“It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.”
—Henry David Thoreau“Tain’t What You Do (It’s the Way That You Do It)”
—Ella Fitzgerald“People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
—Maya Angelou
These quotes hint at how tidying and decluttering collaborations can be most rewarding and successful for clients and the KonMari Consultants who guide them in a journey toward achieving a clutter-free life and lifestyle.
The KonMari Method, pioneered by Marie Kondo, focuses on keeping only items that bring joy to your life rather than what needs to be eliminated. As part of the process, a lot gets eliminated, of course, because it doesn’t “spark joy,” meaning it’s not essential to the lifestyle you envision.
Everything that remains must have its own place to reside as part of a new, tidy home—and that home gets decluttered by category, not room-by-room. (My Services page provides more detail.)
The process of a KonMari transformation is fairly straightforward, and while it can be rigorous and challenging, anyone committed to clearing away clutter will achieve a good result by working with a KonMari Consultant.
When things really click, though, the collaboration reaches a higher level.
For me, it’s all about listening, empathy, and building a rapport, which then buoys the activity at hand—the often emotional process of confronting, assessing, and passing judgment on items that range from merely functional to highly sentimental.
I find that the personal relationships I develop with people who hire me to help them comprehensively tidy and declutter their homes are the most important part of the collaboration.
Being a good listener is the key. I must admit that it did not take me long to truly understand the power of just being quiet and listening. I have been doing this with my patients for the past 33 years.
When you provide that comforting space for someone by simply listening with empathy, they will reveal what’s troublesome in their home as far as clutter is concerned—and also reveal how the situation affects their lives on a deeper level.
That’s when you see the path not only to helping them eliminate clutter but also to helping them realign the things that are off kilter in their lifestyles and even relationships. And that ends up fostering personal growth that goes far beyond tidying up and moves them toward the joy end of the spectrum.
I experience this regularly now with my KonMari clients, and one recent example sticks with me.
A client wanted to schedule my visits when her husband was working so she could declutter without him knowing, but he ended up being ill one day I was visiting and she had to loop him in.
Against that backdrop, she opened up a lot in our conversations and discovered something new about herself as she spoke and gave voice to something she hadn’t acknowledged before.
It created an instant connection between us, and the next 4-5 hours we spent working together were so productive that the experience literally gave her a new direction in her life.
The instinct to work this way is natural for me. The philosophy of improving the whole person from the inside-out arises from my background in working with patients on a deeper level as Dr. Christine Thorn. For three decades I have been a Chiropractor, Reflexologist, Reiki Master Practitioner, and Acupuncturist.
To me, a person’s health and their home are inextricably related, and we endeavor to assure both have the same positive status, which results in a new equilibrium.
My goal through KonMari decluttering is the improve the whole person, which I have described as the Tidy Lifestyle Doctor approach, but the degree to which I carry it out depends on each client’s personality, of course.
Together we find the degree of engagement that’s comfortable and then, also together, we maximize the benefits of that.
Email me at [email protected] or give me a call at (203) 772-8883 to discuss what’s misaligned in your home, your body, your mind, and your spirit and we’ll determine an action plan. Call me at 203-910-6185 for more information specifically about my healthcare practice.