, and it just doesn’t bother them. And so understanding that, again, doesn’t mean that you have to live in a messy house, and it doesn’t mean that you have to live in a picture-perfect house, but it’s understanding, okay, why is this triggering me? What is going on?
So, setting the expectation that this is how clutter makes us feel is a really good conversation starter for parents. If that’s okay, I’ll give you a practical example.
So, my girls are now almost 21 and 24, so I say they’re grown-ish, but when they were younger, I was the type of person who had to wash the dishes. I couldn’t leave to bed with a sink full of dishes. So after dinner, I would make sure the kitchen was cleaned before we would sit down and watch TV or do whatever, play a game, or do whatever we would do.
And I would explain to them when they were younger that I wanted to spend time with them. I want to do these things, but it’s really important because it stresses me out when we have messy houses, and that sets the tone. And the faster we can all do this together, the more time we’ll have.
I explained that because I wanted them to understand that this is a part of what we do as a family. And so they had a choice to a degree, right? Not everything is a choice, but you want me to spend time with you. We’re going to do this, or this is a family. We’re all going to pitch in our participation, but there was a conversation around it.
What I find with many of my friends who wound up having teenage kids and never had those conversations is that the kids just thought of a magic wand being waved and the kitchen getting cleaned, or they didn’t understand how to prioritize things because it was never discussed. And again, if you’re a parent, you’re going, Oh snap, I’m already there. I didn’t do it.
It’s never too late. Like today’s a good day to start. But if you can just set some precedent and say this is why we do these things. It’s not about because I want to have a Pinterest-perfect kitchen. It’s about how I don’t want to feel stressed in the morning when I come downstairs and see all the leftovers from last night.
I don’t want to feel stressed when I come in after a long day of work and see the breakfast dishes sitting there from the morning when I’m tired. So it’s painting a picture that I think that’s the piece that gets disconnected for a lot of people, and they just go, I just can’t stand it, and you’re yelling at the dishes, and you’re yelling at the paper, and it’s really about what it represents and how it makes you feel.
SHERYL: Oh my gosh, so good. I’m taking notes. What I love about what you’re saying is it’s also including them that this stresses me out, rather than letting it be this battle of clean up. It’s this clutter that stresses me out. So you’re including them and how it makes you feel.
Yes, I think it’s often the missing piece, and even like being a perfectionist, it has jumped into my brain that I’m imagining. And I don’t know that when you’re a perfectionist, it’s probably a lot easier to do it yourself than to get your kids involved because you want to do it right.
LAURIE: It’s a slippery slope because one of my best friends is the one, and she has told me she was crying to me one day; she’s like, I have a 17-year-old who does not make his bed because it had to be done.
SHERYL: Yeah, and understanding, if you have a kid that’s a perfectionist too, that gets frustrated if things aren’t a certain way. Also, I was thinking, as a two, I can get stressed with all the clutter and angry that nobody’s helping me, but it’s funny, I’ve had to learn to take that frustration and criticism that nobody’s helping me and ask for help, which “twos” don’t like to ask for help.
And so it’s interesting to get everybody involved, which stresses me out, to pay attention. How do I feel? And so maybe you have a kid whose clutter doesn’t bother them as much. So what if it doesn’t bother them as much, but it’s driving you crazy?
LAURIE: I think there has to be, and this is an important question. So I’m glad you asked if there are certain; as much as we want to include our kids in the conversation and allow everyone to have their voice, we are still the parents, and there are set boundaries.
I think having clear, realistic boundaries for what you will tolerate in your home, in different spaces of your home, is important, and that might vary depending on the season of life you’re in and your situation. But in our home, in the common areas, when you are done playing with something.
So there were a few different kinds of, like family rules, if you will. So I loved it when my kids were in school; they were not the type to retreat to the room. They would like to hang out downstairs. They would do their homework downstairs. They would do activities, which was great. But they also were mixing.
I mean, they spread their stuff out, which, again, is fine. Still, we would say in the common area, at the end of the thing that you’re doing, you need to at the end of the evening when you’re done doing your homework, or you’re finished with the project for the night, we have to clean it up because we’re not leaving everything out on the coffee table or the dining room table like that’s just not – we’re not going to do that.
And they knew that when they had friends over for a play date, I, from a very early age, incorporated cleanup as part of the play date. So if they had a friend that was getting picked up at four, at 3:45, I would say, okay, it’s time to start cleaning up because we weren’t going to leave the playroom messy, and I wanted them to know, and their friends to know, hey, like, this is part of the process, right? Like, this is what we do.
We take things out, put them away, and normalize them in our house; that is what you do. On the flip side, I would say to my kids, within reason, I always said, what’s not great gardens? We’re not leaving food for rodents and feral animals to come in. But, if you want to be a teenager and have your clothes on the floor, I will shut the door.
