Excellence Not Perfection with Lisa Woodruff

You don’t need to do everything perfectly to live a life that feels meaningful, peaceful… and truly your own.  In today’s episode, “Excellence Not Perfection,” I’m joined by Lisa Woodruff, who shares a refreshing and freeing perspective on how women can step out of overwhelm and into a life of greater purpose and ease. 

Lisa opens up about her own journey—from feeling reactive, depressed, and constantly behind in her 30s and 40s… to becoming more positive, proactive, and grounded in her 50s. And what she discovered along the way might just change how you see your home, your time, and even yourself. 

We talk about why overwhelm isn’t just a “busy mom” problem, the three key spaces to organize for your well-being, and the powerful shift from chasing perfection to becoming a woman of excellence—where your best is enough, and peace becomes possible. 

You’ll also hear practical, real-life strategies—like creating a caregiver go-bag for those unexpected moments, and why letting go of things like “perfectly folded laundry” might be one of the most liberating decisions you ever make. This conversation is honest, empowering, and full of permission to stop trying to keep up… and start living in a way that truly supports you. 

So let’s call Lisa… and let’s “Call IT in With Dar. “ 

Transcript

You don’t need to do everything perfectly to live a life that feels meaningful, peaceful… and truly your own.  In today’s episode, “Excellence Not Perfection,” I’m joined by Lisa Woodruff, who shares a refreshing and freeing perspective on how women can step out of overwhelm and into a life of greater purpose and ease. Lisa opens up about her own journey—from feeling reactive, depressed, and constantly behind in her 30s and 40s… to becoming more positive, proactive, and grounded in her 50s. And what she discovered along the way might just change how you see your home, your time, and even yourself. We talk about why overwhelm isn’t just a “busy mom” problem, the three key spaces to organize for your well-being, and the powerful shift from chasing perfection to becoming a woman of excellence—where your best is enough, and peace becomes possible. You’ll also hear practical, real-life strategies—like creating a caregiver go-bag for those unexpected moments, and why letting go of things like “perfectly folded laundry” might be one of the most liberating decisions you ever make. This conversation is honest, empowering, and full of permission to stop trying to keep up… and start living in a way that truly supports you. 

So let’s call Lisa… and let’s “Call IT in With Dar. “ 

Speaker Dar  

Welcome, Lisa. I'm excited to have you with us today, but before we dive into overcoming our overwhelm and replacing chaos with organization or routine, please tell us a little bit about yourself and how you got to the place of writing the book,” Escaping Quicksand.” Well, Dar, thank you so much for having me on the podcast. 

Speaker Lisa 

Well, you know, I'm getting older, so I'm in my 50s. I'm 54 I've written some books, I've had a podcast, I've raised my kids, and when I was going to write my next book, I thought back on my first 50 years, and now that I'm kind of empty nesting and have more time, I was like, how did I survive those years? Like, how did I survive the 30s and 40s? And I've taught people how to get organized and things like that. But it's not always about cute containers or organizing a space. What were the things that really turned me from a negative, depressed, reactive, overweight, overwhelmed woman into a positive, proactive, healthier in all ways, woman in my 50s and I realized there were, like, a handful of things that I had done that were really mindset shifts that helped me escape that quicksand stuck in my house, feeling that I had and moved me into a more positive, proactive second half of my life, 

Speaker Dar   

Beautiful. So let's dive into some of those mindset shifts. 

Speaker Lisa 

Yeah, you know, there are, there are a couple of things. The first one is, you know, a lot of the conversation in the media today about women being overwhelmed and the invisible work at home talks about women who are stay at home moms, which is awesome, and it's great. And I definitely was one, and I definitely was overwhelmed, but that's only 17.9% of the US population. Right now. There are many more single moms, people who are married without kids, people who aren't married, single, widowed, whatever. And so as I've gotten older, my perspective of overwhelm has changed in that I see women being overwhelmed in many different phases of their lives, and it's not just if you're married with children, although that is what academia has studied, and that's usually what the media talks about. And so in escaping quicksand, I really want to think about, how do all of us get into situations where we get overwhelmed? We're really not sure how we're going to get out of that overwhelm, and what are the mental shifts that happen inside of us first, before you can see the external effects of escaping that quicksand! 

Speaker Dar  

Well, what would be our biggest priority in escaping the quicksand? 

