001 - The Lisa Glossary Part 1: Organizing Foundation

Thanks for listening to this special playlist of the Organize 365 Podcast. The Organize 365 Podcast started in 2014. With over 500 episodes and 15 million downloads, we know there is a lot of content to sift through. This taste of the Organize 365 Podcast is just a taste of what you can find in the full podcast and is easy to share with your family and friends who want to join you on your quest to learn the skill of organizing and grow your mindset of what is possible as you move into a proactive and purposeful life. Enjoy this podcast curation of the Organized 365 Podcast that will take you through all the big ideas we have uncovered in the last 7+ years of podcasting. Along the way, I, Lisa Woodruff, have created a whole new glossary of terms for us to use to define and understand the invisible work and belief systems we have from our childhoods and how and why homes function the way they do. Happy New Year. Oh my goodness. The number one question I get from people who listen to the podcast is, how do I introduce a new person to Organize 365? Lisa says so many things, like where would you even start? So 18 months ago, I recorded 8 podcasts that were called the Lisa Glossary. Basically all these words that I just kind of made up and have turned into what Organized 365 is today. And guess what? This week we are turning 10 years old. Oh my goodness. Organized 365 is 10 years old. And for the first 8 days of January, I am going to re-air these glossary podcasts that we recorded in the summer of 2020 that will tell you how Organized 365 got to be what it is today and our philosophy, our outlook, our methodology on organization. And in the 18 months since we recorded these podcasts, there have been a lot more terms and things that I have created. So for the rest of January on the Fridays, the last 3 Fridays in January, I will be recording a new glossary podcast, number 9, 10, and 11. We'll be talking about the Paper Solution, the binders, and the research that Organize 365 is doing now. So sit back and listen and get motivated to take back your house this year and finally get organized.

This week's mailbag comes to us from Dip. My biggest win is having more organization so I can find papers I need more easily. I haven't yet mastered the planning part of it, but with all the recent changes in our lives, I have found it difficult to be consistent in using the Sunday Basket method. It hasn't been the most optimal time to establish new habits or even plan things out, since our lives have been changing almost daily. Right now, I do consider it a blessing that I was able to set up my new slash pocket filing system before the big life changes occurred. And I have the reassurance that I know where to find things for which I might have an immediate need. A little control within a life out of my control. This happened at the right time for me in a way that no one could have imagined that it would. Do you have an Organize365 success story? If so, we would love to hear about it. Please send us an email at customerservice@organize365.com and tell us how you have taken back your home, your paper, and your life with Organize 365.

Welcome to the Organize 365 Podcast. I'm your host, professional organizer, productivity expert, and motivational speaker Lisa Woodruff. This podcast will help you embrace progress over perfection and create lasting functional organizing in your home. I have so much to share with you. So let's get started. Do you remember your favorite teacher and your favorite class growing up in school? I'm sure there are a lot of qualities that that teacher had, but you just were hungry for the knowledge that was in that class. You did better, you tried harder, you showed up early, you stayed later. You loved learning from this specific teacher. Here at Organized 365, we are an education company. I'm a teacher by trade and I want to teach you to love and be really great at the skill of organizing and increase productivity. And along the way, as your teacher, I've created my own systems, methodologies, and a lot of terms. I mean, a lot of terms. There are a lot of things that I say that nobody else says. And you're like, what is a Golden Window? What is functional organizing? These are the things that I'm going to unpack for you in the next 8 episodes. Now don't worry, it isn't going to be just a list of vocabulary with definitions. I have organized the next 8 episodes in order so that you kind of go from how Organized 365 started and has grown over the last 8 years and how you find organizing and learn and grow and get organized as well. So sit back, relax, and let's get started organizing. I am super excited in the next 8 episodes to really dive into the Organized 365 story. And today I'm going to talk about the foundation, the 5 main principles that are the bedrock of everything I teach inside of Organized 365. And the very first one is that organization is a learnable skill. Organized 365 is all about teaching. I'm a teacher by trade. I've taught everything from 4-year-old preschool all the way up through middle school, math. I went to Miami University and got a dual degree in early childhood education