Last week, I wrote about the transitions we’re experiencing as the seasons change. While fall doesn’t officially begin for several weeks, its unofficial start has happened. You’re back from summer vacation, the kiddos have returned to school, and your plate is piled high with numerous projects, goals, and activities. Your schedule is packed, and your daily patterns are changing. Do you feel calm and prepared, or anxious and not ready?

Transitions can be tricky and uncomfortable. However, intregrating mindfulness into the mix can bring calm and confidence to this next phase.

There are six ways to feel ready as you prepare for your busy season. You can use these strategies for any shift you’re experiencing, such as starting a new day, month, season, year, project, or life change.

6 Ways to Mindfully Prepare for Your New Season

1. Prepare Emotionally

Your emotional state benefits greatly when you prioritize your self-care. To fortify your energy reserves and to create a positive emotional state:

• Get enough sleep

• Eat healthfully

• Hydrate

• Move your body

• Make time for just you

• Engage in nourishing activities

2. Prepare Environment

Clutter can cause blockages in your thinking, well-being, creativity, daily flow, and routines. Make time to let go of the physical things you no longer need, want, are in your way, or are no longer relevant for this new phase. Clear the path for your new season. What can you declutter now?

3. Clarify Goals & Why

Did you create an ambitious list of goals at the start of this year? This change of seasons presents an excellent time to revisit and reset. Ask:

• What one or two things do you want to accomplish this season?

• What will success look or feel like when you accomplish those?

• What is driving you to get there?

• What is your why?

Taking the time to clarify will be valuable. The clarity will help with more effortless and less stressful decision-making when your choices align with your goals and overarching why.

“Integrate mindfulness to bring calm and confidence to this next phase.”

— Linda Samuels, CPO-CD®, CVOP™

4. Gather Your Team

The busy season makes it a terrific time to gather more support. Collect your go-to peeps- family, friends, colleagues, and professionals. There is no reason to go it alone. Who will be on your team? They can help you:

• Succeed

• Provide accountability

• Brainstorm and discuss ideas

• Navigate frustrations and challenges

• Cheer you on

5. Gather Your Resources

Aside from your ‘team,’ what else will help you prepare for this season? What physical supplies or products will be beneficial? What about finding resources for ideas or referrals?

As we’re in the back-to-school mode, images of sharpened pencils, blank notebooks, and boxes of new, colorful crayons fill my thoughts. While our kiddos are adults now and not in that stage, I remember when they were. Returning to school meant gathering the essential supplies, which helped them feel prepared and ready to learn. What do you need to feel prepared?

6. Schedule Downtime
During the fullness of this new season, plan time to stop. We aren’t designed to be constantly doing. We also need time to just be. Whether you make time daily, every week, or once a month, build breaks from the busyness. Each of us has different refueling needs. My daily mindfulness meditation practice and walks in nature keep me grounded and calm. They give me a quiet space to practice mindfulness, restore my energy, and prepare me to engage more fully after I pause.

New Podcast: Helping You Reset for the New Season

A few weeks ago, I enjoyed talking with the engaging, delightful podcast host, writer, and my new friend Kara Cutruzzula on her “Do It Today” podcast. Our conversation covered many topics, including ways to get ready for the new season. Listen to our conversation below:

If you are gathering your team and would like support from me as your Virtual Professional Organizer, let’s talk. I’d love to help as you travel on this next part of your journey. Call 914-271-5673, email me at linda@ohsoorganized.com, or click here to contact me through this site.

What helps you mindfully prepare for change? How do transition times affect you? I’d love to hear your thoughts. I invite you to join the conversation.

One thing that has become increasingly clear to me over these past years is that success is impossible in a vacuum. There are people, insights, and learning that are part of our journey and help us experience success with our projects, paths, and purpose. So whether you’re facing a daunting organizing project, pursuing a new career path, or searching for your life’s purpose, you will need the help, guidance, and emotional support from others to get there, wherever “there” is.

As a professional organizer, I’m often enlisted to be on someone else’s team. I love that. I get to be cheerleader, planner, strategist, organizer, list maker, worker, coach, resource-ist, support-giver and more. Clients will often remark that they “couldn't have accomplished this without me.” And while I’m grateful for their kind and encouraging words, I remind them that it was a team effort. Success happened because they stayed the course and were open and willing to enlist help. I am continually grateful for being part my clients’ success team.

“Success is impossible in a vacuum.”

— Linda Samuels, CPO-CD®, CVPO™

I’ve recently embarked on a huge family project to help my Mom sort through her home of 55+ years. At this juncture, because it’s hard for her to do, it’s pretty much me that’s leading the project. I understood that a successful outcome would only be possible by creating a new team, which I’ve dubbed, “Team 152.” And it’s so interesting to be on this side of the project where the decisions and attachments are often emotional ones. I have a new appreciation for what my clients grapple with.

The team I’m assembling grows daily, but so far the members include family and friends that have offered to help and companies that haul, organize, repair, resell, clean, recycle, and accept a variety of donations. As the project progresses, even more people and resources will be added to Team 152.

Two things are crystal clear:

• This project will take time, patience, and a consistent effort.

• While the project feels daunting right now, the help from the team is getting me through.

Who makes up your success team? If you don’t yet have a team, whom could you enlist? I’d love to hear your thoughts. Come join the conversation!

There’s a restlessness and impatience I’ve been noticing. People (at least on the east coast) are ready for winter to morph into spring. We’ve had record snowfall and temperatures. We’re poised and ready for change. This month our conversations have focused around change. We’ve looked at how we view change and the value of making small changes. As we continue the topic, let’s think about resources we can access to help us facilitate change.

