Ep 156. Declutter Your Life

I’m Kym Showers and this is Reinvented After 40, episode number 156, Declutter Your Life.

Welcome to the Reinvented After 40 podcast. I am your host, Kym Showers, and I’m a certified life coach for women in the second half of life. Each week I’ll bring you direct advice and inspiring, practical wisdom to help you live your very best life and create a future you’re absolutely obsessed with. It’s going to be fun, let’s get started.

Hey, my friend out in podcast land, how are you today? You might be listening to this on Thursday, the first Thursday of September. Happy September, happy officially fall. We love fall. I love the changing of the seasons. I love decluttering my life, and I’m so excited for you to listen to this episode. I’m going to offer you some really awesome advice, some tips and tricks, and some reasons why decluttering your life is so beneficial for you. It’s beneficial for you on every level, mental, emotional, physical. More than you can even imagine, you’re carrying the weight of clutter in every area of your life, and you want to get really good at letting things go, like I have.

The more confident you become, the easier it is for you to let stuff go and the less stuff you need to prop you up to help you to feel safe. So in every area, your schedule, your closet, your house, your relationships, and especially your mind, we want to declutter these five areas of our life. And I could probably give you 15 more areas, but this will cover the main ones and just how much easier your life is going to feel to you, especially in the mornings, just being able to wake up so excited about the day with nothing really in your way.

So having too much of everything really blocks us from living our super best life, and I’m all about my super best life, and the less I have, the less I collect, and the more I let go, I just feel so much more empowered. I feel so much lighter. I feel so much happier. I trust myself in a deeper way. So the reason that I’m saying when we collect things to help us feel better, that’s what we do as women in the second-half of a life, whether we know it or not.

We’re collecting things. Maybe we love to shop. Maybe we love to have a bunch of people in our life to make us feel like we’re loved and we belong and help us feel secure and safe, right? Maybe we have filled up our home with so much stuff because we don’t even know how to let things go. Maybe you’ve never been taught to declutter your mind. Maybe you have a bunch of beliefs and unuseful thoughts that fill your brain every day and you don’t know how to sort through the ones that are useful and keep only those.

And that’s the number one skill that I can teach you when you come to work with me, is how to declutter your mind so that you can live the exact reality that you only dream about. It’s just all the clutter in our mind. So we’re going to declutter our mind, we’re going to declutter our closet, we’re going to declutter our relationships, we’re going to declutter our schedule, and we’re going to declutter our house. I live a very streamlined life and it keeps serving me so well. And it’s really an art.

Like you’re just discovering this new art of decluttering. And let me suggest to you the reason that you have a hard time letting things go from your closet, like literally letting clothes go from your closet, is because you’ve invested so much in them and because one day maybe they’re going to fit you or maybe they’re going to come back in style. You have these un-useful thoughts. Those are three un-useful thoughts. Why I’ve invested so much in it. It might come back into style. My goal is to fit into it one day.

Those are not useful thoughts when it comes to your closet, to decluttering your closet. Those are not reasons to keep a full closet of clothes that you do not wear. So this is what I do. Let me just help you with my closet first and foremost. I have a very streamlined closet, everything in my closet I love. I love it. Everything in my closet fits me. Everything in my closet is super cute. Everything in my closet I wear.

So if you went through your closet and you said, okay, does it fit me? And if it’s a yes, it goes into one pile, it’s the fit me pile. And everything else that doesn’t fit you, you are going to bag up and that’s going to the giveaway pile, period. You don’t overthink it. There’s no other question. It doesn’t fit me right here, right now, today. It’s got to go.

So we’re talking about for the benefit of yourself. Your future self is saying give it away, do not keep it. It is weighing you down. It’s keeping you from living your best life. The first question is, does it fit me right now? So you have everything that doesn’t fit you in the giveaway pile. You don’t even look at it again. You’ve already bagged it up. You’ve already taken it out to where it needs to go.

So now you have the rest of it that fits you right now. All of these things fit you right now. Then, you know what I do? I try them on. I try everything on. Is it cute? Does it feel good? Do I love it? If it’s no, in any of those categories, it goes into the giveaway pile. Again, the new giveaway pile that you’re just starting. It’s not cute, it doesn’t feel good, and I don’t love it, it’s going.

So now we have the pile that we’re going to keep. This is cute, this feels good, this fits me, I’m keeping it. So everything gets hung back up in the closet. Now you get to go shopping and fill in a little bit of the blank spots. And honestly, we can call this a capsule wardrobe. I don’t even care how many pieces you have. I just care that you love everything in your closet that fits you and that you can’t wait to put it on every day, okay?

