Ep. 240: Decluttering Isn't About Your Stuff (+ what it’s actually about)

Okay. 

If you’re in Accomplisehed Lifestyle, my coaching community, you’re about to join me for the Declutter-A-Thon this weekend…and I know you’re excited. 

If you've ever tried to declutter your house and somewhere in the middle of it, you looked around at the piles and the bags and the half-finished rooms and thought…Why does this never stick?

We need to talk.

Before you pull out a single bin. Before you label a single box. Before you drag anything to the garage.

We need to have a real conversation.

Because if you go into this weekend for our Declutter-a-Thon or into your next decluttering afternon thinking you just need to get more done….if you think the problem is that you haven't pushed hard enough or tried the right system or found the right YouTube video when you’ve fallen off track, you’re diagnosing what’s actually happening completely wrong.

And I don't want that for you.

So grab your coffee. Find a quiet corner. And let's actually talk about what's happening here because it is not what you think.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

https://www.jenniferroskamp.com/organic-the-clutter-languages-guide

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Transcript

Well, okay, so I want to start with a question like I so often do before we really even get into this conversation. Questions are so good because they make you think, right? Okay, so when was the last time that you walked into a room in your house or a closet or your spare bedroom or a corner of the kitchen and you felt something other than dread? For a lot of the women that I work with, the answer is I can't remember.

And I think that matters. I know that matters because we've trained ourselves to either avoid the hard spaces entirely or to power through them with your jaw clenched, just trying to get it done as fast as possible before we lose momentum. And neither of those is the right answer. The answer is somewhere that we haven't gone yet and that's what today is all about. And so here's what I wanna do today. I wanna walk you through exactly how to approach decluttering differently.

so that you don't just clear some space in your closet and feel good for a few days. I want you to actually change the pattern, the one that keeps putting you right back where you started, because if you have ever decluttered before, and I'm assuming that most of you have, you know that feeling, right? You spend a whole Saturday going hard, you fill the bags, and you feel relief. You stand in the middle of the room that finally has some breathing room, and you think, this time it's gonna be different. And then six months later, you're standing in the same room

looking at the same kind of mess, wondering what is wrong with you. Nothing is wrong with you, but something is wrong with the approach. And that's what we're gonna fix today. So I wanna set the tone for this conversation before we get into anything else, because the tone matters more than the tactics. There is a time to push. There is absolutely a time to go all in on your clutter, to burn the candle, to do the hard things, and to get it done.

This conversation is not about that. And our declutter-a-thon this weekend is not that either. This is a totally different thing. this might surprise you that we're not just about going gung-ho on a declutter-a-thon weekend. You might have been gearing up for this kind of a weekend, right? You might have mentally committed to getting through as much of the house as you could, as many closets, as many drawers, all the flat surfaces.

that have become a landing strip for almost everything that you don't know what to do with. And I get it, that energy is not bad energy. But here's what I know about the women who come into my world. You already live in push mode. Every single day you're trying harder, you're doing more, you're waking up earlier, you're going to bed later, you're squeezing more into every gap. The problem is not that you haven't pushed hard enough.

The problem is that pushing harder is the pattern that's actually gotten you here. You push until you crash. You reset and you push again. You run on adrenaline and guilt and the fear of falling behind. And then when you finally do fall behind, you decide it's because you didn't try hard enough. And so you push harder next time. Do you see the cycle? This weekend or the next time that you host your own declutterathon yourself, I want you to move.

through it in a way that your life can actually support. Not the life that you wish you had, not the life where your energy is limitless and no one needs you and you have six uninterrupted hours to work. What I want you to do is I want you to experience progress inside your actual life. Because here's the truth, if you're already overwhelmed, pushing harder is not the answer.

It is the pattern and the pattern is exactly what we're here to interrupt. So before we talk about what this weekend actually is, I need to ground you in something first. You have already been doing the work. Okay? I need you to hear that because one of the most exhausting lies that shows up in this space, in the decluttering space, in the self-improvement space, in the life coaching space is that you need more information before you can start.

You need the right system, you need the right method, you need the right podcast to finally explain it in a way that clicks. And I'm about to say something that might sting a little, but I say it with all the love in the world. You do not need more information. You do not need more input. I talk clutter here every single week. And if you have been following along, you've been thinking about your clutter differently.

You've been noticing things about your habits, about your avoidance, about the rooms that you walk past without looking. You've been building awareness, even if it hasn't turned into action yet. And so what you need is not more information. What you need is to use what you already know differently. That's a big shift. And it's one of the core things that I believe about real change. Clarity doesn't come from consuming more content.

