100. 100 Labeled Episodes

We did it, you guys. Yes, WE! Without you, the listeners, getting to 100 episodes would not have been possible. For this special episode, we don't look back, we move it forward. And the future of Labeled Organizing is looking pretty bright. Thank you for subscribing to the Bonus/Premium content and for being a faithful Labeler! 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:20

Well, we made it, you guys. We're at a hundred episodes. One hundred labeled episodes. And I gotta be honest with you, there were a number of times where I thought we would not get here. And I say we because yes, I'm the one recording, I'm the one coming up with the content, I'm the one editing, I'm the one posting. You're welcome. But it would not be a podcast at all if it wasn't for the fact that people were actually listening to the things that I have to say. And I know many of you are listening because I see the numbers. And when I was trying to figure out how I was going to spend the 100th episode, what I was going to talk about, what I was going to focus on, my mind went to a very technical place. I thought, okay, what most people do is they kind of do a review, they go back to old episodes, they pull old clips, they do a lot of work to make sure that the 100th episode is perfect. And to be honest, I was considering doing the same because I thought, well, that'll give me a chance to go back through and really highlight a lot of the topics that I covered. And I can pull out audio from certain episodes and we can revisit it. But really, the task itself is a very big one and it's very time consuming. And one problem that I run into all the time, because I am a perfectionist, is I get paralyzed to move forward with a project because of the perfectionism that I put on myself. I feel like, okay, unless I'm going to do this perfectly, I probably shouldn't do it. And that is a really good way to look at a project because that just means you care. That means that you have high standards, which is an episode, by the way. We do talk about high standards of organizing, but it means that you care, you have high standards, and you are detailed oriented and you want to put together a really good final product. And for those of you who have listened to all 100 episodes of this podcast, you probably have learned by now that I am a perfectionist and I do like to be really detailed. And I do want a really well thought out, finished episode, every single episode for you guys. Because why do something unless you're gonna do it great? And when I sat down to record episode 99, I had all these thoughts in my head. And most of the time when I sit down to record, I have no notes in front of me. I just have all of the thoughts in my head. And what happened to episode 99 was I actually had close to 10 points that I was gonna make in episode 99. And I think I got through three, maybe four. Maybe there was a hidden four in there somewhere. But I got through three and I realized it's okay. Episode 99 doesn't have to be perfect, and neither does episode 100. And the more I got to thinking, I just need to record episode 100 because it is a milestone, a reward, if you will, for hours and hours of hard work, for hours and hours of talking, editing, posting, researching, and just putting together some of these stories of things that I have experienced over the years. It takes a while. It's a lot of effort. So to even make it to 20 episodes or 30 episodes is actually a victory because a lot of people quit after six, seven, eight. They may make it to 20, but then they barely churn out 21 and 22. And then if you make it to 50 episodes, a lot of times the hosting sites will make it very clear that your next big milestone is 100. So here you've done 50 and you're like, wow, I have spent hours and hours of time dedicated to this project. And I'm not really sure how many people are listening. But then you have to double that in order to be considered a successful podcast in a lot of people's eyes. It's the 100th episode that really makes people say, okay, maybe we're onto something here. Maybe people listen. Because why would you record 100 episodes if you think that no one is listening? So I wanted to come on here today. And instead of going back in time, I want to look forward. I want this to be more of a motivational episode instead of a technical episode. And I'm not going to be able to help myself, trust me. I'm going to bring up some actual organizing things here and there. I'm going to make some points. But in the bigger picture, this is what I see all the time. This is what I've seen over the last 18 years. I always say 15 to 20 because it was closer to 20 that I actually interned as an organizer and I worked for someone else. And then I spent some time trying to figure out how I was going to have my own business. And there were a couple of years that I took a break when I had my child and I had a completely different business. So whenever I say 15 to 20, it's not that I can't remember. It's just there was a lot going on in times that I did have to take a break, and times that I paused because I thought, okay, I can't give 100% to this right now. I can't do it perfectly. And one of our episodes was Instagram organizing. That was a time, especially around 2015, 16, 17, when my son was young, that I thought, you know what, I should just take a break because I can't focus. I'm worried about getting him into Mother's Day Out programs and trying to figure out things that toddlers go through and pre-kindergarten kids go through. And I don't regret this at all. But at the time I thought I just can't take on one more thing. And there are times in your life where you do have to pause and you have to focus on things that quote unquote are more important. Whether that's taking time to really focus on your career, focus on your children, focus on your marriage. There are times that you kind of have to put your blinders on and only see what's in front of you. You can't have a number of tasks going on because mentally and emotionally it will drain you and it will make you feel like you're not accomplishing anything because you're trying to accomplish everything. And so, from one perfectionist to another, if you're a perfectionist, I just want to say that it's okay. You don't have to turn off that part of your brain in order to get organized. You don't have to turn off that part of your brain to decide, okay, I want to try something new, but I'm going to have to give up all of this over here. You can find a balance if you do have multiple priorities. But a lot of times you have to be able to decipher, okay, is this something that I'm interested in? And I just want to kind of sit back and be an observer. You know, maybe you think organizing is interesting and you're somebody that sits and watches like DIY