So I kind of have a capsule wardrobe. I don’t even buy that much anymore as far as clothes go because I have a look, I have a vibe. My clothes are like hung by colors. You know, I’m a bright color person mostly, and then I wear jeans, I wear whites, and I wear blacks. And everything fits me pretty good. I don’t like to wear big clothes. I call big clothes my cozies.

I like to wear pretty form-fitting clothes. So everything in my closet is definitely something that I feel super beautiful in. I feel super comfortable in. I feel fit in, I feel like it is completely my personality. I love going out in it. And I wear a lot of the same clothes over and over and over. That’s where you want to go. To walk into your closet every day and have everything in your closet, like your closet’s very spacious, everything’s hanging up like a little category, like you have your pants, you have your jackets, you have your tops, you have your dresses, right?

Everything has a little category and it feels so easy to get dressed every morning. It’s so easy to get dressed. Doesn’t that sound wonderful? So you’re going to declutter your closet and that’s going to up-level your life. Every single day, it’ll streamline your life. It’ll help you feel so much lighter and so much more beautiful.

So we’re going to streamline our closet. Like, it’s okay if you feel anxious about it. And this is another thing that I do when I streamline my closet. I’m in the practice of continually decluttering. So this is what I do. First declutter, right, the big declutter is what you’re going to do, the huge declutter. So you’re going to have all your trash bags. This is what I do. You can do it any way you want, but this has been the easiest way for me.

We have a little storage barn on the side of our house. And so I just bag up all my clothes. And the first step out of my closet, step number one is they go all in a storage bag and they all go to the barn. And then when the barn gets a little crowded, I declutter the barn. And then all of those bags of clothes, I don’t even look at them again, all of those bags of clothes, I have someone with a trailer that comes and picks up my clothes, my household items that I have put in the barn that I’ve decluttered from my house, everything that I’m not using anymore.

They come and they pick it all up and they take it away. I am not concerned at all, you guys, about what they do with it. They might sell it, they might use it, they might give it to people who need it. I trust them. I know that all my stuff’s going to go to a great place. Now, I don’t care what you think about my process other than I just want to tell you how I do it, how I keep it easy for me.

Now, you get to do whatever you want, but I want you to keep it easy for you. You can’t do it wrong, okay? That ‘s a useful thought for you. You can’t do it wrong, okay? So declutter your closet. Number one, let’s go to declutter your house. I live in a very spacious, simple, beautiful home that doesn’t have a lot of stuff in it. And I haven’t always been that way. I used to have a ton of accessories and just lots of extra furniture and all that stuff.

But as I’ve gotten older, and especially since we’ve moved to the beach, I was very specific about how I wanted to live in this house and I wanted it to be very streamlined with as little stuff in it as possible, and that’s what I’ve stuck to. Now at Christmas time, I have my tree and I have some extra decor that I don’t normally have. But even my brain’s like, oh, wouldn’t it be good to have a little centerpiece on your table, or we have one huge coffee table, one huge sofa in our living room. And that’s basically it, you guys.

I have one huge coffee table and one huge sofa. And it was just so unnormal for me not to have like coffee table books and florals. And at first I bought all this stuff and I know how to accessorize and it was beautiful. But you know what? I didn’t love it on a daily basis. I didn’t like having that stuff. It felt so much lighter and my brain felt so much lighter and it’s more spacious, some more creative with all the stuff.

So I cleared it all out, took it all to the barn for step number one. And now I have nothing on my tables. I have nothing on my sofa. I have a huge island and literally I have one huge, beautiful, white ceramic platter that I’ve had for a long time that I absolutely am obsessed with. And I move it around from like a table to my island. And that’s kind of my one big accessory. And every once in have fresh flowers. I have a plant here on my bar behind me.

But basically, no accessories. And my home, to me, feels so free. It feels so beautiful. I love it so much. Every morning when I wake up and walk upstairs, I’m like, oh my gosh. Like a big inhale and exhale. I love living here. And of course, you know, it’s all white. It has big open ceilings and big tall windows. And when you look out the windows, you see the ocean.