Speaker Lisa 

All right, well, there are two things I would love to talk about. One is how we treat ourselves in our household, and then the other one would be this idea of perfection versus excellence. So I'll talk about how we treat ourselves in our household. When I was, you know, in my early 20s, got married young, left my childhood home, moved into a condo with my husband. I was so excited. I was so excited to finally be in charge of the household and be able to make all the decisions I wanted to make. And somewhere in my head, I thought, well, that meant I wouldn't have to do chores, because there wouldn't be a parent telling me I had to do chores. And the truth of the matter is, everyone has to do chores because there's a lot of chores related to living in a household. So I quickly learned that that wasn't actually going to be the case. But as I was a stay-at-home mom, and I was getting my kids organized as they kept moving through their childhood, I realized along the way that I was helping them clean and organize their bedrooms every Saturday, you know, and teaching them how to organize and clean their bedroom. And it was probably when they were in middle school that I

walked into my bedroom one day and I looked around, I was like, Huh? When was the last time I organized my bedroom? And the answer was a long time ago, multiple years ago, but yet, I was spending every Saturday organizing both my daughter and my son's bedroom, and sometimes the whole entire weekend, and you know what? Was it organized? The next weekend, their bedrooms were instantly unorganized. And so it took me a while to organize my bedroom, probably a couple of months, mostly because my bedroom had become the dumping ground for everything projects I was in the middle of things that I wasn't sure what to do with, things that I didn't want to take all the way down to storage, things I didn't want the kids to see or I didn't want to get ruined, like I basically was living in a storage room. And so once I really realized that, hey, maybe I should organize my room, kind of like I tell my kids to organize their room, I hit on something unique in that many of us in our overwhelm do. To organize the spaces in which many people will see first, like our family room, our front entryway, our kitchen, our kids’ rooms, our kids toy areas. However, the spaces in our house that really have the most impact on our organization and wellbeing are our bedroom, our bathroom and our closet. Like every night and every morning, you're in your bedroom, your bathroom, in your closet, and we don't tend to take as much care in our own spaces as we do other people's spaces that we are caring for. And when you do, you're supporting your own self-care and organization and starting and ending your day in an organized state, and it really reduces the overwhelm and the stress of getting ready and going to bed at night. 

Speaker Dar 

Wow, those three areas, huh, the bedroom, bathroom and closet. So let's dive into perfectionism. I love your chapter that says women of excellence, not a perfectionist, yes.  

Speaker Lisa 

So it's probably about the same time this is going to be like in my early 40s. Man, I did a 

lot of transforming of myself in my 40s. I think many women do. And it was about that time, you know, where I realized, Hey, I haven't done my bedroom, I haven't done my closet, but I keep doing the kids, and I started to think, well, maybe I could take a little bit of that time and work on myself. And I, you know, in school, I never was a straight A student. I wasn't even a B student. I always had this floating C that drove my mother crazy, because sometimes it was in science, and then the next semester would be in history, and then the next semester be in some other subject, because I doubled down on wherever I got the C before, and then the C would float somewhere else. And I just wasn't good at achieving an ape. I wasn't an A plus student. I eventually was diagnosed with dyslexia, and so I realized I could not attain perfection. But in my 20s and 30s, I really tried to. I was like, Well, now it's my own house, it's my own kids. Like, maybe now that I'm in charge, or I have the time, I'll be able to do it, and I just never was able to have something done perfectly. I'd get a room painted, and my husband came home from work, he said you'd missed a spot. And I was like, dang it. And I was always trying to, you know, get a gold star, have somebody say you did a really good job, like you did this perfectly. And it was exhausting. So eventually, I finally said, You know what, I'm not a perfectionist. I just stopped accepting that judgment of anyone else, or even my own internal judgment of not being able to do things perfectly. And that worked for a while. The problem was, when you say you're not a perfectionist, it's like, well, what are you? Then you're just like, not trying hard enough. Like, you're not like, now you're just not even putting in the right effort, you know? And I didn't like that either, but I knew I 

couldn't go back to being a perfectionist. So I really wrestled with that. And then one day it came to me. I said, You know what? I am a person of excellence. I give excellent effort, I do the best I can with the resources I have at the time, like I'm always giving excellent effort and doing as much as I possibly can at any one time, knowing that I will never be perfect, and that was it. I can strive for excellence all day long, and it's not the same effort and judgment of striving for perfection. It's more supportive and Grace giving to be a person of excellence. And I really just love how it feels to be a person of excellence, and how little I judge myself and others now that I do look for excellence instead of perfection. 

Speaker Dar 

Oh, I'm joining that club as a woman of excellence, for sure. Thank you. Thank you. We had a little conversation about, what action can we take right now? What can we do right now? If, if we're overwhelmed, many of us are in that age where we're starting to do caregiving, not of small children anymore, but of perhaps, our parents. I remember my first teaching job, one of the older women told me, she said, Well, wait till you're the age of parenting you’re the parent. And boy, did I get to that age where caregiving and having to be on the run and on the call for ailing parents. So could you talk about your special go bag?  