shows, even construction reno type shows. A lot of people like to see before and after, and they'll watch something and they're like, I could do that. A lot of people could do that. A lot of people could be a professional organizer. It's not the type of profession where if you make a mistake, lives are at stake. Or if you make a mistake, the whole entire house is gonna fall down. Or if you make a mistake, someone is gonna get released from prison early, right? So you're not a doctor, you're not an architect, you're not an attorney. It really isn't that deep in the whole scheme of things. But what I think that people need to understand is that there are times that we can push things to the forefront because they need to be done. And then when we get them done, we feel so much better. And I think we really, really get stuck and we get paralyzed because we think to ourselves, we have to get this whole project done. We have to have a before and after in order to do it. Because if not, it's not gonna be as exciting and it's not going to look as great if it's a before enduring. Okay. So if you have a before and you're like, I really want to get organized, and you only think about the after, and you're like, well, between my budget and between the things I want to do and everything else I have going on, it's probably gonna be two to three years before that after comes. So I should just wait. I should just wait until I have the time to do the before and after. Everybody else does it in a weekend. Everybody else does it, you know, in one week. Big renovation projects one week. People ripping out walls, putting in custom organizers, custom closets, you know, custom pantries. But it's a whole crew and it's also a whole production. And it's also either a lot of money or it's part of a TV show. And so with real life, a lot of us realize that real construction and real renovations take time because you've got permits, you have people, you have crews, you have to hire the right people, they have to show up every single day. So if you're part of a TV production crew and you're filming something, yeah, you're gonna get it done in the week because everybody is part of this production. You've hired all the people. All the people know they have to show up because they're under a microscope. They're in front of a camera. And so, for those of you who think I'm not gonna do this right now because it has to be perfect, it really doesn't. And as we move forward with the moving series, we've got another episode coming up next Saturday. For those of you who are moving forward with episode two in the bonus slash premium content, just know that none of this has been perfect. I have not sat down for hours and outlined every single episode, but that is how I got to a hundred episodes. And I'm also proud of those episodes. I don't feel like I threw things together and put out crap. Okay. That's the difference. And I think back to two years ago when this podcast started, and I thought I am literally gonna outline every single episode. I'm gonna list out a hundred episodes. Like, if I want to get to a hundred episodes, let's figure out what every single episode is gonna be called. I want to make sure it all falls in line perfectly so that if you're someone who's never organized before, but you want to, as you gradually get to a hundred, you feel like you've learned more, everything just kind of falls perfectly in line. And then I would go to a client's house and I would come home and something specific happened that day. And I would say to myself, I have to record about this, like right now, while it's fresh in my mind, because it just happened, or I felt like it had been something that happened with other clients. And it's like, okay, I want to talk about this because this is a pattern. This is an organizing pattern. And so I wouldn't even look at my little production schedule that I had put together because it didn't matter. You know, what I experienced that day was fresh in my mind, and it just felt like it was something that just had to get out of me. I felt like I had to share it with more people than just turning to a friend or someone that I was working with that day and saying, okay, here's my advice on this, here's what I would do about this, or just kind of talking about the situation and letting people realize that a lot of these things that they're dealing with, a lot of households are dealing with. And that's hard for people to really wrap their mind around because you go through some of these neighborhoods and you look at some of the houses and you see really nice landscaping. You see that there's no trash out in the front yard, you see that people don't have broken down cars in their driveway and stuff up on their porch. And you're like, okay, all these, all of these people right here in this neighborhood. There's probably 200 houses in this neighborhood. They all have it together. What's wrong with me? When I go to my neighborhood, which is two neighborhoods over, my house is a mess on the inside and the outside. And people think that there's this magical neighborhood that people live in. And it's usually a more expensive neighborhood with gates and fences and more expensive landscaping, and maybe they back up to a golf course, maybe they're on the water. Everything from the outside looks really great and put together. And then someone like me has rare access to a lot of these homes. And that's when I see the truth. And the truth is no one household has it completely together. And like I've said before, some people are able to throw money at every single problem that they have. But when it really comes down to it, some of the problems that they are ignoring are problems that you can't throw money at. And either it's some point they get frustrated because they're like, well, my household should run perfectly with all the people that I'm paying. I just don't understand. But a lot of times the issue that they have is something that they have to work through because of their habits, because of the decisions that they're making. You can have a crew come along and clean up something once, maybe twice, maybe three times. But it gets to a point where there's only so much that you can clean up for somebody else. And whether it's hoarding, whether it's just excessive shopping, whether it's financial, whether it's emotional, whether it's medical. There's a lot of people that have medical issues. And whether that presents itself as hoarding or shopping or treating yourself or eating or, you know, working too much. Some people work too much when they don't want to address something. I have worked for people who have been at the end of their life and they know they're at their end of their life, and they weren't old. I talked in one of the episodes. I worked for a mother. Um, when she hired me, she