Are your New Year’s resolutions nothing more than hope?
Happy New Year everyone! Is your New Year’s Resolution to get more organized in 2017 really just a New Year’s Hope?
Over the years, I’ve endeavored to help you get organized and at the same time help you to fall in love with YOU. I’ve dedicated my career to helping you and your quest to have a peaceful, cozy, organized and happy home.
Until I quit hoping I could get organized, I faithfully faced each New Year in a bigger mess than the year before, and with a bigger hope that this time I’d do it. That kind of hope is unconscious compromise with doubt. It’s wishful thinking. It’s like saying, “I’m going to try to get organized this next year.” When you try you lie. When you hope, it’s nope. So how do you quit hoping and trying and just do it?
Baby steps are certainly part of it, but for me I had to get a hold of the right reason to take those baby steps. In my hoping days my reasons to get organized were wrong. I was in a very unhappy marriage and I thought if I could get organized he’d finally be happy with me and our marriage would improve. I tried and hoped my way into overwhelming chaos and misery. It wasn’t until I realized I wanted to get organized so I would have more free time to play that I was able to break free and get out of the mess I’d created.
I got organized in 1977. In 2002, I met a person who changed my life. Her name is Nelly. She’s my inner child.
Even though I met her 15 years after I got organized, obviously she was alive and well behind my desire to have more free time to play. Doesn’t that sound like a child’s motive?
My theory is we all have an inner child and she has a great deal to do with our choices in what we eat, say and do and our motivation to get organized. We all have the ability to be organized if we want to and getting the right reason it is crucial.
Here’s some dialogue between Nelly and me that might help you get the right reason to get organized once and for all, starting today.
“Hi Little Girl, how are you doing?”
“Fine.”
“Nelly, I didn’t know you were with me in 1977 and so many don’t know that they have an inner child, so can you help them?”
“What am I suppose to do? I’m just a kid?”
“I know, but you sure got me to get the right reason to get organized way back in 1977. How’d you do that?”
“Well, I had to just wait ‘til you got excited about gettin’ out of the mess we were in.”
“Excited?”
“Yeah, remember when you read that book by Daryl Hoole, the lady with a whole buncha kids who was born organized and she made it look so easy? She called it, The Art of Homemaking.”
“Yeah, I forgot about her. She did make it sound easy and fun!”
“Yeah and that’s when I perked up! I liked that feeling you had! It made me happy and so I just thought real hard and I heard you tell your sister, ‘We need to get organized for a different reason this time, not so Mom’ll get to brag about what a great job she did raisin’ us instead of apologizing to our husbands for the messes we turned out to be. And not so Mr. Cranky Pants is happy and gets nicer. I’m gonna get organized for me this time! I’m gonna have more free time to play!’ (I just sorta slipped that in!)”
“You know once I got the right reason, I had so much energy and I quit caring if I was making Mr. Cranky Pants happy. Hey did you come up with that name or did I?”
“I did! And remember when you started getting organized, he just got crankier and crankier and we got happier and happier.”
It was true! The more organized I got, the more free time I had to play with my kids and be creative. Housework went from drudgery to the thrill of playing house! No more hoping and trying, we were having fun.
Mr. Cranky Pants didn’t appreciate my creativity. He wanted me to get a job as a meat wrapper (good union) and make extra money for us.
Once I had habits and routines that served me, I was able to play more and more. If I hadn’t gotten organized, I never would have written “Sidetracked Home Exec-utives” or my latest book. “The Joy of Being Disorganized.”
Granted, I’m not a brilliant writer and my books don’t come near to works, such as “War and Peace” and “Gone with the Wind,” but every one of us has something good to share with this beautiful world.
We are all part of a wonderful life and when we get organized we really get to play in it!
I hope you are looking forward to a fabulous year filled with the fun of being organized. This New Year stands before us beckoning us to have more fun than we ever have before.
Let’s christen our new calendars with dates and plans that include our obligations as well as fun, adventure and creativity. Now that’s a good reason to get organized!
For more from Pam Young go to cluborganized.com. You’ll find many musings, videos of Pam in the kitchen preparing delicious meals, videos on how to get organized, lose weight and get your finances in order, all from a reformed SLOB’s point of view.