Speaker Lisa 

Yes. So, thank you for bringing this up. You know, as we get older, you know, 

Our lens of what the world is really our age and younger, because that's only our lived experience. I mean, I remember going towards my 40th birthday thinking like, oh my goodness, I'm going to be a decrepit dinosaur the day I'm 100 you know, the day I turn 40 and one day old. I just thought I was going to fall off this precipice into the pit of de. Fair and 40 was great, you guys. If you haven't turned 40 yet, when you're 40 and one day old, you go, Oh, this isn't bad, as matter of fact, it's really good. 50 is better. I'm sure it gets better even as you get older. But there are new challenges that come as you get into your 40s and beyond. And for me, it even happened in my 30s, where you realize that not only are you sometimes caregivers for children, and of course, you're a caregiver for yourself, so that's self-care. But you are also going to end up in a caregiving situation, probably for your parents, possibly for your spouse, maybe for a sibling or close friend, and more often than not, you're going to settle a couple of estates. I know that you know, just going the way things are. My husband and I are both the oldest children. Will probably settle four estates in our lifetime, possibly up to eight. You don't really think about that. You don't want to think about that. You don't think about that. And what happens is you get a phone call, and the phone call is someone has fallen, or somebody is sick, or somebody's been in an accident, and you instantly are in fight or flight mode, and you're immediately going to that person and you're taking care of them, and sometimes that's the beginning of a really long caregiver journey. And because I've been in this situation a couple of times, what happens is, when you get that call, you are going to get in the car and leave instantly. It's almost like you do it within a breath. You're already in the car. Once you get to the scene of that accident, or you're in the hospital with your family member, or you're attending to whoever it is you need to take care of, it's not a quick process. It's not like an hour later you're back in your car and you're on your way. It's usually the whole day that you're there, sometimes multiple days. And what happens is you don't have the resources to take care of yourself so that you can be present in that situation 100% focusing, because maybe you didn't get your coffee that day, you don't have a bottle of water, you don't have a protein bar, your phone is going to die. You know, all of these things happen if you're going to be in a prolonged situation like this. So I realized that the best way to be proactive about just being an older woman who was going to be called on in emergency situations was to just basically make myself a go bag, not like if you're escaping a hurricane, but if you're called in to be a caregiver at a moment's notice, kind of like you would have a baby bag for a baby. So I was like, what are the things that I would need if I was dropped in a hospital for 24 hours. They're always going to feed the patient, but they're not necessarily going to feed you. I need water. I need a cell phone charger. I need, You know, I put a sweatshirt in mine, because I'm always cold when you go into hospitals or things like that, or whenever I'm in trauma, I get colder. A notebook in there so you can take notes, you know, a little bit of money. So if there's a vending machine, you have money, most of them take credit. They take credit cards now, but not always, a couple of protein bars, things like that. And I usually pack enough. So if I'm sitting next to somebody else, I can share with them. If you're the only person there, you can't leave and go get food. If you have another person there, one person can leave and go get food. But these are the things that you don't think of until you're in the situation. You're like, Ah, I wish somebody would have told me this, so now you're telling them. That's right. What a great idea. 

Speaker Dar 

I'm sure, wow, I have the book in front of me ladies who are listening. So I'm sure there's many more things we can talk about, but sometimes we hold an unrealistic expectation when it comes to, Well, just about anything but housework. What can you tell us about that? 

