Click here to learn more and join us for our ELEVATE retreat on October 17, 2026.
What’s keeping you from getting organized?
You may think you need more time, better systems, or more motivation. But often, there are two gaps between where you are now and where you want to be: a skill gap and a mindset gap.
In this episode, I break down both and show you how the SPACE Method helps you practice the skills of organizing, while your thoughts, beliefs, and identity can either move you forward or keep you stuck.
I also share a lesson I learned while cross-stitching a Christmas stocking and why organizing isn’t just about reaching the finished result. It’s about who you become in the process.
Plus, you’ll learn how to start building a “bank of evidence” with every small win so you can prove to yourself that becoming an organized person really is possible for you.
In this episode, you’ll learn:
- The two gaps that may be keeping you from getting organized
- Why organizing is a skill you can learn and practice
- How perfectionism and your thoughts can keep you stuck
- Why becoming organized is about more than your stuff
- How to build a bank of evidence that you ARE becoming an organized person
If Point B is an organized home and a more organized you, you don’t have to wait until you arrive to feel successful. Start noticing the evidence that you’re already on your way.
Your Organizing Coach,
Next Steps
15-Minute Declutter Challenge: https://simplysquaredaway.com/declutter
Organized COACH Academy (OCA) for coaches and small business owners to streamline and organize.
Organized LIFE Academy (OLA) for women who want to be clutter-free.
Learn the Only Five Folders I Use To Organize My Business
Ready to work together? Schedule a consult with me here.
Subscribe and Listen:
If you love what you’re learning on this podcast every week – the strategies, how-tos, and time-saving ideas to set up your organized and systemized business so you can work less and scale – please follow, rate, and review by heading to Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts.
The Two Gaps Keeping You From Getting Organized
When you think about getting organized, imagine yourself at Point A. Maybe your desk is covered with papers, your kitchen counter has become a drop zone, or there are piles around your house that you keep meaning to deal with. You look around and feel disorganized, overwhelmed, or unsure where to even begin.
Now imagine Point B. Your surfaces are clear, everything has a home, and you know where to find what you need. More importantly, you feel peaceful and confident. You trust yourself to walk into a space, figure out what needs to happen, and organize it.
So, what’s between Point A and Point B?
I believe there are two main gaps that can keep you from getting organized: a skill gap and a mindset gap. Once you understand which one is getting in your way, you can stop making your current level of organization mean something about who you are. Instead, you can identify what you need to learn, practice, or think differently about so you can move forward.
Getting Organized Requires Skills You Can Learn
One of the things I want every woman to know is that organizing is a skill. You were not born organized or disorganized. It doesn’t matter what kind of brain you have, whether your parents taught you how to organize, or how messy your house is right now. These are skills you can learn.
I teach five steps to getting organized using my SPACE Method: Sort, Purge, Assign Homes, Contain, and Energize. Each step requires a skill, and there are even smaller skills to practice within those five steps.
Take sorting, for example. When you begin organizing, you might immediately start asking yourself whether you should keep, donate, sell, or throw away each item. Suddenly, you’re forcing yourself to make hard decisions before you’ve even figured out what you have.
Instead, I teach people to begin by sorting things into categories. Books go together. Office supplies belong in another group. Short-sleeve shirts become a category, while socks become another. At this point, you’re simply asking, “What is this?” Learning to recognize categories and sort this way is a skill that gets easier with practice.
Decision-Making Is Part of Getting Organized
Once you’ve sorted, you move into the purge step. This is where you decide what belongs in your life now, and those decisions become easier when you know where you’re going.
Think about your destination before deciding what stays. What kind of life are you creating? Consider what you want to do in this season and what kind of home will support that life. From there, you can look at an item and ask, “Does this support the life I’m creating?”
People often tell me, “I’m terrible at making decisions.” They say it as though being decisive is a personality trait they either have or don’t have. But decision-making is also a skill.
Getting organized gives you an incredible opportunity to practice that skill over and over. Some decisions will feel easy, while others will make you uncomfortable. With practice, you begin trusting yourself more, and decisions that once stopped you become easier to make.
You Don’t Need the Perfect Home for Everything
Assigning homes is another place where I see people get stuck, especially when perfectionism enters the picture. You pick something up and think, “I don’t know where this should go,” because somewhere in the back of your mind you believe there is one perfect place for it.
I like to think of assigning homes more like working on a puzzle. You try a piece, and if it doesn’t fit, you move it somewhere else. Nothing has gone wrong. You simply learned that your first idea wasn’t the best fit.
The same thing happens when getting organized. Maybe you assign a home to something and discover a month later that the location is inconvenient. Great! Now you have information you didn’t have before, so you can move it and test something different.
Part of becoming organized is learning that you don’t have to create the perfect system on your first attempt. You’re allowed to experiment.
Sometimes the Gap Isn’t a Skill Gap
You can know every step of the SPACE Method and still struggle to get organized. That’s when we need to look at the second gap: your mindset.
Recently, I was coaching a client who told me she wanted to feel more organized. We started talking about what “organized” actually felt like to her. At first, she connected being organized with having a routine. In her mind, if she could consistently follow her routine, she would finally feel organized.
As we talked, though, we discovered something deeper. Feeling organized was closely connected to feeling prepared and confident for her. That gave us something completely different to work with.
She is training for a marathon, so we looked at what she might think before running when she feels prepared. A thought such as, “I have trained for this. I am ready,” could create that feeling of preparedness.
This is where I want you to get curious about yourself. What does being organized feel like to you? Maybe the word that comes to mind is peaceful, confident, capable, prepared, calm, or free. Once you identify that emotion, think about another area of your life where you’ve already experienced it and notice what you were thinking at the time.
