Changing your baseline
June 25, 2023
Last week, I was already in bed dozing off when I received a text from my old friend Lucy that read:
“I honestly feel so overwhelmed with so much crap in this house.”
With each buzz, my phone revealed yet another snippet from her current situation.
“My entire house is upside down. There’s stuff everywhere.”
“Tonight I just started screaming at my family because I feel they don’t help me at all!”
“I’m always throwing stuff away, but it’s never enough. It comes in at a much faster pace than I can get rid of.”
The struggle
Text after text, I knew exactly how Lucy felt. Until a few weeks ago, I had felt that way often. Clutter would accumulate in my house for weeks or months and I’d let it go until one day I’d snap. Then I’d call in my best friend, who is a professional organizer, for what she referred to as one of my “fire drills.”
Nicole would help me organize the area that was bothering me (the kids’ playroom, bedroom, my office, etc) which would put me at ease for a few months until the cycle repeated itself.
It’s not that I wouldn’t try to keep it up. Nic would teach me things like how to categorize my kids’ toys and how to create a “home” for each category.
“All you have to do is put things back in their place, Caro. And teach the boys to do the same!”
It seemed so simple.
But somewhere along the way, the system would break down.
Like in Lucy’s house, items would creep into our home that I had no category or home for and make themselves comfortable on my kitchen counter for weeks at a time; My kids’ friends would leave their stuff in my house; The nanny would put things where they didn’t belong, confusing all of us; Or there were things that required action (to return, or mail, or give to someone) and I wouldn’t find the time to take the action I needed to take.
These life interruptions, exceptions, or excuses (however you want to refer to it) would give us permission to revert to our old habits and ways. I’d be able to keep up with some of Nicole’s systems, but not enough of them to keep the house in order.
Is this just the way we are?
This cycle went on for years. Nic would come to my house to help me organize, knowing this was only a temporary solution. Not because her system was flawed — but because we were.
“The system can’t maintain itself,” she’d roll her eyes.
I had believed clutter was unavoidable because of my family size and lifestyle.
In the book series, The life-changing magic of tidying up and Spark Joy, Marie Kondo claims that if you follow her system, you’ll tidy up “once and for all.”
I didn’t believe her.
Just like Lucy, I had attempted to declutter a gazillion times! I’d thrown away bags of things, I’d hired the professional organizer, I’d yelled at the kids and pleaded with the nanny. I felt like I had tried “everything.”
I couldn’t understand how Marie Kondo’s system could change all the “external” factors that contributed to my clutter.
When desire trumps limiting beliefs.
Even though I didn’t believe or understand Marie Kondo, I desired the vision she created in her book.
I desired to be more minimalist.
I desired to be more organized.
I desired to live in a neat, clean, and clutter-free space.
Because those desires were stronger than my limiting beliefs, I decided to follow the Konmari Method to a T.
Do long enough to become.
At first I just obeyed Kondo’s instructions:
Follow this specific order.
Identify the things that spark joy.
Tidy up by category, not by room.
Do it all once. Don’t stop until you’ve gone through every item in the house!
That last instruction changed everything.
It’s not that I hadn’t tried these things before — Nicole had already taught me a lot about what I was learning in this book. It’s that I hadn’t followed through long enough to BECOME the kind of person who IS TIDY.
It’s no different from changing your eating habits. Most diets teach the same tricks with different variations. Most people will follow a diet for a little while, maybe lose a little weight, and then external factors will give them permission to revert to old habits. They view eating healthy as a short-term sacrifice.
But those that can push through the short-term sacrifice to create a lifestyle — those are the ones that BECOME healthy eaters. Their taste buds change, their cravings change, and their default thinking changes. Those are the ones who break the never-ending cycles of weight loss and weight gain.
The more items we held in our hands, decisions we made to toss or keep, and categories we conquered, the more we changed.
What made all the difference.
As I read Lucy’s texts and relived her reality, it finally dawned on me why this stopped happening to me.
Lucy couldn’t keep up with the incoming “stuff” because her baseline was already “too much stuff.”
Even if she got rid of a few bags of clothes, shoes, or toys, she has too much stuff. She often gets rid of the overflow, which makes her feel better, but because her cup is still full, anything new that comes in quickly becomes overflow again. Hence, the vicious cycle.
By tackling our entire house in one swoop, we emptied the container so much that we are no longer at risk of overflowing.
Now that doesn’t mean that we couldn’t start filling the container and get to the point of overflow again — of course we could. But when we created so much space in the container, something magical happened:
We experienced peace.
The peace I envisioned when I read Marie Kondo’s books and studied Joshua Becker’s Becoming Minimalist philosophy; The peace I longed for each time I tried to declutter.
Suddenly, that peace was real, and it felt amazing. I was no longer worried about the “stuff” I had to get rid of. Instead, I focused on enjoying the space we had created and the things we had kept.
Preserving that peaceful feeling has inspired me to take action on things quicker than I used to; To put things in its place immediately, and to discard anything in our home that no longer sparks joy.
Changing the baseline changes the effort level
I’ve noticed it no longer requires so much thought, effort, or energy to be organized, just like it no longer requires thought, effort, or energy to eat healthy.
A client of mine told me once that the thing that discourages her from being consistent in losing weight is that she feels she’s going to have to work at it forever.
What she doesn’t yet understand, like Lucy and I didn’t understand, and you may not yet understand … is that you do have to work at it forever, but not in the way you’re working at it now.
Because right now, every action and decision requires an enormous amount of thought, effort and energy. Right now, it’s hard because you’re still married to underlying beliefs, stories, and habits that have defined you for far too long. Right now, you’ve only just begun doing, and you haven’t yet mastered the becoming.
You’re still trying to eliminate or stop the overflow, rather than enjoying and protecting your new reality.
But if you stick it out. If you don’t quit too soon. If you focus on changing the baseline, I promise you; it gets so much easier. You will enjoy the reality you’ve longed for and dreamt about for so long. The reality you think only others get to have, because they’re different from you.
You will become different, too.
If you want to change the baselines in your life that are keeping you stuck, I can help.
For a limited time, you can work with me 1:1 for a one time session. Although one session will not change your baseline, it will give you the clarity you need to get started. And the only way to mastering change, is to start.