It comes from doing, from actually stepping into the space and watching what happens. And so when you walk into this weekend, I want you to walk into what you already have, not shame about what you haven't done, not pressure to absorb and implement some new complicated system, just your own awareness, just you paying attention. That is what you need to start.

So when most people go into a decluttering session of some kind, here's what they think they're doing. They think they're cleaning, they think they're organizing, getting through the piles. I mean, this makes sense, right? You look around, you see the stuff, and you wanna deal with the stuff. But here's what I'm actually helping women do this weekend. And see, here's what you need to know about your stuff. There is visible work, and there is invisible work associated with all of that stuff.

Visible work is the stuff that everyone focuses on, right? All the decluttering podcasts and all of the talks and all of the courses and all of the tools, right? It focuses on the visible stuff, the bags that are going out the door, the shelves that are getting cleaner, the counters that are clearing off. You can see visible work and you can measure it. You can photograph it and you can post it and you can feel that dopamine hit of progress.

Invisible work, though, is also happening. And this is where the real thing is happening. When it comes to clutter, the biggest piece of invisible work is deciding. It's processing. It's actually sitting with an item and figuring out why you feel resistance about getting rid of it. It is following through, not starting a pile in the living room and calling it done, but actually getting it out of the house. It's closing the loops.

all of those things that are half done, half decided, half handled. It is closing all of those things. Most decluttering advice is obsessed with visible work. Invisible work matters. I'm not saying that it doesn't, but the reason that you get stuck, the reason it doesn't stick, the reason that you end up back at square one, it's an invisible work problem.

Here's the phrase that I want you to hear on repeat in your head, especially if you attend any of my decluttering events ever. Clutter is delayed decisions with nowhere to land. Let me say that again. Clutter is delayed decisions with nowhere to land. Every pile in your house is not a pile of things. It's a pile of unmade decisions, things you don't know what to do with, things you feel guilty about.

Things that remind you of a version of yourself that you're just not sure about anymore. Things that represent money that you spent or gifts that people gave you or seasons that you haven't fully processed. The stuff, that visible stuff is just where the decisions live right now. And that means, and this is the important part, if something about that stuff feels heavy as you're working, especially if you're with me this weekend, if you avoid a certain corner or you

skip a certain drawer, that doesn't equal failure. That is the work. The avoidance that is happening right there is information. What you skip tells you something. What slows you down tells you something. What makes you want to close the bin and walk away, that's the invisible work trying to get your attention. And so don't miss it. Now,

Let me tell you a story you already know because it's your story, right? You get motivated, something clicks, maybe it's a podcast, maybe a really bad day where you couldn't find anything and you just lost it. Maybe you walked into someone else's clean house and you felt that sting of comparison. Whatever it is, you get motivated. You get motivated to deal with all the stuff and you push and you clear and you work and you make progress and you can see it and you feel relief and then you stop.

And slowly, or sometimes not so slowly, it comes back. The counters fill back up, the closets get messy again, the paper piles start to grow. And you find yourself right back where you started, except now you also have the evidence that this is just how it is for you. Does this sound familiar? Here's what I need you to understand. This is not a discipline problem. You are not lacking willpower. You are not broken. You are not uniquely bad at this.

This is a pattern problem. The push clear relief stop repeat cycle, it's a pattern. And patterns don't break by doing the same thing, just harder. They break when you change the approach. And so here's what we are not doing this weekend. We are not doing more. We are not trying harder. We are not aiming for a Pinterest worthy result. We are doing this differently.

And I want you to think about where you have seen this exact cycle somewhere else in your life, because I promise you, it's not just in your stuff. You've done this with exercise. You've done it with eating habits. Stopped, started, pushed harder, stopped, repeat, right? This whole cycle, you've done it with routines and planning and journaling and with every wellness thing you've ever tried. You go hard, you feel good, you lose momentum. And then you tell yourself something's wrong with you when you can't sustain it.

Nothing is wrong with you. The pattern, that pattern, it's the problem. And this weekend, we're starting to interrupt that pattern. So, okay, I wanna get practical because I know that you need structure, right? And structure is good. Structure is the support. But here are some decluttering rules that I want you to stick to, especially if you're with me for this weekend, okay? Rule number one, when it comes to decluttering, you are not fixing your house.

Okay, you are not in this to produce a perfect result. You are not in this to get through every room or hit some arbitrary number of bags that you filled. You are in this to observe your patterns while you work. That's a completely different goal, and it changes everything about how you show up. Rule number two, you're gonna choose the next time you work, especially if you're with me this weekend, you're gonna choose one area.