So of course, that’s the main reason I don’t need any accessories in my house because it would just be a distraction from the ocean, from what I have to look at, from nature. I can see trees and mountains and the ocean, and it’s just so life-giving and fulfilling. So my bedroom is the exact same way. My bedroom, literally, I have just a glass desk in there. I have my favorite painting above my bed. It’s my queen. I call her my queen. She’s the queen of hearts that Carrie Rosenthal, Carrie with a K, she’s an artist, and she’s on the East Coast, and she painted it.

I’ve wanted that picture forever, and I knew exactly I wanted to hang it over my bed. I have her, I have queen of hearts, and I also have my delicious queen-size bed that is covered in white and pink linen. Very light bedding, not heavy bedding. And then I have a black table, a bedside table, right next to my bed. I keep my water on it at night. I charge my phone and charge my watch and charge my AirPods. And then that’s it. That’s what I have sitting next to my bed. And that’s it for my bedroom.

I have a big, spacious bedroom. And my bathroom’s pretty much the same way. It’s just everything that I use is out. And then my closet is very spacious and very simplified. So my life is extremely simplified. My fridge is the same way. My pantry is the same way. I only keep what’s fresh and what we eat every single day.

And you see, if you follow me on Instagram, you see that I shop. I go to the grocery store almost every single day because I will only eat fresh food. I only love fresh food. And it’s such a joy for me to go to get my fresh food every day. So declutter your home. It will give you life. It’ll be so meaningful for you. it’ll open up so much creativity in your brain.

So let’s talk about your schedule. Declutter your schedule, my friend. Only do what you want to do every single day. You have the choice. Ask yourself why your schedule is so full and maybe filled half with stuff you don’t even like doing that you dread doing. I do not dread doing anything on my planner every day. I plan tomorrow, today, and I’m so free. I’ve set myself up to be okay with disappointing people, right? And we’ll talk about relationships, but I’ve let so many relationships go. I feel no obligation to any person.

I feel only obligated to me and to my growth and to my happiness and to my own self-concept. I feel obligated to me. And then the people in my life who love me and want to be with me, they keep showing up. And that’s how you clean up your relationships too, but it also is a way to clean up your schedule. So you’re no longer saying yes to things just out of obligation on your schedule.

I do not say yes to anything out of obligation. I say yes to everything that I genuinely want to do. And those things that I say yes to, like I am clear as to what’s in it for me, my reasons for saying yes, why I’m saying yes. And then I know that these things are getting me to where I want to go, which is always my dream, my goals. I’m always looking towards my future self and my future self is like, yep, let that go. Yep. keep that. This is what’s going to get you where you want to go, right?

So I’m conferring with my future self, which is me, right? So I show up as me, my future, my highest self every single day. And I will not do anything out of obligation just because I’m afraid I’m going to let someone down. Now, I am a woman of my word. If I’ve said I’m going to do it, I will do it. And then once I realized that I don’t want to do it anymore, then I say, I’m not going to do it anymore. I don’t even have to really give a reason. I just say, I’m not going to do that anymore. I can’t meet with you anymore. It’s a no for me.

And then that’s it. And then I move on my merry way. And the way I can do that is just to get comfortable being uncomfortable. And I tell you guys that all the time. It brings up anxiety in me and I’m okay with that. I know that anxiety is going to be there, but I will not compound that anxiety with some kind of self-doubt, or I shouldn’t be feeling this way, or I’m some kind of a mean person, or I hurt their feelings.

I do not think I can hurt anyone’s feelings. I would never hurt anyone’s feelings on purpose, so therefore I would not ever be afraid that I’m hurting anyone’s feelings. I hold myself in the highest light, and I hold everybody else in the highest light, and because I know that if I get my feelings hurt, I know that’s my responsibility, and that’s just information for me, And that’s just a place for me to get curious about and to be able to grow from that place of getting my feelings hurt.

So I just know that if my feelings ever get hurt, if I feel stung, I’m like, ooh, I wonder what that is. What are you making this mean about you? Where are you feeling like you lack something, right? So your schedule is only filled with things that you love doing, OK, and that align with your goals. And you plan tomorrow, today. And then you show up for yourself today, doing exactly what you planned yesterday.

That’s your highest self, 100% guarantee. And if you come work with me, I’m going to teach you exactly how to do that. It just has given me the life that I am obsessed with. So this is what works. So declutter your schedule, my friend, And hold space for the anxiety that will come up in you when you start saying no to a bunch of stuff. That will leave you space for things that you really want to do, that you’re unable to even fit in right now.