and elementary education. I've taught in private school, I've taught in public school, my children have attended special learning disability schools, public schools, Catholic schools, private schools, I've even homeschooled. Like, if there's anything to do with teaching, I'm in, I'm in. I remember when I would go to first grade and I would come home and I loved learning and I love teaching, and so I would sit my sister down who who's 4 years younger than me. So she's like, what, 2, 3 years old? And I would put her at a little desk and I would have her color on her papers because I wanted to be a teacher. Being a teacher, being a mom, those are the two things that I've wanted to do my entire life. And I have taken this teaching skill and I have poured it into Organized 365. So when I started Organized 365, I had no idea that organization was a learnable skill. I had been a born organized person. I could always organize. My mother was artistic in nature. Not necessarily organized, but if I would organize her craft room or I would organize a storage area in her house, she would love it. It would help her so much in carrying on her— she had her own business and she was a crafter and she was a mom and she was active in the community. And so anytime I could organize a space, she loved it because then she could move further faster. But creating organization was not my mom's strong suit. I mean, our house was tidy and it was, it was a lovely home, but any of the spaces that were only my mom's, like her business, like the craft room, like a storage area, would get disorganized. And she was so busy moving on to the next thing, she didn't take the time to create organizational systems. When I was in college, I would come home and I would organize her craft room for her, and I'd go back to college for another 3 months, 6 months, or a year. And she loved when I would come home and I would organize that space. And it was during that time that I started asking her analytical questions. Mom, why do you store these beads over here? Why do you have this paper here and that paper there for card making? Why do you put these different things in different areas? And I would analyze how she was using that craft room, and every time I organized it, I would change it just a little bit. And when I would come back later, it wouldn't be as disorganized as it was the time before, even though she had used the space just as much. So I was learning how to take my innate ability to organize and help her live a more organized life and have the organization stick longer in between my coming home and going. Fast forward 20 years, when I was turning 40, I quit my teaching job and I started organizing other people's homes. Now, I had been organizing other people's homes for pay, but I didn't realize that was called professional organization. I didn't know professional organization was an industry. I'd never heard that term before, and it wasn't until April of 2012 that I learned that what I was doing for pay was an actual industry, and I went headlong into organizing. And I realized, just like how I had organized my mother, that I had an ability to look at a space differently than other people did, and I could come in and I could create calm and I could create order in chaos. And that my clients, the way that I asked so many questions as I was organizing, that their space would stay organized longer than if they did it on their own or if I just did it for them. Like, if I did it with them, it would stay organized longer. The biggest realization I had was in 2013 after I had organized multiple organizing clients and I started booking jobs and we would organize your entire house in 5 days. Our team would come in and we'd organize your entire house top to bottom in 5 days. And by the time we would get to day 3 or 4, if we didn't do that all in one week, like if we spread it out like one day a week over 5 weeks instead of 5 days in a row, we found that people were starting to cancel after the second or third appointment. And so I started calling those clients and they would say, "Oh, well, we finished." I said, "What do you mean you finished?" They said, "Oh, well, we figured out what you were teaching us and we finished." And I thought, "Huh." And I would not have thought anything of it except the summer of 2013, we had 3 clients within 1 month say the exact same thing. And partly I thought, "Oh no, like this is my job." Like my job is to book these clients, and if they're going to cancel and do it on their own, that what kind of money will I be bringing into my company? And almost in the same breath, I thought to myself, oh, wait a minute. Organization is a learnable skill. Like, you were learning something when we were doing it with you? I thought we were saving you time. I thought we were getting you to the end result faster, which we were. What I did not realize was I had trained the people who were working with me in such a systematic way that the 3 of us, even if we were in separate rooms in the house, were doing the same exact process in every single room and getting the same result. And I had duplicated myself in people. But what these clients were telling me was what I had taught my