What are resources for change?

Professional Organizers

Is simplifying life and getting organized one of your goals? Have you tried making changes on your own, but felt frustrated and unsuccessful in your self-help attempts? This is a good opportunity to reach out to a professional organizer. They can be an invaluable resource for lasting change. To learn more about my professional organizing services visit ohsoorganized.com. To find an organizer near you, use the search features from the Institute for Challenging Disorganization (ICD) or the National Association of Professional Organizers (NAPO).

Other Professionals

Often when we desire change, we get stuck because we get confused or lack information. Enlisting support from other professionals can make all the difference in moving forward. Other than professional organizers, which professionals could help? Professionals include accountants, lawyers, social workers, therapists, geriatric social workers, insurance brokers, coaches, doctors, nutritionists, personal trainers, clergy, architects, interior designers, contractors, and educators. Who will be on your team? Which resources do you already have to help make the changes you seek? Which resources will you add to your team?

Family, Friends and Colleagues

Never underestimate the value of your circle when it comes to navigating change. Where would we be without our close friends, family and colleagues? Everyone needs their people to bounce ideas on, complain to, and celebrate with. Who are the people in your close circle? Who are the ones that support you emotionally as you struggle with the changes you seek? Keep them close. Nurture those relationships. Be available to reciprocate.

There are other resources for change. What have you found useful? I’d love to hear your thoughts. Come join the conversation!

From the perspective of being a professional organizer for more than twenty years, I consider my field to be one of the helping professions.  There are many ways I assist my clients, which involve helping them with their “stuff.” I use that term loosely because it isn’t always the traditional physical things of life that are part of the work. The “stuff” extends to emotions, time, transitions and more. While the list is extensive and ever changing, I’d like to share a recent sampling of how I’ve helped. While my clients have a wide range of needs, I specialize in working with individuals who are chronically disorganized. I have extensive training and certification in chronic disorganization through the Institute for Challenging Disorganization (ICD.)

What are some of the ways organizers help their clients? Depending upon your perspective, as you read ahead you might identify ways that you might benefit from hiring an organizer. Or perhaps, you’ll discover new options to provide organizing help to others. I look forward to hearing your thoughts.

10 Ways Organizers Help Clients With “Stuff”

1. Assessment Stuff -Organizing involves doing but also thinking. Assessing is done at various stages in the organizing process. It’s always done before work begins so we can understand the organizational areas that need attention. Assessments don’t end there. They continue once the work begins. Each organizing visit includes an assessment before, during, and at the end to help clients stay focused, adjust the scope as needed, and acknowledge their progress.

2. Physical Stuff -No matter how much the digital era has infiltrated our lives, we still have an abundance of physical things to manage, maintain, evaluate, and organize. From papers to clothing to toys and gadgets, helping to organize the physical possessions of life and the space we live and work in is a major part of the work I do.

3. System Stuff -With all of this stuff, we need systems to manage everything from paper flow to recycling, donation, or return centers. Those are some of the ways I help my clients organize.

4. Emotional Stuff -There are distinct boundaries between organizers, coaches and therapists. You might more readily equate “emotional stuff” with a therapist’s work than you would with an organizer’s. I’m not a therapist and respect the professional boundaries. However, organizing and going through “our stuff” can bring up an array of emotions. So while I don’t counsel, I am there to support my clients during the organizing and letting go process, which can be highly emotional.

“Organizing involves doing but also thinking.”

— Linda Samuels, CPO-CD®, CVPO™

5. Maintenance Stuff -Even after all “things” are organized and in place, there is often a need for periodic maintenance, especially with the chronically disorganized population. This can involve clearing spaces, closets, or surfaces that were previously organized. It can include processing and filing papers, updating financial records, or switching seasonal clothing. Scheduling maintenance builds in time to reroute and restore things to their designated homes and evaluate changes that might be beneficial.

6. Project Stuff -Instead of ongoing, overall organizing help, some clients enlist help for specific projects. This can include everything from organizing a closet to house linens, clothing or gifts to setting up a unique paper management system for college applications, committee work, or writing projects to making lists and packing for a trip. The help needed is often short-term, clearly definable, and has a distinct beginning and end.

7. Routine Stuff -There are times that clients need help for managing routine items like making calls for research, setting up, reviewing, or canceling accounts, making appointments, logging receipts, updating check registers, processing mail, making lists, or writing correspondence.

8. Resource Stuff -More often than not, I’m asked about specific resources for my clients. Their requests range widely for help finding best places to purchase organizing products to sources for donating furniture to companies that remove junk to therapists that specialize in compulsive buying. I’m constantly collecting new resources, generously shared from other professionals, friends, and family.

9. Time Stuff -Many clients are overwhelmed by their overflowing calendars. Their schedules can feel as cluttered as their spaces. The busyness also affects their thoughts, which can create mind clutter. For many clients, I help them evaluate their time commitments, establish their priorities, work on planning, and design a more comfortable version of the 24 hours they have each day.

10. Transition Stuff -A favorite aspect of my work is the long-term relationships that develop. Especially because of this longevity, I have the privilege of helping clients navigate the organizational parts that life’s transitions bring such as marriage, birth, graduation, job change, children leaving, children returning home, moves, divorce, loss, death. Transitions are dramatic periods of change. Being able to help clients organize during the tumult gives them some sense of control, normalcy and comfort. 

I’d love to hear from you. Are you thinking about enlisting help from an organizer? Are you an organizer that helps others? Perhaps you’re in another helping profession. Which ways to get help with “stuff” resonate with you? Introduce yourself and come join the conversation!