Empathy for the before and after pictures
I had a client once say the hardest part of working with me was simply opening the door. Sure, we had previously talked for 30 minutes (free!) about her clutter and disorganization and she was eager to get started—but actually letting me in, letting me SEE her home in its natural state felt so raw and vulnerable.
I hear this a lot.
There’s truth to it. You are shining a light on a part of yourself that you typically try to hide from everyone.
Like Dr. Brené Brown says,
If you put shame in a petri dish, it needs three ingredients to grow exponentially: secrecy, silence, and judgment. If you put the same amount of shame in the petri dish and douse it with empathy, it can't survive.
Empathy is the secret sauce in this very tangled emotional process of decluttering/organizing. And I’m coming in locked and loaded.
There’s zero time or need for judgment. I’m a professional organizer and a minimalist, and I fight clutter in my home every day. We all have clutter. Because we are human beings and we are actively living. (This is a good thing!) The whole point of this work is to create space, ease, and streamlined routines to be able to find TIME, energy, and a renewed sense of self to participate in and appreciate your own life. As it is. To bring your attention and focus to what actually matters.
Before pictures are real life. I aim to be authentic and help normalize the fact that if you are a person, and especially if you have fur babies, human babies, and/or partners, you’ll need a game plan to stay atop the clutter.
Clutter happens to everyone. And if you are one of the people who’ve said to me, “I just need a bigger space,” that’s so untrue—I have been inside a million-dollar home of someone with hoarder-like tendencies. Stuff simply doesn’t look good when there’s too much of it.
Before pictures validate your experience; they show you that you are not alone. We don’t all have our shit together 100% the time (most of the time, ahem).
I also know from experience and from client feedback that before and after pictures invoke a sense of hope. That change is possible, that if it happened to this featured home, it could happen to mine. It’s not about comparison. It’s about showing that there’s potential, there’s people like you who took that brave first step to ask for help. It’s encouraging, it’s validating, it’s inspiring—if you let it be.
Here’s a glimpse of a recent Google review I received from a client. She said
It cannot be overstated how much of a pivotal life change my partner and I have experienced since working with Kim.
If you’re on the fence, don’t wait. This experience is life changing if you let it be.
Well, damn, that felt good to hear. But you know what? I believe it because I’ve been through it myself. I’ve been there—things are thrown about my room haphazardly, walking on top of my belongings, buried in too much stuff, frustrated and can’t find what I need because the surface is too cluttered. I know how it feels to be hopeless about getting unstuck. <— That’s typically my depression lying to me (maybe you can relate).
I tell potential clients I’m not here to move piles around. I hope and expect to fill my car each session to take special recycling/items for donation off your plate. I intent and aim to make lasting changes with you. I want to shift your mindset from scarcity to abundance. I want to challenge your fixed mindset to one of growth. I want to empower you to believe that you can rewrite your own story and make your home exactly what you want it to be/feel like.
And so I show you the after pics. I hope you will see themes such as lack of clutter, spaciousness, openness. I hope you will see differences in organization because there’s no one right way for every person. You are unique, and so are your challenges, barriers, preferences, and needs/wants.
After pictures are meant to capture this moment, this climactic end to an incredible journey we’ve started together. To celebrate your hard work and success—something that especially as women, we don’t do.
Now, here’s the final disclaimer. The only way to keep your home in this gorgeously tidied, organized AF state is to evacuate immediately and don’t come back.
Don’t actually do that. I’m asking you to accept—radically—that you can take a proactive stance against the daily clutter buildup and enjoy a home in which you can easily reset.
So when your whole family is sick all week and the routines slip, it doesn’t take more than a few minutes to rally each room back to its happy state
So when you return from a vacation and jump right back in to real life, you can RESET quickly once you have a moment to catch your breath
So when your kids come home with all the party favors, school papers, and random outdoor finds, you can relax knowing you’re armed with wisdom, knowledge, and systems designed to keep the clutter at bay
Don’t look at those after pictures and think they’re not realistic, think they’re perfect, think they’re unreachable goals. After all, the goal is not perfection—the goal is a home you can relax in, connect with your people in, and easily reset.
Give yourself grace to be imperfect, to be human, to be alive and living and enjoying your life to the fullest.
I’m here for you if you want to transform your home and reclaim your space (and your SELF). Book a free discovery call: https://calendly.com/consciouslyclearedandcontainedllc/freecall