135 | What's Your Word?

Instead of New Year's Resolutions (which statistically fail at a shockingly high rate), Melissa is implementing an idea in her own business to guide her work this year and she's sharing it with us! Come join us as we pick a word of the year to help with your strategy for your professional organizing business--AND your life!  LIST OF WORDS TO CONSIDER: Balance Confidence Simplify Adventure Boundaries Self-care Joy Dedication Commitment Intention Abundance Success Limitless Creativity Discovery Transformation Invest Becoming Yes Determination Effort LINKS FOR LISTENERS: Our free workshop, The Pro Organizer's Profit Plan: click here Learn more about our premier program for professional organizers, Inspired Organizer®: click here Learn more about Pro Organizer Studio: click here ABOUT THIS EPSIODE: You are listening to the Pro Organizer Studio podcast with Melissa Klug and Jen Obermeier. Thank you so much for joining in. Our mission is to broaden the horizons of savvy business women in the organizing industry. By instilling confidence and inspiring authenticity, you'll gain new insight into strategies designed specifically for professional organizers. So now let's get started. [00:00:32] Melissa Klug: Hey, pro organizers. It's Melissa. It's 2023, and I hope that you had an absolutely amazing holiday season. I know I did, and I definitely got some rest and relaxation. I hope that was the same for you and your family, but now we are back into it. It is a brand new year. I am excited, energized, all sorts of words, and this is kind of a companion episode to the last podcast, which was me saying, Hey, thanks 2022 for all your lessons. And I did a lot of thinking over the holidays and I just wanted to bring you some of my thoughts as we start 2023 as a collective organizing industry as the calendar has turned.  I personally love New Year's Day and the few days afterward. I live in Minnesota as most of you know, so before January descends into like gray coldness without the happiness of holiday lights to make it a little bit better. I definitely feel really, really energized when it's the first week of a new year and I just feel like it’s a promise and excitement and just great things in the air, even if that air is freezing cold as it is at my house.  But I want to be clear, I do not want you to worry about this podcast because there are a couple of phrases specifically that you are not going to hear from me today. And the first one is New Year's Resolution. And the second one, which I'm going to admit bothers me infinitely more is “New Year, New You.” So I do not want tooffend anyone because I have seen the phrase New Year, new you all over social media in the last few days. Tons of people are using it, but the reason that I personally don't like it, and you're not going to hear from me about it anymore, is because I feel like it implies that there's something terribly wrong with you and you must fix it, and you must become an entirely new person. Because a calendar has changed over. I just want to say the current person you are is great, and I would rather look at it that instead of New Year's changes or resolutions, I would rather you look at things and take stock and say, “Hey, there are some things I would like to do differently and what is the path that I can take to get there?” But that specific phrasing of New Year, new you has always really bugged me. And so I promise I'm done. Even saying the phrase, I think the current you is delightful. I really do. And I want to find ways to make you even more delightful than you already are. The second phrase, new Year's resolution. Everybody knows there are a billion think pieces and articles about it every single year, but New Year's resolutions are widely proven not to be very effective. What I would prefer to look at is a more holistic approach to trying to develop new habits if the turn of the calendar is a good time for you to take stock of that. Absolutely do it, but just let's not call it a New Year's resolution.  So with that minimal rant out of the way, I'm going to tell you what I've been thinking about, what I've been doing in my own business life instead of resolutions and just give you some ideas to think about in your own world and your own life. So the last podcast of 2022 was all about the things I had been thinking over my holiday break, and I hope that you were able to be inspired by that and maybe do a little bit of reflecting of your own. I know that it's been really important for me to have those talks with myself, and now that I'm taking thinking mode, into work mode as I have started the year for Pro Organizer Studio and my organizing business Home By Eleven, this is where I wanna dip into a little bit of radical honesty. So for, for many years, and I, I'm talking decades of my corporate life and in my life in college and in grad school, I'm going to be totally upfront with you. That goal setting has just never been one of my strengths. I think it's probably that at, at my court I'm a procrastinator, and like goal setting and goal adherence. It, it just like making that strategy. It's just, it's not something that I'm really good at and I know that it's really good for people to set goals and have goals, and by the way, I do have goals. It's not like I just run around in my business and my life and not having any goals at all. What I'm not good is being disciplined about making a serious plan as to how I'm going to implement the goals I have. It's more that I will say, I want X, Y, Z, and then the path to get there. I'm like, eh, I'll figure it out. So, you know, it's absolutely something I'm working toward being better about because I know it's important and I know it really works and I do want to improve myself. But knowing myself, and I want to be honest about who I am, at my core, and what is actually going to work for me. The thing that does work is for me to come up with a word, one single word that I use as the highlight of my year. This one word is, it's simple, but it's a way that I can have it guide my overall strategy of my work. So I can get behind this word and it can keep me on track. I can use it as a litmus test to say, does X, Y, Z project or thing that is coming to me, or that I've come up with fit this track that I'm on for this year? Or is it shiny object syndrome or, if you have seen the movie Up, uh, “squirrel,” that might resonate with you. By the way, if you haven't seen the movie Up, please stop listening to this podcast and go to it right now and bring the tissues. It's such a great movie, but I don't want to go squirrel on things. So this word is going to help keep me on track. The word that I have chosen for myself, because it is simple and powerful, it is only five letters, but it is going to guide my whole year. And that word for me is