It’s the spaciousness of life that when you declutter your schedule, you declutter your closet, you declutter your home. It just leaves you so much space for everything that will be beneficial for you moving forward. And you’ll feel so much more light and in love with you in your life because of it. So we’ve decluttered our house, we’ve decluttered our closet, let’s declutter our people.

So there are people that are good for you and there are people that are not good for you, 100%. We’re going to keep the people that are good for you and we’re going to let all the people that are not good for you go and you know who they are. Once again, you’re going to have to live with the anxiety that will come up because you think people are going to think you’re mean, you think people are going to think you’re selfish, You think you should be the one that takes the higher road always, and the one that is the kind one, and the nice one, and the forgiving one, and the long-suffering one. And I’m saying no, no, no, no. Those are not good reasons to keep people in your life who are not good for you.

If you have goals in your life, and you trust yourself when you know someone isn’t good for you, look at how it feels when you see their name come up on your phone, or you see their name on your schedule for the day that you’re going to meet them and you know that they love to complain, you know that they love to gossip, you know that they’re going to be critical of you in some way, you know they’re going to be drinking or wanting to do stuff that you’re trying not to do, that you’re trying to clean up in your own life, those people are not good for you, those are the people you say no to, and you live with the anxiety of it for a little while, but you get busy on your own journey, on the way that you want to feel about yourself, it’s so much easier to reach your goals when you’re not surrounded with a bunch of people who are dragging you down that are quote, making you feel guilty, making you feel like you think you’re better than them, making you feel like you’re not part of the group anymore.

Like none of that even matters anymore, my friend. You just have to be able to feel uncomfortable with those feelings and know that you’re worthy of moving forward. And here’s why I want you to do it. I do not have anyone in my life who isn’t for me. Everyone in my life is for me. Everyone that I spend time with, no one is critical of me. No one is trying to talk me out of something or making me feel bad, quote, making me feel bad. No one can make me feel any which way. I make myself feel however I want to feel.

But I don’t spend any time with people who gossip or complain or criticize, right? I’d much rather be by myself than hang out. I do not have groups of friends anymore, you guys. I cannot tell you what an accomplishment that is. I have friends, I have one-on-one friends, but I do not feel tied or obligated to any groups of friends. I do not feel a need for any groups of friends. And it has set me free to discover the safety that I feel being with me alone and not having to be propped up or hyped girl up or supported by groups of friends or making myself, contorting myself or making myself small to be able to fit into a group of friends.

I do not do that anymore. I used to do that all of the time and I had so many groups of friends and I collected friends to make me feel okay, to validate me, and to make me feel safe and included and beautiful and smart and funny, to make me feel all of that, I collected friends and groups of friends, and then I discover that I can give myself all of that without being so exhausted by groups of friends. Like this is the process, this is the outcome of decluttering your life of people, is discovering who you are and loving who you are and changing the story about your past and like redirecting to a bright, beautiful, confident future for this newest version of yourself.

That’s what happens when you declutter your life of people who are not good for you. I highly recommend it. I think it’s essential for next level you. It is essential. And the only thing you have to get good at is just recognizing that the anxiety will come up, that anxiety is just your nervous system practiced at this feeling that you’re not safe and I promise you, you are safe. Come work with me. I will teach you how safe you are and how capable you are at just being with you in your own skin and how wonderful and beautiful and smart and funny and talented you are and how bright your future is.

So declutter the people in your life who are not good for you. Keep only the people who are good for you. And the last one and the best one is declutter your mind. And I saved it for last just because I want you to remember this one the most. I want you to know that there is a way to have an uncluttered mind, to be focused on a few things and not let your brain take over and cause you all kinds of distractions in your life.

But you can actually, just like you do with your home and your closet and your schedule and your relationships. You can declutter your mind by sorting out the thoughts and beliefs that are useful from the thoughts and beliefs that are no longer useful for you. So useful thoughts are thoughts like I can do anything I want. I can think anything I want. I am safe. I am loved. I am whole. I have a bright future. I get to decide who I hang out with, I get to decide what clothes in my closet I give away.

I can trust myself. My decisions are always good decisions. I make them the right decisions. I can be afraid and still do the scary, hard things. Like these are all useful decisions that I think on repeat. I believe on repeat. This is why I have the life I have. I declutter my brain all of the time, but the decluttering isn’t as necessary anymore because I’ve been doing it now for eight years that I don’t even believe thoughts anymore that are unuseful.

