Motivation and Desire, These Two are not the Same When it Comes to Getting Your Home Organized

Motivation can be a huge obstacle in cluttering and organizing.

You may find it hard to get started and even harder to pick back up later. So today we're gonna talk about the reasons why you are struggling to get motivated to get started or to keep going on your journey to get organized.

I'm going to share with you my personal experience with these struggles and give you my best advice for when these feelings arise.

Why is it that we struggle with finding motivation when it comes to tasks such as decluttering, especially when we know deep down that we really want to, I can remember feeling so frustrated when I first started trying to get organized.

I knew that I had a strong desire, but why wasn't that enough for me to take action? At the time, I had absolutely no clue why, and it caused so much inner frustration, and if I'm being honest, a lot of shame as well.

After many years of pushing through and learning, I understand that for me and many others, desire does not always equal motivation. It may sound crazy to think that wanting to do something or knowing that something will be worth it isn't enough for someone to do that thing. But for some of us, this is reality.

I've learned that there are many reasons that desire might not be enough.

When it comes to decluttering and organizing, it may be that the task seems overwhelming and takes up too much of your time or energy. It may be because the task has too many steps and each one seems like a massive undertaking. It could even be that you aren't sure where to start, or in which order you're supposed to complete the steps. Any of these things can really be a reason that you aren't able to get started.

Understanding which of these is your hurdle is a great place to start. But what about the times when understanding and addressing the why isn't enough for these moments?

I have a secret superpower that we all possess. Let me share the story of how I accidentally figured this out.

When I first started organizing my house, I was struggling big time to get started.

I was super excited about the idea of getting organized, but I couldn't get myself to start. So I came up with what I thought was the perfect solution.

I decided that every day I was gonna set aside one hour, and in that hour I had to do something related to getting organized.

I remember it took me at least three days from saying that I was gonna do it to actually doing it for the first day.

And then I thought, Okay, great. I did it one time. I'm gonna be able to do it every day now, but within a week, I could not get myself to do it again.

I remember that I was confused. I was angry with myself, and I just gave up. I decided to shelve the idea and focus on something else.

We were actually planning our first trip with the girls to Disney World at that same time. So I decided to focus my efforts on planning that trip, which then brought me to YouTube. I used YouTube every day to research how to save money for the trip, learn what the best snacks were in Disney, and just get excited as a family about the vacation.

As I was spending time on YouTube, I started seeing on my feed these suggestions for clean with me videos or organize with me videos, and I decided to see what they were. After about five minutes into the first one, I could feel myself getting antsy and I wasn't even able to sit still.

I wanted so badly to just get up and go clean or organize something in my house, and that's when the light bulb went off in my head.

Every day I would get on YouTube and I would find a new video, and I would connect YouTube to the TV in whichever room I wanted to work on, and I would just play that video while I decluttered.

And to be honest, I really wasn't even paying attention to what was going on in the video after the first few minutes because I would get enthralled in whatever it was I started, you know, doing, whether it was decluttering and pulling everything out of a closet or reorganizing the girl's dresser.

But having that on in the background and, and doing it with the girls on YouTube made it fun. It made it feel like I wasn't doing it alone.

It was the first time that I realized that I could create motivation out of not necessarily thin air, but just from something that wasn't directly related to what I was trying to do.

You know, once I discovered that I could sort of hack the system and create that motivation, I just went into a deep dive about the whole concept of creating motivation.

I learned that it was actually a thing that a lot of people struggle with. And, you know, I learned a lot about the different ways that we can create that motivation.

I use that a lot in my own personal life now, but I also have been able to take that knowledge and my experience and use it to help my clients as a professional organizer who are struggling with the overwhelm and not knowing where to start.

Through that, I developed my own specific tactics to use for organizing and decluttering based on all the things that I learned about creating motivation.

I hope that you learn that desire and motivation are not the same things and you're not lazy and you're not crazy when you have that desire inside to do something or to improve something about yourself, but you're struggling to get started or to take action on that desire because you just don't, you can't get that motivation and that last push to, to take action.

I want you to know that there are ways around it when you are struggling to get started. There are ways to trick yourself or to make the task more interesting or more challenging, and more fun.

I hope that this is helpful to you. If right now you are in the process of trying to declutter or you're trying to organize, or just anything that you're trying to do to improve yourself, but you're struggling out of fear, out of overwhelmed, to just know that there are ways to make that easier.

Here’s one of the freebies that I have created for anybody interested in learning the tactics that I use for myself and for my clients to get myself motivated, to get them motivated when we're struggling to get started with decluttering and organizing.

When you take the quiz, you're gonna learn about which motivation methods work best for you. I'll give you some tactics that you can use that go along with that method when you're trying to declutter or organize your home.