078. Stop Saying Sorry for the Mess: 5 Principles of Beautiful Living for Your Home

Are you constantly apologizing for the state of your home? You’re not alone. In this episode, I share why that habit doesn’t serve you — and how to shift your identity to become a Choosy Organizer instead. You’ll learn the 5 Principles of Beautiful Living that help you create a clutter-free home you love, feel more confident, and live with less stress and more intention.

What you’ll learn in this episode:

✨ Why apologizing for your home reinforces an identity that isn’t really you

✨ How the 5 Principles of Beautiful Living can anchor you when life feels messy

✨ Simple ways to Live Light by letting go of excess stuff and mental load

✨ How to Love Your Home with quick resets instead of chasing perfection

✨ Why decluttering makes it easier to Connect Often and enjoy social connections

✨ How to Work to Live Well with my DONUT method for overloaded to-do lists

✨ Ways to Thrive Daily by setting up your home to support your health and wellness

Here are the links I mentioned in the episode.

• Episode 66: From Chaos To Company Ready In 10 Minutes: The Blueprint for Confidence → https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/organizing-for-beautiful-living-home-organizing-tips/id1740218605?i=1000716278958
• The DONUT Method download → https://fireflybridge.com/donutminivideo

Beautiful Living isn’t about perfection. It’s about creating a home that supports you so you can live fully, freely, and without apology. Follow the podcast so you don’t miss weekly organizing tips for Beautiful Living.

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Email me: zeenat@fireflybridge.com

Transcript

Do you know that, without fail, every woman whose home I go into to help them organize apologizes to me and my team members for something about their homes?
It’s always something like, “Oh, I’m so sorry this is such a mess!” or “I’m so sorry it’s hard to walk through here.” Every. Time.
And interestingly enough, the men don’t really apologize. No, they explain instead. They’ll say things like, “Yeah, this has been years in the making.” Or, “I just don’t know where to put this stuff.”
Now, wherever that tendency comes from for most women - and I’ll admit, me included, because I catch myself apologizing all the time for the stuff on our kitchen island - we can make peace with that right now. We don’t need to apologize. Especially not to an organizer who’s coming over to help, but really, not to anyone.
And the that way we do that is by becoming Choosy Organizers. And I’m going to tell you how to do that today.

Welcome to Organizing for Beautiful Living with Zee Siman, The Choosy Organizer.
This podcast is for women who are done organizing everything and ready to be choosy — about what matters, what’s enough, and what can wait.
Because Beautiful Living starts with a little less stress and a lot more intention.
Ready to get beautifully organized? Let’s make it happen!

So let’s talk about this apologizing for a minute. Like, why do we do it?
Well, I think it’s partly habit, we grew up apologizing or we heard our moms or other women in our worlds apologizing a lot too. It’s partly shame, and partly this weird cultural expectation that women are supposed to keep everything under control, right? The kids, the meals, the house, the dog, the schedule, just all of it.
And when we don’t, when life shows up in piles of laundry or dishes in the sink, well we feel like we’ve failed. So we apologize.
But the thing is, guys, that apologies don’t make the piles and smaller. Apologizing doesn’t reset the kitchen for you and sure doesn't bring peace into your home. It just reinforces the identity that you’re “the messy one,” “the disorganized one,” or “the one always behind”, right? 
We’re saying “I’m sorry I didn’t clean up enough before you got here. I should have done better.”
And the people who are coming over? They probably don’t even care! As a professional organizer, I for sure don’t care. I’m just there to help you figure it out.
And apologizing is not who you are. I know that. You know that.
So what if instead of feeling like “Oh, I’m a disorganized mess”, you shifted your identity to being a Choosy Organizer? “I’m a Choosy Organizer.” I’m someone who doesn’t apologize for her home, but instead chooses, with intention, how her home supports her life.
And that shift is possible, and it happens through what I call the 5 Principles of Beautiful Living. And I want to walk you through those today so can you see how they can anchor you when life feels messy. These aren’t just principles for your home, ok? They’re touchstones, or guideposts, for a calmer, more intentional life. They make sure you’re moving in the direction of feeling really good, really right, in your home, in your work, in your town and in your relationships. All right?