employees was being taught to them as we were asking them the questions, and they were then able to take that organizational learning and finish their house on their own. I thought, oh my gosh, organization is a learnable skill. Like, my mind was blown. I was like, game on. I'm a teacher. If this is something you can teach, I can teach it. How do I teach people online to organize their entire house? I had started Organize 365 in January of 2012. I had no idea what the blog would become over time. I just knew that for the rest of my life, my mission was going to be to help homeowners get organized. I did not know how I was going to do that. So in the summer of 2013, after I had organized my house, in 2012, and we had organized at that point over 50 different houses in Cincinnati, and I had grown my in-home organizing team, I realized that there was a way to do it. I just had to figure out how to take this in-person learning that I was doing and make it online. Organization is a learnable skill. Everything I had heard up until that point was you were either born organized or you weren't born organized, and if you weren't born organized, there was no path to getting organized other than to hire a professional organizer. The second foundational principle after I learned that organization was a learnable skill. In teaching organization both in person in Cincinnati and starting to teach it in online courses, I realized that we had to grow our organizing muscles. And I use this analogy of learning organizing in the sports metaphor, even though I have like no athletic ability. Because that is exactly what happens in organization. Like in math, you are in a— you're growing your intellectual capacity to go from addition to subtraction to multiplication to division. I mean, I'm a math teacher, so I know that what you're learning in math is expanding your mental capacity and adding on multiple steps into each mathematical problem in order to get deeper and deeper into your mathematical ability. Organization was different. You are growing, and yes, some of it is mental, but truly it is very physical. Organizing is a very physical activity, so we had to grow our muscles, not just our brain, but our physical stamina and the amount of time that we could spend doing an organizational task. So to go from a 15-minute clean out the silverware drawer task to walking into your hot mess room and spending an hour sorting items that you have no idea how they got in there, where they're going, or if you even need them anymore, That was a completely different amount of mental capacity and physical capacity you had to have. As you learn to grow, you learn the skill of organization, you get stronger, and you can handle larger problems. And this is why in the 100 Day Program, I start everyone out in the kitchen. It's not an accident. The reason we all start in the kitchen is because you all have one. There's not a single home, apartment, whatever, that doesn't have an area where you're making food. Some people don't have basements, some people don't have garages, some people don't have laundry rooms, front hall closets, but everyone has a place where they eat. Even my son's studio apartment has a kitchenette. Everyone has a kitchen area, and we all understand a kitchen, right? Like, when I say silverware drawer, you know what I'm talking about. If I say refrigerator, you know what I'm talking about. If I say, you know, a drop zone or how we're going to store things in a storage room, not everyone has the same picture come to their mind. So because you have always somehow fed yourself in some kind of a kitchenette or kitchen experience, there are many, many things that I'll teach you in that first 3 weeks in the 100-day program that are not really taxing your mental ability very much. And because it's not taxing your mental ability very much, because you can find your silverware drawer, you're not trying to figure out what your version of a silverware silverware drawer is in your house. I can show you how to clean a silverware drawer, and then I could say, by the way, what you just did, extrapolate it out. Now we're going to do the utensil drawer, and this is how you could do any drawer anywhere in your house. This is how you do a junk drawer, a desk drawer, a bathroom drawer. All drawers are exactly the same. They go through the same 5-step process in order to get organized. But you didn't know that. You thought that all of the drawers were completely different because they had different things in them and that they would need different organizational ability. They do not. And that is what Organize 365 does, is now that I know that organization is a learnable skill and I have you along for the ride to grow your organizing muscles, I teach you a little bit more every time you go through one of my programs than you did before. So that you can get to the next level of organizing. If you want to know a little bit more about growing your organizational muscles, you can go back to episode 211 where I talk about that more. All right, organization is learnable and we have to grow our muscles. The third foundational principle of Organize 365 is that I am a functional organizer. And let me just tell