And if that means, and I don’t mean to sound elitist, I’m like, we’re fortunate enough to have a cleaning person, but I would say, Listen, Dorothy’s not here to pick up your dirty clothes. So if your stuff’s on the floor, she’s not coming into your room. And that’s it, and that’s your choice. So you can have, if you want to be, if you want to have stuff all over the place in your room, within reason, again, we’re not going to have it be dirty. I mean, unsafe.
But if it’s you who wants to have messy clothes and just does not put your clothes away and get dressed out of a laundry basket, that’s on you. I won’t stress that because, as parents, we have to pick our battles. So, I would not pick that battle. It just wasn’t, but I said you would make sure you put your backpack away. You will put your stuff in the common area, like the Team Palau area, your locker room, and your bedroom. You want to; you want to smell like that’s on you. I don’t have to go in there.
So that’s how we handled it in our house. When I talk to frustrated parents, I say they shouldn’t try to control every variable they can. Choose what makes sense for you and what you think will allow them to express themselves and have their say.
SHERYL: Yeah, I think that’s so good because in the common areas, you’re taking care of yourself and having them clean up after themselves, but in their rooms, is that a battle I want to pick?
LAURIE: I want to add another really important piece that is very common for parents. This is when I’ll work with kids one-on-one, and I love talking about this. Parents often tend to talk in very broad, general terms.
Clean your room in and of itself is way too abstract, and I learned this again through just my trial and error from working with parents and being very specific in what clean looks like, what a clean room looks like, we want to use words like you need to pick up your clothes from the floor and put them in your hamper.
Or I want your dresser not to have 10,000 tchotchkes. Or do we need to pick up the Legos off the floor? Well, you have teens and tweens, so they’re probably, well, they might be playing with Legos, but you know what I mean? Like we want to, I don’t want your makeup all over the bathroom.
We need to corral it. So, being very specific about what that means because so many kids will say, Okay. I will shovel my stuff under the batter in the closet, and they go; it’s clean because you can see the floor, but that’s not organized.
What are we trying to accomplish? That’s always why I don’t want your stuff to go bad. I don’t want your makeup ruined; just leave it on the counter. This is a shared space. We want to ensure everybody can find what they’re looking for.
So you want to have this, so it’s not about the bin, it’s not about the basket, it’s not about having a clear counter for the sake of having a clear counter—it’s about what that provides us.
And that goes back to your undeveloped prefrontal cortex, and these kids don’t understand that. They don’t know that, and they just know my parents are freaking out, or my mom is freaking out that my room’s a mess, and so what?
Because they don’t understand the why behind it and often lack the tools and tactical skills, how do I even organize this? That’s where a professional organizer could come in if you don’t have that. How are we going to sort things? How will we decide what to keep and what to get rid of? All of those decision-making things are specific.
SHERYL: Whoo, because it is like cleaning up your room. It can be overwhelming for them if their room is a total mess, versus picking up their clothes and putting them in the hamper or putting away their makeup, which is very specific and clear.
And then I love them and so that and thinking about taking good care of your things so that it doesn’t dry out your makeup, so that you know whatever, and I love that, so that you can find your stuff more easily in the morning, and we’re all downstairs, and you’re trying to get your sports equipment together.
LAURIE: 1000%. So that I’m not screaming like a lunatic because we’re saying, get in the car, and you don’t have your basketball uniform because you can’t find it in the pile of stuff.
SHERYL: Yeah, that’s very helpful. So you have a cool Enneagram sheet. Tell them what you have. You have a course, tell us.
LAURIE: Okay, so in a nutshell, and the first place to start, I’ll give you a link to drop in the show notes. I have this free; I call it my Enneagram cheat sheet. So wherever you are, if you are a stranger to the Enneagram or familiar with it, it’s a great place to start. It’s a free download.
It just gives you an overview of all the nine types, tells you a brief snapshot of what they are, and can give you some direction. And if you don’t know the Enneagram, it can give you a roadmap for figuring out your type. If somebody is interested, we have it as a course. Now, we’re calling it more of a masterclass, but either way, it’s a digital product that comes with a companion workbook that walks through each of the nine types.
It gives a deep dive into your motivation, where they struggle, and where they thrive, right? I call it their strengths and struggles in general, specifically when it relates to clutter and organization. Then, we discuss those three centers: thinking, feeling, and doing.
For each one, we look at the strong center and the weak center. The goal is to know how to use them. How do we blend them to make decisions regarding the organization? So, for you, there’s, like I said, a companion workbook that goes with it. It’s self-paced. You can go through it, and it’s great to learn not just about yourself but also how to communicate with people.
It’s great for parents, I think because it’ll give you language and conversation starters that you may not otherwise have in your toolbox to communicate with your kids and even understand your spouse.
But, like for you, as a tool, as a two, my goal would be to let your default feeling be as we identified. I’m going to say, challenge. You say, Okay, what are we going to do about this? So we know that you’re struggling with, you know your paper clutter, or you know your hidden paper clutter, right? It’s not outward paper clutter. So what can we do?