So Principle 1 is Live Light. 
My husband and I come from sort of similar family backgrounds in that our parents were frugal. They only spent on the necessary things, not on like “nice to have” stuff. So we, my husband and I, we inherited that way of living, and so as we transitioned into our adult lives, every event we went to, every sports season, every work conference, we would bring home whatever free stuff they were giving out. We had mugs. More mugs than could really fit, we would stack them 3 high. Our kitchen cabinet was basically a mug museum.
And I had a reason for keeping them all! Like when my family would come to stay, we needed a mug for every person, and we drank tea multiple times a day, so yes, we need 28 mugs! And then, some of those mugs were from different places we had each visited, so we didn’t want to part with them. Oh, no. They were memories. 
But years later, after I began my journey to being organized, we pared it down. We now have I would say about 10 to 12 mugs, and I’ve kept our favorites, of course. And when we have a bunch of people come over and we need to make tea, we improvise. I’ll pull out the nice Christmas mugs my mother-in-law gave to us, and I wash mugs between uses. It just takes a minute. 
So now, our mornings are really simple. We can grab a mug for our coffee without being scared that you know we’re going to knock down something and break it. It’s way easier to unload the dishwasher and put the mugs away, which used to be a chore I dreaded because of having to balance all those mugs on top of each other. 
That’s what Living Light looks like. It’s choosing quality over quantity. Keeping less, so the things you do keep serve you well.
And by doing so, you’re lightening your mental load, like me not having to dread putting the mugs away anymore.
So how do you Live Light and put this into practice and become a Choosy Organizer? Well, pick something, or let me say that a different way. Choose something that’s annoying to you that you might have too many of. Maybe your tshirt drawer isn’t closing easily, or you hate to put your kids’ socks away. Set a number or a space limit. And Choose the ones you prefer to keep until you reach that number or that space and donate the rest. Go ahead and try that one thing, and see how you can enjoy the freedom of space.
And you’re also choosing to limit how much of this stuff you’re going to bring into your home from now on. So you’re practicing simple sustainability right there.

Principle 2 is to Love Your Home. Now this is all about creating Inviting Spaces in your home.
Listen, messes will happen. Maybe you have kids, maybe you have pets, and you probably have a decent number of Amazon deliveries happening. Look, life is messy. But the difference between apologizing and feeling confident in your home is knowing that you can reset it quickly.
Think about the last time that you were sick. Maybe your partner picked up some of the slack and got the kids to school, on time or not, but they made it there, right? But for those days that you were sick, things probably got messier than usual. The laundry maybe backed up a bit, the kitchen was in disarray. It’s going to happen. And then, the day that you actually feel better is the day your husband panic-texts you because your in-laws left him a message to say they were stopping by that evening to help out. 
And you’re sitting at work thinking that your house looks like a tropical storm ripped through, picked up every toy, every dirty dish and random sweatshirt you all own and dropped them on every surface. Like how could you possibly feel good about welcoming your inlaws into your house like that?
Well, when you have a 10-minute tidy reset, like the one I go through in episode 66. It’s called From Chaos To Company Ready In 10 Minutes, I’ll put the link in the show notes so you can listen to it. But if, when you have a 10 minute tidy reset like that you’ll know that you can get your house to be at least presentable, by whatever your standards are, before they get there.
That’s Loving Your Home. It’s not perfection, but it’s trusting in your systems so you feel confident anytime, and so you really do love hanging out in your house without feeling annoyed or stressed by seeing clutter around you.
So sure, love your home can be creating inviting spaces for you to share with other people, but it’s also creating inviting spaces for you to love.
Principle 3 is Connect Often, which is having Social Connections often.
Clutter keeps us isolated. If you don’t feel good about your home, you’re going to hesitate to have people over. 
And let me add that when your phone is buzzing constantly, well you’re going to miss the little daily chances to connect with people in real life.
One client recently told me she hadn’t hosted friends or family for the past 2 years because she didn’t feel good about her dining room. The table was buried under paper piles and there were bags of gifts that she hadn’t even had the courage to empty. But once we cleared it, she hosted two dinners over the next couple of weeks!
It changed her vibe completely. Instead of feeling dejected, she felt hopeful about the rest of her house, and she was so happy to share those 2 dinners with the conversations and the laughs with those people that she loved and who loved her.
That’s what Connecting Often looks like. We have to create space. We have to create margin in your home and your digital life to make room for people.
If you’re standing in the checkout line at the grocery store just texting or scrolling away on your phone as we tend to do, what simple little joyful, kind connection with the cashier could you be missing out on? Think about it. It cheers us up to have happy conversations, even with total strangers. If you notice the cashier has an amazing manicure, well let them know that! You know, when people see you smiling, they smile back. You don’t have to be creepy about it, but if you catch someone’s eye, it’s ok to say good morning as you pass, right? Small shifts like that open the door to big connections with the people in your town, or at your work, and especially in your own house.
Principle 4 is Work to Live Well. 
I’m pretty sure that’s why most of us work. We’re in search of living well. But a lot of us are working so hard just to keep up and if we’re honest, the work never ends. Emails, laundry, carpools, and of course, endless to-do lists.
But when you Work to Live Well, you flip the script on that. Productivity isn’t the goal; living well is the goal.