didn't give me the full picture. She just hired me and I showed up on day one. And that's when she said, I've been given two months to live. And I have three children who are under the age of 12. The younger two were very young, like I think four and six. And I said, Oh my gosh, I'm so sorry. And she said, It's okay. She said, I'm been through this. I've had cancer for a few years. It left and came back, and now it's the end. And she's like, I've just accepted it. And it's it is what it is. And six weeks later, she was gone, and the whole house was being packed up by me. And the family was coping and taking kids to different places. It was very, very sad. And that moment, that client, that friend, because over that time, I feel like just for a split second, I got her to smile and laugh, even though she really did not want to get attached to one more person. And I won't even go into the details of all the things that she did for me in terms of the help that she could have gotten, but she turned to one of the organizations that was just going to pay for everything if they use if she used their people. And she said, Nope. She said, I've got a single mom who's helping me and I really like her and I don't want to take the income away from her. I did not even find out about that until after she passed away. The organization came back around and and told me that they were really impressed with the fact that she turned down a lot of services, which if I had known, I clearly would have worked with the service. I mean, I she just kept some things from me because she had made a decision. This is who I want to work with, and this is what's going to happen. So I think about her often. I think about other clients I've had over the years. I've had young clients, I've had elderly clients, I've had clients who have lost spouses while I've worked for them. I've had clients move, I've had clients divorce, lots, lots of divorces. I would say out of the 15 to 20 years of me doing this, I would say probably 40% of the clients that I've had, when they hired me, they were married. And by the time, not necessarily by the time I was finished, it could have even been a small project, but I'd say within a couple of years they were divorced. Either one or both of them reached back out and said, Hey, one of us is moving, or we need you to help pack, we need you to this, that. And so I saw a lot of those breakdowns where one project did not fix everything. Because again, one person, one team, one crew can't come in and fix a lot of the things that people are dealing with. And so, in closing out this hundredth episode, I want to look forward instead of going back over every single episode or saying, hey, here's the highlight reel of the last two years. I really wanted to look forward and I really want to motivate all of you. The only thing, the only thing that you have to do to get organized is to really want it. You have to really want it because that is the common denominator for everyone who is successful in this project, in the projects that they work on or have other people help them work on. You have to really want it. You can't trick someone into organizing, you can't coax them, you can't bribe them. Organizing, hoarding, spending, all of the things that fall in the category of being disorganized or unorganized has to do with the fact that you really, really have to want it because once you really want it, then you actually see a lot of the things that you own that you've been storing, that you've been hoarding, that really don't matter. When you know that you have a chance at a brand new life, if you want to travel, if you want to be able to quit your job and start a new business, if you want to retire, if you want to be able to spend time with your grandkids, if you want to be able to have people over and feel confident in your space, you want to be able to show off the things that you do have. This is where you have to decide. Do I want that or not? Because a lot of people will look at other households and say, Yeah, I could have a house like that if I had the money. It's not about money, it's about wanting it. You have to want it. And it doesn't mean that you have to want the actual house that they have, the type of house that they have, the size of the house. But if you go to someone's house, whether it's 3,000 square feet or 300 square feet, if you like the way that they have everything, if if the things that they own actually fit the space and it feels very open and airy and clean and peaceful, and you say, Well, I want that, then translating it into your space is the easy part. But you just have to want it bad enough so that when someone gives you the prescription and says, Listen, you've got to do this once a day, you've got to do this once a week, once a quarter, you've got to do this. This is what they do. And again, there's the whole concept of the answer is always less. And I announced in episode 99 that I am writing the book, The Answer is always less. That's the working title. It may change, but that's that's what I'm focused on to come out for the summer of 2027. And I'm really excited to share that with all of you once it is published. And I'm also excited to see what happens in the next year, in the next two years with this podcast. Because today we are at a hundred labeled organizing episodes, and not all of them are perfect, but as a whole, it feels like a really big accomplishment for me. And as a perfectionist, I am really proud of myself that I pushed forward and I made it happen. Not everything was pretty, not everything was edited perfectly, but I made it happen. And again, that's hard. When you're doing something as a supplement to your main job. I hope this episode was helpful. I hope all of the episodes leading up to this 100th episode have been helpful. If you haven't had time to listen to all of them, I encourage you over the next week or two to go back and listen to some episodes that you skipped over. Maybe you came in at episode 60 and you have no clue who I was before episode 60. I encourage you to go back and listen because a lot of the information is timeless. There will be some things over the next year or two, over the next hundred episodes that I will revisit and say, hey, what I talked about in 2024, we're gonna revisit it because some things have changed. But then there are some things that are timeless. Things that I learned as I went along 30 years ago, 20 years ago, 10 years ago from personal experience, from professional experience. It all comes together in my episodes, and I appreciate those of you who listen and who appreciate the fact that I try to pull from all of those experiences in order to give you guys what I feel is a really strong podcast. Thank you all for listening. I appreciate you taking the time, and I will see you on the next episode.