Speaker Lisa 

Oh, I could tell you some fun academic stories. So I am just about done with my PhD in applied psychology, and I have been researching, you know, what we understand about housework and academia? And it's interesting. It's fascinating. You know, if you go all the way back to the 30s, 40s and 50s, that's when Lillian Gilbreth was a psychologist, and she was working on the efficiency of the home. She is the Cheaper by the Dozen lady. She and her husband did a lot of efficiency studies, and those are in psychology. And when she was done with her work, the field shifted into economics, like, what is the economic value of the household, the labor that's done in the household that was the 60s, 70s, early 80s. And then it shifts again into the current narrative, which is, who is doing the labor? Is it the man or the woman? I mean, shocker, it's the woman. It's been a woman forever. So this isn't anything new, but they've, they've really been researching the woman's role in housework and how much work she does compared to men, and partly they can do the comparison to men, because they're only looking at that population of married couples with children, which in the 80s was, you know, 45% of the population. Now it's only 17.9% of the population. But what's interesting is the arc. The conversation today is that there are studies on populations other than married couples with children, like widowers, or women who are in a caregiving role, or once the family retires and you're in a non-working relationship, married couples where both partners have retired. Here's what's fascinating, and I cannot figure this out. When couples retire, the woman adds seven more hours of housework per week. I'm like, What is she doing? Like, we're not working now. What exactly? What is this extra housework that I can be expecting when my husband is retiring and I'm not looking forward to it? I can't figure it out, because there isn't enough information in the study. If this work is because they're just doing homework so they have more time, they just do more housework because there's more time to do it. Or if there actually is more housework, I'm not, I'm not really sure, but the bottom line is, housework will expand to all of the time that you give it, just like anything else you're going to do, like if you have more time, you can be more leisurely in how you clean or how you cook or how you prepare your food, or you know what you do with the laundry, and that's great. If that's how you want to spend your time, that's awesome. You should do it, but it's not how I want to spend my time. I actually don't cook at all. So I don't want to do housework. I want to have more time to get a PhD, to play with my grandchildren, to run my company. And so I look at the housework that we do, and I think what is optional here, and the problem is, so what I think the problem is, is that our only understanding of what is an appropriate amount of housework comes from our lived experience in our own childhood, our spouse, if we have one, their lived experience, and how we decide to create a household together any of our family members when we're in their houses, and we see how they do housework, what we see on social media, what we see in TV, and the handful of houses that we're in where we're not there for dinner or a party, where we actually see how our friends live in their households and how they get their work done in their households. It's not a very big sample size. And so if you're looking at how housework is portrayed on social media or on TV, like that's not necessarily real life, and a lot of those things that we do or strive to do aren't really necessary, they're totally optional. And I just want to let you know that, like, you can do them all if you want to, but I like to say, if you have kids under the age of five, or maybe when I live alone, I'll probably do this like you can have a clean laundry basket and a dirty laundry basket. There's no one that there's no underwear and socks. Police that's going to come to your house and make sure you fold your underwear and you match the pairs of socks and you put them neatly in a drawer. If you want to do that, that's great, but you don't have to do that. 

 Speaker Dar  

I love that. Yeah, there's no underwear. Police, Speaker Lisa   

nope. 

Speaker Dar 

Oh, that's good. That's very good. And where? Oh, I don't know. I'd be asking that same question as you are, where? How come they're taking that extra time? I'm down here on South Padre Island for the winter, and I'm sure not spending my extra time house cleaning. I am on the beach or doing something fun, like yesterday, we went to Mexico. I'm certainly not going to be doing extra housekeeping either. I'm in your camp. 

Speaker Lisa  

Great. 

Speaker Dar  

All right, let's just talk about the logistics of this book and the gift that you have for our audience, yes, so “Escaping Quicksand” is available in all bookstores everywhere right now, but it will actually launch on June 23 meaning that you're going to pre order it now and it'll get shipped out from wherever you order it on June 23 but if you order the book now, then you can come over to the organized 365 website and put your receipt in, and you'll get in our free book club that we have right now. So I am recording an audio book. It's not available for purchase yet, but for everyone who pre orders, I'm releasing one chapter per week so that we can go through the book together as a big group book club. And I know this podcast is coming out after the book club will have been going on for a while. It's starting on March 3 so we'll probably be a couple, maybe half of the way through the book by the time you hear this podcast. But come over to the book club with us all. The first half of the audio book will be right there for you to listen to, and you can jump right in and do the book club together. I'm so excited about this book club. We have more than 1000 people in it already, and I love the idea of not only reading a book, but implementing the book in real time. And what fun is it to do it with other girlfriends? 

Speaker Dar 

Yes, yes to implementing and yes to doing it with other women. And 

So I just want to encourage people to pack their phone chargers and a sweatshirt and a notebook and money and protein bars and get their gold bag, their go bag all set up. But before we leave, what other things are you being called to inform our audience about 

Speaker Lisa 

You know, I think the older I get, the more I realize that until we have the lived experience of someone in the decade that we are going into, we don't really understand all of the complexities of life's pivots and the changes that happen as we age. I wish that there was more research. I wish that there was more knowledge about, you know, what my next 50 years of life will be like, so that I could be informed about it. But you really can't do that until you've experienced or, you know, somebody else who has experienced it. So give people grace. Yeah, just give everyone grace and strive for excellence, not perfection. 

Speaker Dar  

I love that during life pivots, give everyone grace and that saying I pulled out of your book right away, excellence, not perfection. Thank you so much for being with us today, Lisa and sharing this wonderful book. 

Speaker Lisa  

Thank you. 

Transcribed by https://otter.ai