You might have one of those to-do lists that never ends, and that’s normal. We always want to do more than we could ever possibly have time for. That’s just a function of being human I think.
One of my favorite tools is my DONUT method for long to-do lists: DONUT stands for Do it, Outsource it, Nix it, Uncomplicate it, or Table it. It’s a playful way to cut your list down to what actually matters, and it reminds you that not everything deserves your energy. 
It’s how you can be Choosy about what you actually need or want to accomplish on that list, and then you choose what can wait, and what you can actually just cross off and not do at all. I’ll put a link to how you can download my DONUT method so you can go through it with your own to-do list, ok?
Now productivity is important in businesses of course, but we’ve brought maybe an unhealthy version of it into our home lives as well. The reality is that there’s no division line between work and home anymore because we’re always connected, we have our phones with us and our computers with us all the time. And if you’re one of the lucky ones, well you love to work.
The trick is to balance all the stuff you want to do with all the stuff that is best for you to do right now, at this moment. You might get to the other stuff later, you might not, but if you choose with careful thought and intention, the stuff you didn’t do isn’t going to haunt you later, all right?

And Principle 5 is Thrive Daily
Your home shapes your habits, for better or for worse. If the yoga mat is buried in the closet, guess what? Yoga isn’t going to happen. If your fridge is cluttered, meal prep feels overwhelming, and you won’t feel like making that healthy meal that you wanted to.
But if you set up your space to encourage wellness, both physical and mental, well then it becomes natural. 
And you know what’s great? Your kids will see you putting importance on your wellness. And what you do, they pick up on and they’ll probably do too.
So if you’re making more meals at home, they’ll probably do more of that when they become adults. If you’re ordering in all the time, that could very well become the norm for them when they become adults. 
So that’s what Thriving Daily’s all about. Setting up your home to support health, relaxation, and well-being, so you feel good every single day.
So, let’s just circle back for a minute. You don’t need to apologize for your home anymore. That identity just doesn’t serve you.
Instead, you can step into the identity of a Choosy Organizer, someone who decides what matters, who creates sustainable systems, and then lets the rest go.
The 5 Principles of Beautiful Living are your guide to do that, ok?
Live Light.
Love Your Home.
Connect Often.
Work to Live Well.
And Thrive Daily.
So which one feels like the one that you most need right now? For me, today, it’s Thrive Daily. We’ve had a week of minor struggles here: no hot water on one side of the house, a lot of super duper early mornings and late nights because of my son’s schedule, and I’ve let some things falter a bit, like working out. So that’s my goal for this week, to get back on track.
So maybe pick the principle that feels right for you to focus on right now, practice it in the smallest and simplest way you can this week by doing just one or two things to getting you closer to where you want to be. That’s how identity shifts happen, right? One choosy decision at a time.
Listen, if you’re not following the podcast, please hit the Follow button so you don’t miss an episode each week, ok?
I hope you have a beautifully organized week. I’m Zee, and I’ll see you on the next episode.