you, I don't want to be. When I first started Organize 365 in 2012, I wanted to be a Pinterest perfect magazine organizer. I wanted all of my organizers to be acrylic and labeled with the cutest Cricut and everything to be color-coded and that my house was an interior decorator's dream. And the reason why I wasn't was because I was deeply in debt, totally overwhelmed, depressed, and negative. And I had to save myself and figure out how to make money before I could get to the Pinterest level of organization. I needed to replace my teaching salary because I had quit teaching mid-year and the amount of money I'd been making teaching wasn't enough. So as soon as I replaced my teaching salary, which took 3 months, then I had to learn how to make more because we were continuing to go in debt when I was teaching. And so we needed a lot more money. Like we needed like a lot, a lot more money. So I just kept going. I kept taking more professional organization jobs. I kept cleaning our own house. I kept going to all the doctor's appointments I needed to for my kids. I kept selling things at resale stores. I had one garage sale. I just did anything I could to bring the money in. And while I was doing that, over those first 2 years of growing Organized 365, I realized that my house got organized. I mean, organized, organized. I was no longer looking for anything ever. And before that, I mean, every drawer had been a junk drawer, every cabinet was a mess, our house was bulging at the seams, my kids were entering middle school and I still had sippy cups in the kitchen. Like, you can't believe it now, but I was as disorganized as you are when you started your organize— we all are. Like, life had gotten moving so fast that it ran me over, and in the process of starting a business and getting my home in order and starting to climb out of this huge debt hole that we were in, I didn't have the time or the money to make it pretty. Like, and furthermore, I'm not a great decorator. I'm just not really good. Carol, who was the first person I hired on our Organize 365 team, is an interior decorator. And 3 years into working together, we were in somebody's house and the whole entire house was, was painted like a taupe color, like an off-white, light brown color, and all of the furniture was like a brown leather. And she said, "Oh yeah, this is what people do when they don't know how to interior decorate. They just paint the wall off-white or taupe color, and then they buy all brown furniture." And I looked at her, I said, "You realize you're describing my house, right?" And she was like, "Oh, oh yeah, well, I don't mean you." I'm like, "No, no, no, you mean me. You mean me." I don't have that ironically, my mom is like an interior designer, artistic person. I don't have that gene. I just don't have it. And at that point, 3 years into my career, I realized I don't really need it. Organize 365 isn't about making your house look pretty. Organize 365 is about making it function. You can make it pretty. I mean, you may be a perfect interior designer, or you might be ultra modern or country casual or what, how, I don't even know the terms of interior decorating. That's how uninterior decorator-ish I am. That's not my calling in my life. My calling is not to show you a Pinterest perfect house or get your house in Better Homes and Gardens. And to be honest, nobody's houses are like that. Nobody's houses are perfect. Nobody is living this Pinterest life you think that they are. Everyone has dirty dishes. I only do my dishes one time a day. So there's like one time a day for 15 minutes where my kitchen looks good. The other 23 hours and 45 minutes it doesn't because I have young adult children. Um, my laundry gets done once or twice a week. All the rest of the time there's dirty laundry somewhere, maybe on some stages of being clean inside of the laundry room. I don't make my bed every day. I pull it up, but it doesn't look great. I am not a perfect person. I am not a Pinterest organizer. My house is never going to make it on any magazine. So if that's what you're looking for, I'm definitely not the organizer that you want to follow, but I am a real-life person who's living an extremely organized life who can find anything I need within minutes because everything is functionally organized. It is attainable and still aspirational, if not perfect. Some of the things I say that go along with this functional organizer mentality is done is better than perfect and progress over perfection. Now I did not coin these terms. They are not unique to me, but I do say them often, and many of you have never heard of them before you came to me. Done is better than perfect is my way of saying just start. I don't, I don't want to hear about how you don't have this, that, and the other thing. Like, done is better than perfect. Just get started. Just get it done. And the story about that is my husband is a perfectionist. And so for a long time, nothing got done around our house because it wasn't done perfectly. And then I'm pretty sure I lost my mind. He went to work and I think I hung up a bunch of pictures. The way I find if pictures are matched and leveled on a wall is I hang them on the wall and then if