And if I am feeling a little bit stuck, I realize that I’m thinking something that’s unuseful. And so I get coached on it, and my coach points out what it probably is, like, oh, I hear you saying this over and over, and that’s not a useful thought for you. And I’m like, oh, you’re right. This is the beauty of getting coached and having a mindset coach is because my genius is helping you to see what’s really bothering you, getting to the bottom line of it, and it’s always some sort of unuseful belief or unuseful thought, something antiquated that was taught to you a long time ago and you’ve just been dragging it with you, just like clothes in your closet that no longer fit you, right?

And you could just keep squeezing them in your closet and trying to make room for new things that don’t fit because you have all this old antiquated stuff that is no longer useful for you. That’s how your brain is, okay? So you can retrain your brain. I can help you with that. Come join my September 10th group. You will love it so much. You will be a different person by the end of 2024. I guarantee it. You will love being you, and you will learn how to declutter your mind, and you will learn how to feel all over your emotions.

You will learn how to be fearless. And fearless means being afraid and doing the hard things anyways, trusting yourself in a deeper way, maybe trusting yourself for the first time, and holding yourself at a higher standard and requiring your people to do that too. Anyone that wants to be in your life, it’s a privilege to be in your life. You got to think like that. That’s a useful thought. It is a privilege, my friend, to be in your life and to be a name on your schedule.

So just know that. And it is a privilege to be you, you’re amazing, you’re beautiful, you’re a rare gem. And I feel the same way about me. And this is the beauty of living an uncluttered life, is the way that I feel every single day about myself and about my home, about my work, about my schedule, about my people. I am thinking very specifically every day, and I only think useful thoughts, and I only think about the things that I’m creating every day. Okay.

And that goes like with your food, your diet. I mean, we can declutter so many areas of our life, but these five will make a huge impression on you. These five will give you a great start. And I’m here to encourage you with that, motivate you with that today. You know what I’m talking about. You have so many ideas right now for your own life, and I guarantee you’re feeling a little anxious about it. And I want you just to go dive in and I’m going to give you the feeling of ruthless.

I feel ruthless when I’m decluttering, I’m like, nope, nope, nope, doesn’t fit me. Don’t love it anymore. Doesn’t care how much I spent on it. It’s time for it to go. I’m making room for my closet and my home and my brain and my relationships and my schedule and my work to feel light and spacious and open and happy and give myself room to breathe, to grow, room to do more of what I want to do, and no more out of obligation, okay?

That’s why you want to declutter your life. Okay, my friend, that’s what I have for you today. I want to tell you, if you do not follow me on Instagram, come follow me on Instagram. Next week, episode 157, my friend, will be my final episode of Reinvented After 40. I’m going to reinvent my podcasting. I’m taking a break from podcasting. I will come back with new stuff, a new name, new ideas. And next week when I record my final episode, I’ll tell you all the ways. This podcast, when I started it at 60, it was my dream come true. And I’ve done it now for three straight years. It has been more successful than I could have ever dreamt of. And I love it. It’s my bestie.

And also, it’s time for a new chapter. And I always want to be the example of that for you. Just because you start something and it’s super successful, you have to trust yourself enough to know that when it’s time to close up the chapter and move on to a new chapter, you have to trust yourself to know that this is the time. And that’s why I made the decision. I didn’t ask for anyone’s opinion. I trusted my own instinct, my own wantings for my future.

What I’m needing right now is to take a break from podcasting and to give it some room so I can be more creative and create something new for myself and ultimately for you. So you have that to look forward to. I don’t know how long of a break I’m going to take, but that doesn’t even matter. I’ll know when it’s time to jump back in. So I love you all so much. Come join my September group. I’m going to focus all of this energy into my Instagram and to my new TikTok account.

If you need daily inspiration, come there, Kim Schauer’s Life Coach on Instagram, Kim Schauer’s Life Coach on TikTok. You will get daily motivation, inspiration, and encouragement from me on both of those platforms. And especially if you come and pay the money and dive into coaching with me, you will get it every single week on repeat. And that will change your life the most. If you think that you look forward to this podcast, wait until you come and work with me.

You can work with me privately for two months every week, so you’ll get eight weeks with me straight with just me and you for an hour every week, or you can come work with me for 20 weeks and join my September 10th group and come work with me once a week for 20 weeks in a group setting which is magnificent and so life-changing. So I love you so much. Thank you for showing up today, And I will see you for my very last episode next week, and I’ll look forward to that.

If you love this podcast, I invite you to come work with me. Go to kymshowerslifecoach.com, sign up for my next group and retreat, and let’s create your dream life together.