Hello, everyone. Welcome to Your SuperPowered Mind. I’m Kristin Maxwell and in this show, we explore the process of transformation and give you tools, strategies, and organization tactics that you can use to transform your own life.
Today, I am talking to Tracy Paye about powerful organization tactics to relieve stress. Also known as Miss Organized, Tracy Paye is a certified professional organizer located in San Diego. She’s the author of, If Clutter Could Talk, she teaches clients how to organize, how to understand the behaviors that cause the mess in the first place and gives perspectives on your things so you can more easily let go of what doesn’t work for you. She also applies Feng shui to help you balance the energy in your home. I really wanted to talk to Tracy because with all of this coronavirus, we are definitely in our homes much, much more than we were before. And I suspect I am not the only one who has realized I need to do some organizing.
So welcome to Your SuperPowered Mind, Tracy.
Thank you so much, Kristin. I appreciate you having me here, I really do. And you’re absolutely right about everything you just said.
So my first question is always, what superpower did you discover as the result of mastering your mind?
I would say that that would be the ability to be a fast decision maker.
Wow. Okay. So tell me more about that. How did that come up and how do you use your fast decision-making?
Well, basically how I got to that place is I was driven by the inability to sleep. I was an insomniac for 15 years and what I realized was part of what was driving the insomnia, I started working backwards. I’m like, “Okay, this is what the end result is. I’m not sleeping.” And just started asking questions to work backwards to see if I could figure out what the solution is. And what I discovered was a lot of it was driven by anxiety and then I started asking the question, “Well, what’s making you anxious?” And it always seemed to come back to questions that weren’t getting answered. And if these questions aren’t getting answered, then decisions aren’t getting made. And if decisions aren’t getting made, then things are getting procrastinated on which is creating the stress and the anxiety. And then not being able to sleep is making the stress and anxiety worse, which is making my brain even less effective being able to answer those questions and making those decisions.
And once I started putting all of those pieces together and see how they were all connected with each other, I then decided that I really needed to do something to become more effective at answering those questions and answering them fast so that I’m not festering, I’m a festerer. I tend to fester and I tend to like to digest when thoughts come in and things that bother me and go really deep in my thoughts and I’m in my head quite a bit. And I learned that was really bogging me down and I started looking for ways that I can answer those questions faster and just be done with it and realizing what can I do to just move things forward a little bit? Maybe it’s not the whole answer. Maybe it’s just a little piece of the puzzle, but it moved things forward.
And then I also recognize when I really need to go into deep thought to look at this from a much deeper level. But what I started to do was create all of these little strategies that I now use to teach my clients to become faster at decision-making. And I would say probably one of my favorite ones is what I call, “think in threes” and what that is, is taking anything that I’m working with in my environment, meaning my brain environment, my physical environment, my emotional environment. I can take anything and I could put it into three categories of any given categories and work with that information from there.
Wow. So what’s an example? So just because we are going to be talking about cleaning and clutter and all of that. We all know that stress that’s caused by just piles of stuff, being everywhere, things not being handled. How does that come up if you’re working with somebody and they have an area that’s just a mess, how would they think in threes?
So the first step of organizing usually is the sorting process, not for everybody, but most of the time, it’s the sorting process. So as an example, when I go into the garage, I will have them, instead of doing what would be considered a micro sort and going through say all of their holiday stuff and making a pile for Christmas and Easter and Halloween, I would have them start in the garage with three main categories. And that would be, what’s already in a bin or a box, what is too big to fit in a bin or a box, and what’s small enough that’s scattered about the ground that could be put in a bin or a box.
And I just have them look at their stuff in those three categories to start, with the intention of clearing enough space so we can at least have a walking path to start working. But in doing that, what I’ve helped my clients to do is realize that they could take their physical environment and if they’re getting overwhelmed, then they could just divide it, sort it, put it into only three categories to start, and then they could work from there. And by doing that, they’ve made their first decisions super easy and cleared the space and we all know that when your space is clear and I think that’s what everybody’s figuring out right now in their homes, that when their space is clear, their minds are more clear. And then we could go to a deeper level of decision-making that’s going to be a little bit harder.
Great. This is fascinating. We do actually already have to take a break.
No!
I know it’s crazy, but we will come back and I really want to go into how you think about this. My dad used to call me a perseverater because I would get stuck in my head.
I like that.
So can you let people know where they can learn about you and your work surrounding organization tactics? Because I know you do stuff online too, it’s not only in person. I mean you do things virtually.
Yeah. As a matter of fact, that is a service that I’ve been wanting to offer for a very long time but now has given me the perfect opportunity to offer that service. So usually I go into people’s homes and organize what I would call hands-on organizing. But right now I’m offering virtual coaching.
So people can literally work with me over the phone and I help them to develop the plan and they use their hands, it’s my brain and their hands. And they do the physical work while I’m coaching them through the process and the easiest thing to do is to go to my website, which is missorganized.com.
There’s lots of information on there as far as my services are concerned, but if you want to learn more about my virtual coaching, you could go to missorganized.com/diywithmissorganized. I’m also on all sorts of social media channels. You can usually find me at just, Miss Organized, on pretty much every social media channel.
Awesome. Great. We’ll be right back and talk some more about some powerful organization tactics you can use to relate to this.
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