they aren't matched, I put another nail in until they look matched enough on the wall. So when he came home from work, the pictures were hung and there were 6 nails behind those pictures. They did not— 6 extra nails that we didn't need. Done. But you can't see extra nail holes behind pictures that are already hanging up. And from that point forward, I said to him, here's what I need done, here's when I need it done by. If you don't want to do it perfectly, I will be doing it the next day. And pretty much ever since then, I have done everything in our house, and none of it has been done perfectly, but it is all done. So just get it done. No one is going to know if you accidentally got paint somewhere else, if there are 6 nail holes behind that picture. Like, nobody's gonna know. Just get it done. And then progress over perfection means to take the next step. If you've gotten started or there's a project that you're in the middle of and you don't have enough time to finish it, or you don't know what the end result is going to be, or you don't have enough money for whatever the end is going to be, we don't have to get to the end. We just need to keep making progress. So progress over perfection. What is the next step you can take in that project? And sometimes in taking the next step, you realize that whatever the expensive thing is, or that you were going to need, you don't need because you took the next step and now you realize when you have a little bit more information that you don't need that. Okay, so organizing is a learnable skill. We're growing our organizing muscles and I'm going to teach you functional, not perfect organizing. The fourth foundational principle is, and this is a big one, the only person you can control is you. I mean, I think I learned the first three of those foundations in the first 18 months of business. I would say the only person you can control is you is something that has come to light more and more in the last 2 years for me. And when I finally let go of my kids, my husband, the economy, the world, my company, my employees, whoever has to meet my needs or help me on my organizing journey, I was freed. I was freed in multiple ways. I was freed to go ahead and try things and see if they would work before asking everyone to toe the line. You know what I mean? Like, so the whole reason we talk about a drink cabinet in the kitchen is because I tried it. I was like, well, none of this is working. So what would happen if I take all the things that are related to drinking and put them in one cabinet? Coffees, smoothies, water bottles, all of it in one place and take it out of all the other cabinets. And you know what? It worked. So now that's something that I teach. I can't control if my family even puts things back where I want them to, or if they leave things out all over the house, or if they're ready to organize a space when I'm ready to organize a space. And so I only think about what can I control. And often I want my kids or my husband to clean up or organize something in the house because I see it and it is bothering me. But when I really look at everything that is out in the house, I have more projects out than they do. I have more half-done projects, half-done laundry, not finished dishes than everything that they have out. But it's so much easier to see how other people are in process of their projects than yourself in process of your projects, because you know when you're going to get to that next, or you know that you're leaving that out because you're waiting for something. And when I changed and I stopped worrying about what everybody else was doing in my house, and I only worried about my projects, and I went in and I redid my closet, or I cleaned out my bathroom drawer, or I did the dishes, or I finished the laundry all the way to completion, what I found was it was the end of the day and I was tired and I went to bed. And I didn't worry about what everybody else was doing. Now, there is a time when you say, okay, we're going to get this house clean because my mother-in-law is coming over or something like that. But on the day-to-day, the majority of the time, I don't worry about the rest of my family members' items that are left out or not put away to my satisfaction. I take that time and I go read a book, or I do a puzzle, or I take a hot bath, or I take my dog for a walk, or I work on one of my organizing projects, because I am only in control of myself. However, I have seen this happen with clients, and it has been true in my life as well. When you focus on yourself and stop focusing on others and you start making forward progress and you become more positive and you have more energy and you are more organized, that is attractive to people, including the people who live inside of your home. And they will most likely start to follow suit. Like, I know you don't believe me, and then when it happens, you email me and you say, "I can't believe it, but I was, you know, third week of organizing and I'm up in my closet and I'm organizing my clothes. And my husband says to me, 'I'm going to go and organize my tools in the garage. And it's so hard to then not go, you're gonna what? And you're like, oh, okay, let me know