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 Restoring
Order to Your Home
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CBN.com –
Recently I gave a reporter the shock of her life.
She asked me to share my “little known secrets”
about organizing. I told her quite simply that
“organizing can be painful.” She stammered, “What
do you mean, painful?!” She had been
looking for a silver bullet, for a quick tip, for
ANYTHING but the kill-joy I had just delivered.
After all, she wanted to sell magazines, hopefully
with a story that was juicy enough to tease on the
front cover.
The truth of the matter is: I’ve been in the
trenches of disorganized homes and offices across
America. I’ve seen it all, including why people
resist getting organized in the first place. I see
first-hand the reasons why they begin their
process and later backslide. I witness why they
don’t want to look any deeper than products and
quick tips.
However, as I’ve begun unraveling the question
“Why don’t people get organized?” I’ve realized
that the answer has a lot to do with pain
avoidance. Therefore, if I don’t address pain, I
can’t help those of you who genuinely want to
reclaim your life.
If you want the truth about organizing—and to
achieve lasting change—you are going to have to
confront an unpopular fact: organizing can be
painful. The Pain Principle™ is this: If
you can understand why and how pain works to keep
you from organizing your life, then you can
address it head-on and create a plan for
overcoming it.
Those of us who are avoiding organizing because
it is painful will never make lasting changes in
our environment or life. We will continue to peck
away at the problem, only to find ourselves stuck
in the same self-defeating cycle of disorder. Only
when we understand why we are resisting organizing
and resolve to embrace the process can we create
and maintain organized systems.
Why can organizing be painful?
Let’s look at some of the reasons:
1. We’re afraid: We’re
overwhelmed and we don’t know where to begin. We
are afraid that we might fail, and our past
efforts have confirmed our backsliding nature. We
want to get things “perfect” so we never begin.
Above all, organizing is a change process and once
we realize that, we are nervous to embark on a
journey that will ask us to look at ourselves.
2. We expect ease and speed:
In today’s sound-bite world, we want everything
fast and without hassle. That’s why every company
in America seems to be promising that their item
or service will “save time and money” as a
marketing ploy. Authentic organizing is a process,
not a slammed-out solution. It’s not a quick fix;
it is an investment. Just like a financial
investment, you don’t put your contribution in and
then immediately pull it out…you invest for the
long haul. This is simply more than most people
want to do when it comes to organizing. It seems
so much more expedient in the moment to just shove
our mess into a plastic bin and forget about it.
3.We’re not ready to commit: We’d
really just prefer that someone else handles it
for us. We start a project but never “go the
distance”. We say we want a tidy home but we don’t
want to do the work to get there. Organizing is
time-consuming (no matter what the magazines
falsely promise us) and we know it. We will have
to allocate time, make decisions, change habits,
and practice maintenance. No wonder a quick trick
seems easier to swallow.
How can you overcome the temporary pain
that organizing may cause in order to break
through to an orderly life? There’s only
one way I know of: to go through the Pain Tunnel.
The Pain Tunnel is a word picture for the
organizing process. Most people want to go over
it, around it, or dig a tunnel under it. They just
don’t want to go through it. We would
rather avoid facing our habits, making changes,
and setting up systems. Yet, we actually expend
much more effort and money and energy avoiding
the process than if we just moved through it.
True and lasting order doesn’t come without
going through the struggle against self that leads
to change. Without learning about ourselves,
becoming aware of our habits, and facing the costs
of our disorganization, we cannot emerge from our
state of disorder. As we struggle through our
process we gain skills and make new commitments to
establish and protect our quality of life. Once we
have gone through the pain, we don’t particularly
want to repeat it, so we become more committed to
maintenance. The blessing of The Pain Principle is
that you will emerge from your process with
greater self-awareness and newfound skills to
create and maintain order.
Adapted from: Reclaim Your
Life™ copyright © 2007 by Vicki Norris (available
now at
www.RestoringOrder.com. Published by Harvest
House Publishers, Eugene, OR. Used by permission.
About the Author: Vicki
Norris is an expert organizer, business owner,
speaker, television personality, and author who
inspires people to live out their priorities.
Norris is a regular on HGTV’s nationally
syndicated Mission: Organization, and is a
recurrent source and contributor to national
lifestyle publications including Quick & Simple
magazine, Better Homes & Gardens, and Real Simple
magazine. Norris is also author of Restoring
Order™ to Your Home, a room-by-room household
organizing guide. |