You Don’t Have to Wait Until Point B to Feel Organized
When I walk into my home, I often feel peace because of what I think when I look around. I see artwork I love and notice how I feel when I look at it. My table makes me think, “It’s ready to have people around it.” When I walk into my kitchen, I know it’s ready or that I could have it ready for people in five minutes.
Those thoughts help create the peaceful feeling I associate with an organized home. But here’s what I realized during the coaching conversation: you don’t need your entire house organized before you can begin practicing that feeling.
Imagine clearing your dining room table today. As you sort everything on it, notice which items already have homes but simply weren’t put away. You’ll probably also find things that don’t have a home yet, which tells you exactly what needs your attention.
After you finish, stop and look at that clear table. Instead of immediately turning your attention toward every other messy space in your house, notice what you accomplished. You could think, “Look at that beautiful clear space. I organized that.” Another thought might be, “I’m so grateful I took the time to do this, and now my table is ready for people.”
That one space can help you experience some of Point B while you’re still on your way there.
How Does the Person at Point B Think?
One of my favorite questions to ask is, “How does the organized version of you think?”
Consider what she believes about herself and how she approaches decisions. When she doesn’t know where something belongs, what does she do? If a system she tries doesn’t work, how does she respond?
The woman at Point B probably isn’t continually telling herself that she’s terrible at making decisions. She doesn’t reinforce the belief that she has no time, can’t figure things out, or never knows where to start. Instead, she has practiced thinking differently as she has developed new skills.
We don’t outperform our identity. If you continue identifying as someone who is terrible at decisions, always behind, or incapable of getting organized, those beliefs will affect the actions you take. Part of getting organized is learning to think more like the person you are becoming before you have all the external evidence that you’ve arrived.
What Cross-Stitching Taught Me About Getting Organized
I’ve cross-stitched or needlepointed Christmas stockings for my family over the years. When my boys got married, I needed to make stockings for their wives too. One of those stockings ended up taking me about three years to finish.
After finally completing it, I started the next one. This pattern was even smaller, with tiny squares that were hard for me to see. Looking at the unfinished stocking, I started thinking about how many hours it was going to take me to complete it.
Then I realized something. It probably WILL take hours and hours, but why is that a problem?
During those hours, I can relax, have conversations, listen to something, or pray for the person whose stocking I’m making. I’ll make mistakes and figure out how to fix them. There will be plenty of opportunities to practice patience and keep going when I can barely see those tiny little squares. Eventually, after enough stitches, I’ll also become the person who has a finished stocking.
As I sat there cross-stitching, I realized how much this reminded me of getting organized. You can look around your home and focus on how many hours it will take to finish everything, or you can think about what is happening to you during those hours.
While organizing, you’re practicing making decisions and learning how to work through perfectionism. Along the way, you’re discovering what you want your home to look and feel like, testing solutions, assigning homes, and figuring out what works for you. With every organizing session, you also have another opportunity to become someone who trusts herself and knows she can finish what she starts.
The process itself has value. Getting to Point B is wonderful, but who you become on the way there matters too.
Start Building Your Bank of Evidence
As you move from Point A toward Point B, I want you to start building what I call a bank of evidence. Rather than measuring yourself only against the finished version of your home, begin collecting proof that you’re changing along the way.
Five minutes of sorting counts as evidence. Clearing one surface is another deposit into the bank. Maybe you finally made a decision you had been avoiding or assigned a home to something that has been sitting out for months. Each action gives you another reason to believe that getting organized is possible for you.
Even the things that don’t work can become evidence. Perhaps you tested a new home for something and realized two weeks later that it wasn’t convenient. Instead of making that mean you’re bad at organizing, notice what actually happened: you tested something, learned from it, and now you know what to try next.
Catching a perfectionistic thought is evidence too. The same is true when you notice yourself thinking, “I never finish anything,” and choose not to let that thought determine what you do next. Little by little, you’re building proof that you can learn new skills, make decisions, solve problems, and follow through.
Over time, that bank gets fuller. The evidence starts changing what you believe about yourself, and your identity begins catching up with the person you’re practicing becoming.
Which Gap Is Keeping You From Getting Organized?
Think about one area of your home or life that you want to organize and ask yourself what is actually keeping you at Point A.
Perhaps there’s a skill you haven’t learned yet. Sorting into categories may feel confusing, or decision-making could be where you get stuck. Maybe you need help assigning homes, choosing containers, or creating a simple routine to maintain what you’ve organized. If that’s the case, you’ve identified a skill gap, which means you now know what you need to practice.
On the other hand, you may already know exactly what to do. The obstacle might be what you’re thinking about yourself, the project, or the time it will take. Thoughts such as “I don’t have enough time,” “I’m terrible at making decisions,” “I never finish anything,” or “I’ve tried this before and it didn’t work” can keep you standing at Point A even when you have the skills to move forward.
Sometimes both gaps are there, and that’s okay. Neither one is evidence that you are incapable of getting organized. A skill can be learned, a thought can be questioned, and a new identity can be practiced.
You don’t need to wake up tomorrow magically transformed into the person at Point B. Instead, take the next stitch, clear one surface, make one decision, or practice one skill. Then notice what you just did and add it to your bank of evidence.
Getting organized is not only about the finished house, the clear countertops, or everything having a home. There’s a much bigger transformation available to you in the process.
You’re becoming an organized person.
The Organized Coach Podcast
If you’re finding this podcast helpful and want to get started organizing, start by learning the only 5 file folders you need. This course walks you through every step to get your business and yourself organized, helping you save time, cut costs, and confidently prepare for growth, including hiring support when you’re ready. Check it out at SimplySquaredAway.com/oca.
Leave me a written review here. It’s the best way to let me know how much The Organized Coach Podcast means to you! Connect with me on Instagram here. Check out my other resources here.
Until next week, have a fantastic day!