if you need anything. And they go, it's like, wow. Or children, especially when they see, um, their parents start organizing, will go in and they will start organizing their bedroom if they are organizationally inclined. And I always say, if you have 3 children, at least one of them is organizationally inclined. So the only person you can control is yourself. And then the last foundational principle of Organize 365, which has been there all along, all the way back to 2012, but I never realized it was there until about 18 months ago when my team and you started pointing it out to me, is that Organize 365 has a— offers the organizational solution wrapped in grace. And I've always done this, but I did not know that I was doing this. And you'll find out in part number 3, I think it is 3, yeah, that our foundational product I've been using for 20 years and I didn't even realize it was a thing until— sometimes you're so close to things you don't even realize. I grew up as a Gen X kid. I was extremely independent. I was not an all-A student. I had learning disabilities that were not diagnosed until I was a junior in high school. And I was always trying to meet everyone's expectations because words of affirmation are my love language. So I wanted to hear, "Good job, you're doing a good job." And I was never able to achieve all A's on my report card, ever, never. Well, once I got to college and I was in my junior year, from there on out, I did get all A's, but I just was not an all-A student no matter how much I tried. And I remember being a junior in high school, this is before they realized I had a learning disability, and I had taken a science test and I think I got a C on it. I might've even gotten a D, I can't remember, I brought it home. I had to have the paper signed by my parents, and I got a really long lecture. I got a really long lecture about how this was not acceptable and these grades weren't good enough, and, you know, we provide all these things for you, how can you not achieve these grades, yada yada yada. And I said to my mom, I said, look, I went up to the teacher after this test was over, and I asked for the correct answer for every single one, and you can ask me any question on this test, and I have the knowledge because I know what was being taught in the class. However, I wasn't able to produce it on that test, and so my grade is reflective of what I knew at that time. But if you want to know what I know now is I have the knowledge of what was being taught on that test. And yes, I probably said it that way because I was a precocious kid and I hung out with adults my whole life, and I've always talked like this. And my mom, who was a straight-A student, didn't know what to say to that because she was so used to getting straight A's and getting the accolade in school that she had not thought about, as no one has, 'cause nobody thinks this way. My goal in school is to gain knowledge. And I had gained the knowledge even though it wasn't reflective on my grade. And so I had to learn at a young age to not always take what everyone else was giving as the value judgment on me, because I was smarter than my grades were showing. And I am a lifelong learner. I mean, I've read 3 books just this week. Like, I, I devour content. This is why a lot of what you'll hear in Organized 365, like Done is Better Than Perfect and Progress Over Perfection, I'm reading business books. I'm not reading organizing books anymore, but business books, learning about online learning. I'm studying the great companies in the world. I'm studying private companies. I learned from such a variety of sources that I pull all that together and then I extrapolate it out to how does that help you organize your home? How does that help you be more productive at home? How does that help you have a house that feels like a home from any source that I can have? And in— and my mode of teaching has always been from grace. ¡Gracias! My 4th year in teaching, I finally got a classroom. Before that, I had been like a support teacher where I had kids in my classroom for either half an hour or half of the day, and I was supporting other classroom teachers and giving them additional instruction in a Title I situation. But I finally, my 4th year of teaching, I got my own 1st grade classroom. And when they gave me my 1st grade classroom, they moved me into that position and they gave me all of the children that had been in my Title I class that either were on IEPs or were going to be on IEPs, and they did something they didn't normally do, and they put all of the lowest kids in my class instead of dividing them out amongst all the classrooms. And so at that time, when I was teaching this, like 25 years ago, kids could fail first grade. You could actually be held back in first grade, and some schools still do that. And in this school, with this population of children, the number of children that would repeat first grade was definitely some, like, you know, 2 to 5 would have ended up repeating first grade in this political climate. And I remember standing there as this young 20-something teacher, maybe 25 or 26, and it was parent night and the parents had come in and I said, "Your child cannot fail first