focus. This word is perfect for me. It not only encapsulates the things that I talked about as I was really contemplating and thinking about the end of the year of 2022. It helps me with the problems that I needed to solve and what I know is on my plate in 2023 and what is truly important for me to work. If I could describe the way that I felt about my 2022 business life, the only thing that I can really come up with is I felt like a ping pong ball, if I'm being totally honest. I was constantly bouncing all over the place from thing to thing, and I was never able to really stop and concentrate like I needed to. And the funny thing is, by the way, I had a great 2022 actually, I did not have a bad year at all. I had a great year. I grew a lot as an entrepreneur and as a leader, and I was able to help a lot of people, which, is really important to me. And I created the results that I needed to in my business. But in terms of personal stress and overwhelm, it was definitely very high for me in 2022. So that ping pong feeling of like bouncing all over the place and I just didn't really have great balance last year. I had a boss once who reminded me, “Hey Melissa, you cannot have 100 number one priorities,” because I remember going to him and being like, here are all the things absolutely critical for me to get done this year. And, last year I definitely fell into that category of I had too many number one priorities. A phrase I love is when everything is important: nothing is important. So I have latched onto this word focus because I just feel so strongly that if I can remind myself to take care of the truly important things while eliminating needless distractions, hello phone apps. I'm talking to you. If I can really focus on the strategic things that I need to pay attention. I think it is going to be not, I think I know it is going to be extremely transformational for me and my business. The word focus addresses the things I talked about in the end of the year podcast that I've been thinking about. And I think we all struggle with distraction. Seriously. Distraction is one of the biggest things that I think we all deal with in this constantly connected world, and that's one thing that I really, really, really want to concentrate on this year.  By the way, you guys, anybody listening to this podcast should want me to succeed using my word focus because what it means is you will be getting tons more great things coming your way from us at Pro Organizer Studio, which of course our goal is always to help you in your businesses. Hopefully you guys can rally around me and cheer me on and really hope that I make this focus thing happen.  But this podcast is not about me, it's about you. And I would love for you to think about a word for the year that you can get behind to help stay on track for what is important to you. And let me tell you, I am not typically, I'm not like a mantra person. But I will tell you this one word has helped me in the last two days legitimately draw my attention back to what I'm working on.  Great example—today I was writing out my notes for this podcast, and I found myself gravitating toward moving my cursor up to check social media, and I said, no! Focus, I am focusing on this thing right now. So I would love you to find a word that really connects with what you know that you wanna work on this year. And I have made a list of of other words that you might want to think about. This is not an all encompassing list because there are literally thousands of words that you could pick, but I wanted to pick some words that align with the things that we do in our business and our lives, and I will link these words in show notes so that you can be reminded of them. But just listen to these words and see if anything connects with what you are thinking about in your business and life: Balance Confidence Simplify Adventure  Boundaries Self-care Joy Dedication Commitment Intention Abundance Success Limitless Creativity Discovery Transformation Invest Becoming Yes Determination Effort balance.  There are so many words that you can use. I just wanted to start with something that I thought really speaks to entrepreneurship and organizing entrepreneurship specifically, but find a word that can link where you are coming from and where you are going in your life and your business. And by the way, for me, my word is also about my personal life. It's not just about work. I have a daughter graduating this year and going to college this fall. So my focus is making this year magical and special and making sure that I'm taking care of my family in addition to taking care of my business. So maybe the word you want to choose is one that covers both your work life and your home life. If you are a one person family, a 22 person family, if you are single, if you are married, if you are. Divorced. If you are a single mom, if you are not a mom, if you are a dog mom, we all have home life that we are balancing, and I really, really, really want you to think about how that word can work for your personal life as well.  Okay, I want to know your word. You can email me at [email protected], or you can DM me on Instagram when I post about this episode. I seriously would love to hear the creativity of the words that people come up with and what you're thinking about for your year. As always, I wanna thank you for being such an awesome part of my work life. I cannot tell you how much it means to me when people email and tell me that they listen to the podcast. And if you do not mind taking a minute, if you love the podcast, which I appreciate so much, if you could leave us a review on Apple Podcast, it would be super amazing and helpful. It helps people be able to find our podcast and join our community, which I just love this community of organizers that we have here on the Pro Organizer Studio podcast. It would be wonderful if you could take the time to do that. Sort of like when you ask clients for a Google Review. You know how important. Apple Podcast review would be absolutely glorious. So thank you. And if you would like to start your year with a free workshop, if you'd like to spend a little bit more time with me, please check out the Pro Organizer's Profit Plan, which you can watch anytime 24/7 at poroadmap.com.  All right, let's start an amazing year. Truly, we have no idea what this year is going to bring. There could be challenges in front of us that we don't know about yet. There certainly will be challenges in front of us that we don't know about, but pick a word to gather yourself and your thoughts and your work, and I think we're all gonna have a good one. Have an awesome day Organizers. Thank you so much for listening in to the Pro Organizer Studio podcast. If you'd like to get our roadmap for success as a pro organizer, head straight to www.poroadmap.com.