Not the whole house, not the three rooms that bother you the most, one area, a closet, a kitchen counter, a corner of a room, something that has been bothering you. Don't overthink it, just pick one. Rule number three, you're gonna use three simple decisions. These are the decision filters that you're gonna work with. An easy yes, meaning this stays. Easy no.

This doesn't stay in my life right now. And the third one is not now. That's the whole decision. That's the whole decision system for this weekend. Something, again, is an easy yes if it's useful, if it's meaningful to you in this season, if you use it, and if keeping it is obvious. That's an easy yes. Easy no means it goes. Not now. This is for the things that have weight, the things that when you pick them up, it feels complicated.

the things that you're not sure about that are tied to something bigger than just a bag of donations. And here's what I want you to notice. The not now pile, it's just data. So don't shame yourself for having one. Don't power through it just to prove you're not avoiding it. Just notice it. Because what lands in that pile, what feels heavier than it should, is not about the item. It's about your pattern.

Rule number four is to notice as you're working. Notice what slows you down. Notice what you skip. Notice where you want to walk away. Notice what you pick up and hold for a second and then put right back down. None of that is failure. All of it is information. Now, I have done this work long enough to tell you if something feels heavier than it should, it's not the thing.

It's what the thing represents. It's a decision that has been avoided for a long time or a feeling that you don't know what to do with or a season of life that you haven't fully closed yet or maybe you don't want to. And that doesn't mean that you have to psychoanalyze every single item that you pick up, but if something stops you, just pause for a second and ask, what's actually going on here? That question is more powerful than any bin label that I could give you.

And here's where I want to be really honest with you. I could give you the perfect system. I could give you the exact step-by-step sequence. The right bins, the perfect labels, the hour-by-hour schedule. And you might go out and you might have an incredible weekend of decluttering. There's bags that have been removed, rooms are breathing, and you have Instagram-worthy results. And then life will happen. The kids will come home. Your work will pile up. You'll have a hard week.

And three months from now, you'll be standing in that same place wondering why it all came back. Because here's the truth that nobody wants to say in the decluttering space. You don't need another method. It's not about the method. You need support for how you actually operate. So I think the best way that I can say this more clearly is to give you an example. So I'm gonna share with you someone that I coached. I'm calling her Sarah. That's not her real name, okay?

She came to me having done every decluttering challenge you can imagine. She had done the ones where you get rid of one item on day one and two items on day two. And by the end of the month, you've theoretically removed hundreds of things from your house. She had done the big overhauls. She had done the closet purges and the garage overhauls. She was not someone who lacked motivation. She was not someone who didn't care. But every single time without fail, the stuff came back.

And when we started working together, the first thing I asked her, it wasn't about her systems and it wasn't about the method that she used to get rid of the stuff. It wasn't about her bins or her labels or again, the process. I asked her what she was avoiding and she got quiet. She didn't know how to answer it. But then she said something that I have heard in about a hundred different ways from a hundred different women. I think here's what she said.

I think if the house is a mess, then no one can expect too much from me. There it is. The clutter wasn't disorganization. It was protection. It was a way of staying below the radar, of not having to show up fully, of not having to do the hard things, of having a built-in excuse for why things weren't farther along in her house, with her weight loss, and honestly, in all kinds of different ways in her life.

Once she saw that, everything changed. Not because the decluttering suddenly got easier, but because she stopped trying to fix the symptom without understanding the root. The reason nothing has stuck before is not because you haven't found the right organizational system. It's because the clutter was never the problem. It was always the symptom. Clutter is the physical evidence of decisions that have been delayed or avoided or made under pressure and then abandoned.

It's what happens when your capacity is too low and your demands are too high and there's no real structure that's supporting you. So yes, decluttering matters. The work that we're gonna be doing this weekend together in Accomplished Lifestyle for our declutterathon, that matters. What you do with your physical space matters, but what matters more is what you notice about yourself in the process.

Because if you change how you decide, if you change how you follow through and how you close loops, then the clutter doesn't come back. If you don't change those things, it will, every time. I believe in real life over ideal life. I believe in structure that supports you, not structure that suffocates you.

I believe that sustainable change is the only kind of change that's worth building. And I believe deeply that you, every single woman who is listening to me here right now is capable of this. But it's not because you're going to push harder or be more disciplined or finally find the motivation to get it done, but because you're willing to finally see yourself clearly inside the process. And that changes everything.