Like because you’re always going to go, this is how I feel, or I feel like this. And even in conversation, you’ll use the word feel. So I will challenge you to say, Okay, so let’s be very specific. What are we going to do? Then, that will work a muscle not used to being worked.
Because for me, if you go, Okay, well, how do you feel about that? I’m going to be like, What do you mean? How do I feel about it – I don’t. I don’t feel any way about it. I’m just doing it.
So the goal is to try to get people to be intentional about using that center that they don’t normally default to when it comes to clutter. Each of our clutter pitfalls probably has something to do with our weak center, and that’s really what we talk about in the course.
SHERYL: Well, this is also like a to-do list and applies to business.
LAURIE: 1000% clutter isn’t just limited to your house, and it’s not just limited to papers and laundry and dishes. It’s about our time. It’s how we spend our resources. It’s about there again. I work with other women entrepreneurs, as I’m sure you do, too, and it shows up in so many facets. Yeah, our lives and our relationships.
SHERYL: Do you find that with twos, there’s a specific motivation that helps them get it done?
LAURIE: So, I think again, not every two looks the same, right? So again, the jist to give people – so the two’s motivation is their helpers by nature, and so they’re the false narrative they choose to tell themselves, which is that their worth is tied to how they can serve and help others. That’s not to say that we don’t other types don’t want to help and serve other people.
But this the false narrative that the twos tell themselves is: I’m only good for me being able to help you, so I’m always going to put somebody else first because that’s the value I bring in the world, which is fake news, like people.
So you have to for yourself; it might seem selfish to say, You know what, I’m going to spend an hour doing this, for the greater good, for twos, that it will hold on to things, what I call emotional clutter, because here’s a common one I get. I used to get all the time from people. My kids are teenagers, but I still have a high chair. Like kids’ sippy cups and plates in my kitchen because somebody might come over to my house, or I’ll have little kids’ toys in the garage because what if somebody comes over?
They have a little kid, and I need to be able to have stuff for them. So you’re holding on to clutter, not because you’re emotionally attached to the sippy cup, or you’re emotionally attached to the high chair or the stroller or whatever, but because you feel that you have to be able to cater to all people at all times. So, the challenge is kind of helping you change the narrative that is not your responsibility for that.
And once you can have that light bulb moment, then that gives you the freedom to be able to make those decisions on your own, as opposed to me coming in there, in my very “eight personalities,” and going, Sheryl, come on, your kids are 15 and 17. Why do you need to have a sippy cup like that’s shaping you? It’s about saying, let’s talk about why you feel the need to have this in the first place and having that conversation instead of browbeating somebody.
SHERYL: Yes, and you’re getting to the root because if you just come in and clean all my clutter out and help me organize everything, it won’t stick. And, like you say, it’s so much more than the bins. So, finding our motivation is important to grow and be self-aware.
Oh, that makes sense about why I’m struggling with this. I can shift and see that doing these things I need to be doing for myself will serve me so much better and others better. So, yeah, it was very helpful.
I’m having all kinds of epiphanies, so tell them where to find you because I’m sure our listeners are like, Oh my gosh, I want to dig into this. I’ve never heard about this before, but I think it would be very helpful to me.
LAURIE: Yeah, absolutely. My website, https://simplyborganized.com/, is probably the hub for everything. From there, you can find the book, the podcast, the courses, everything.
As I said, many free resources are also available for people struggling with certain areas of their homes and lives. But this is something that I feel was a game changer for me when I started incorporating this when I started gathering this knowledge, and just being able to look at clutter a little bit differently, clutter and organization through a different lens, as opposed to what we see on the surface.
SHERYL: You also have coaching, which is where you train other organizers.
LAURIE: I do. I do. Yeah, so part of the things that I do is when I shift my business from being on-site with people to doing kind of more speaking and writing and all the things, I know that there’s such a need for people to have professional organizers and other experts to support them in the areas where we just don’t have those skills.
So, I started coaching and mentoring other people looking to build their own organizing businesses, teaching them my strategy methodology and best business practices. How do you become an entrepreneur, especially as I was figuring it out?
As a mom, I was an entrepreneur with little kids, and I wish I had a guide, a leader, and a roadmap. I just kind of figured it out. But I know that that’s intimidating and a little scary, so I wanted to be that person for people.
So, a lot of people come to me. They’re like, I’m good at organizing. I enjoy it but don’t know how to make it into a business. And we have a coaching cohort. I don’t know when this will go live, but we have one starting in September, and we do coaching and mentoring to get people in a position where they can go and turn their gifts and talents into an organizing business.
SHERYL: I love it. You’re doing so many great things to help other people get organized and figure out how to start their businesses if they want to help their kids get organized.
So, yeah, I love what you’re doing, Laurie. I love your whole mythology, which really gets to the point of understanding ourselves, our why, and how we can grow and change. And I love it. So, thank you so much for being here today.
LAURIE: Thank you so much for the opportunity. It’s been great. Thank you.