grade. It is impossible for your child to fail first grade." Children cannot fail to learn. Only teachers can fail to teach. So if I cannot teach your child what they need to know in first grade, then it is a failure on me. It is not a failure on your child, and I need your support to help me to do so because children cannot fail. That is another thing that I would hear 10 years later when I was in a psychologist's office with my kids, and I had been told, you know, my kids were failing, my kids weren't doing well, you know, this was wrong with my kids, that was wrong with my kids. And a psychologist said to me, she said, "Children want to please those in authority, and if they are not pleasing those in authority, then something is wrong, and we need to be the ones to figure it out for them." And so that experience of me being in high school, knowing the knowledge but not getting the grade on the test, me being the first grade teacher, being given this class of students and knowing that some of them would fail. None of my children failed because I refused. I taught, and that's when I learned to teach math 8 different ways. Like, I can only fail to teach, you cannot fail to learn. And that's what I believe in Organized 365. You cannot fail to learn organization. Only I can fail to teach you the skill of organization, and I do not fail. So I will just try again and again and again and again. And this is why we come out with more and more and more things inside of our program at no additional cost once you you purchase a membership, because I learn that people— you— have different ways of learning. So I provide additional and additional, additional until you get the result that you want in getting your organizing. And then when I had that therapist and I had my children and the school was saying, your kids are not meeting expectations, your kids are not meeting expectations, to have that therapist say, children do not fail to meet expectations, we fail to realize what is And so those 3 messages are what you have told me you receive as grace. I am giving it out as in, you cannot fail, you just need more knowledge, I need to do better, I need to find a new way to teach, I need to meet your need so that you can learn this skill of organization, and because I take the onus of teaching and giving and serving and providing and encouraging and nurturing until you are successful, you receive that as grace. And that wasn't what I intended to do, but that is what you get. You get grace from Organize 365 to organize at your pace. It's a lifetime program. The 100-day program is a lifetime program because I don't want you to be stressed out. I don't want you to be stressed. All of our programs like The Sunday Basket Club, the 100 Day, All Access, they're lifetime memberships. It's not like you buy this and you have to hurry up and figure it out. Some people take longer to learn things. Some people need to have the help of in-person instruction, which is why we created the entire certification program. The entire certification program was created because I knew there would be learners like you that would get the idea from me, that could get the experience from me, but you would need the physical in-person organization, a certified organizer. Could provide you. So to sum up, Organize 365 believes and is founded on these principles. Number 1, organization is a learnable skill. Everyone can learn to be organized. Number 2, you need to grow your organizing muscles. Do not, I repeat, do not start in the storage room. Start in the kitchen, grow, grow as your organizational muscles grow, and we will get you all the way organized. Number 3, I am not your Pinterest organizer. I will teach you functional organizing that works. You make it pretty if you want to. Number 4, the only person you can control is you. So if you ask me questions of how to organize your spouse, your kids, that— I only help you organize you, and usually that solves 95% of the organizational issues. And number 5, I will give you what you perceive as grace. Through an unending quest to teach you the way you need to learn, but I want you to give yourself grace. You are beating yourself up because you're not already organized yet, and that is never the message you're going to receive from Organized 365. And as you receive that grace and you realize it is a learnable skill and you can walk through this and we will teach you to be organized, and you receive that grace, what we've seen happen is you start extending grace to those around you, the anxiety in your homes go down, the positivity comes up, and everyone feels like they have a place. I hope you've enjoyed this part 1 of the Organized 365 story. In part 2 coming up next, I'm gonna start talking to you about how I have identified there are different cycles and there are different seasons in organizing and how that impacts you getting your home organized. Thanks for listening to this Organize 365 playlist. You can find more information about these podcast episodes at organize365.com/glossary. I invite you to dive deeper into your organization journey by choosing another topic-specific playlist or listening to our latest revelations on the Organize 365 podcast.