Now, I wanna take a second before I close to tell you something about where this comes from for me. Because I didn't figure this out from reading books. I figured it out by living it. There was a season in my life where I was the queen of the reset. I was always starting over. I was always going hard for a few weeks, feeling like if I had finally, feeling as though I had finally turned a corner and then watching it fall apart. And I kept thinking, if I just tried harder, if I just found better systems, if I just cared more.

Then it would finally stick. What I eventually understood and what took me a long time to be honest about is that I was treating symptoms, not problems. And I'll be real with you about one of those symptoms because I think a lot of you will recognize it. For a long time, I poured a glass of wine every single night at the end of my day. Not because I drank too much, not because I had a problem by anyone else's definition, but because it was my escape.

It was my signal that I had made it through the chaos of another day. It was the only thing that felt like it let me breathe. Something to soften the sharp edges, something to slow down my racing thoughts and to help me not care so much about everything that hadn't gotten done. And for a long time, I thought that was just how I coped. But over time, I started to notice the pattern. There's that word again, right? It wasn't really about the glass of wine. It was about what I didn't want to feel.

It was about the stress. It was about the loneliness. It was about the frustration, the quiet disappointment in myself and in the seasons of life that weren't going the way that I had hoped. I wasn't chasing a drink. I was chasing relief. And when I finally got honest about that, when I stopped fighting the behavior and started asking about what was underneath it, everything shifted. That one honest question, what is actually going on here?

opened up more change in me than any system or challenge or reset ever had about decluttering, about weight loss, about how I felt every day, about everything. Because it was never about that glass of wine. In the clutter, wasn't the problem either. The burnout wasn't the problem. The weight that I carried for more years than I cared to think about. None of those were the root.

They were all the same problem wearing different clothing. They were all places where I had avoided something real, where I had delayed a decision, where I had chosen short-term relief over long-term clarity, over and over again until the avoidance had a body and it lived in every room in my house and in every corner of my life. And the way out wasn't to attack each one of those symptoms one by one.

The way out was to look honestly at what was underneath. That's the work. And it's not dramatic. It's not gonna come to you in a breakdown moment. It's not some big transformation event that you'll be able to point at and say, that's when everything changed for me. This understanding, this clarity, when you ask that question and get honest, it's what happens on a Tuesday afternoon in a closet holding a sweater that you haven't worn in four years.

noticing something about letting it go because it feels bigger than it should and getting curious about why does that feel bigger than it should? Why does this feel so hard? Getting curious about that instead of just pushing through it and asking yourself to put the sweater in the bag. That's where the transformation shifts. It's asking yourself while you're standing there holding the sweater, what am I actually holding onto here? And being honest enough to sit.

with the answer. That's where change actually lives. That's how change happens. It's not measured. It doesn't happen with the amount of bags that you fill. It happens in the moment that you stop. You ask yourself questions and you actually see yourself. So here's where I want all of this to land. This weekend is not about proving something. It's not about finishing.

It is not even about doing it perfectly or getting through every room or having the before and after photos to show for it. Those are great. But that's not what this weekend is about. This weekend is about finally seeing yourself clearly inside the process. It's walking into a space that has held stress and avoidance and delayed decisions for years and being honest about what's there. Not just the stuff, not just what's on the shelves or in the bins. What's in you?

Because once you see the pattern, once you understand what's actually happening, then you can change it. Once you understand what's been driving that cycle, you can interrupt it. You can interrupt that pattern, not by pushing harder, but by showing up differently. Because you actually understand what you're dealing with. And that is what I want for you this weekend, or the next time that you try to clear the clutter on your own. It's not about having a cleaner house.

It's about having a clearer you. So if you are joining me for the Declutter-a-thon this weekend, here's what I need from you. And if you're gonna do a decluttering on your own, same thing. You need to come in willing to be honest. Not willing to be perfect, but willing to be honest. Bring your awareness, not your pressure. Choose one space. You're gonna be using our three decision filters and pay attention to what you notice.

That's it, that's the whole assignment. And again, if you're not joining me for the Declutter-a-thon, if you're just listening to this on your own while you're on a walk or folding laundry or sitting in a parking lot waiting for a kid to come out of practice, start getting honest with yourself now. And start planning for when you are going to actually approach decluttering differently. You pick one space, not to fix it, not to get through it, but to watch yourself.

in it. Notice what slows you down. Notice what you skip. Notice what feels heavier than it should. And that noticing, that's the beginning of real change. It's not about the clearing, it's about the seeing. And if you're ready to have progress actually happen, then you're ready to actually start with the seeing. So I look forward to seeing so many of you this weekend.

for our decluttering. And all you've gotta do is show up ready to do the work, yes, but show up ready to do the real work. And that's what we talked about today. So, happy decluttering.