Media: The Journey of Ruth Podcast

I recently appeared on The Journey of Ruth podcast with host Courtney Lowman (such a doll who has the best energy)!  We talk about the importance of organization in our lives and how it can help us live out our God-given purpose.

We chat about how organization can help us find more joy in our life, help us live out our priorities and purpose, and just for you mammas, how teaching our kids to organize can help them…and us…not feel overwhelmed in our own home.

Transcript:

[Music] [Music] well i'm here today with jennifer ford berry thank you for joining me today thank you for having me courtney i'm so excited for this conversation well i've told her that already i'm seeing things that i need to learn like i need my podcast name on my microphone it is fun uh so jennifer she is a professional organizer i mean that in itself is amazing but she's also a best-selling author she's a podcaster of the 29 minute 29 minute mom podcast she's a national speaker so she's a verybusy woman can you tell us about yourself please yes i started doing organizing 20 years ago after i got laid off from my corporate job shortly after 9 11 i was working for a radio station and kind of in advertising and being a newer person to the company they laid me off because advertising got some cutbacks after 9 11. i was then pregnant with my first and i thought it would be fun to be a stay-at-home mom but shortly after it the first few months of being a stay-at-home mom i realized i really needed to do something else and so i went on kind of a spiritual journey of figuring out what i wanted to do with the rest of my life even though i always thought i would stay in corporate america and i just after a long process realized that i was always just gifted with the gift of organizing i loved organizing since i was a little kid i used to organize everything icould find i was a kid i had was a kid that thought it was fun to rearrange my room and clean my room my parents never had to tell me to clean my room but i didn't realize that was a unique gift to me i didn't know that it was just kind of normal for me and so i started um praying a lot and doing some soul searching and i decided to take a leap of faith and start an organizing business what's interesting about it is at the time courtney there was nobody really that i knew as a professional organizer so i knew a couple of peopleum julie morgenstern and peter walsh peter walsh was on the oprah show i don't know if you remember that um with the australian accent and julie had written several books and that was about it so we didn't have you know hgtv and instagram and pinterest and all these great things so back in the you know olden days so hey you are finding your niche that's awesome i know and what's funny about this is i literally just took a leap of faith because i knew in my spirit that this is what god called me to do but i had noidea the journey he had in store for me and i had no idea that it was going to turn me into a speaker and an author and a podcaster and i don't think they had podcasts back then no not bad that was kind of like i don't know i know i've been listening to one podcast for 12 years and they were kind of right at the very beginning of that yeah yeah okay so it was before podcast but yes yes you know what's interesting is um i had this has evolved into a sort of ministry for me and i think that's the coolestpart of the whole story is that i realized that i'm not here to just make people's houses look pinterest perfect and have the perfect organized closet i'm actually here to get them to separate their attachment to things so that they can have more what i call stem space-time energy and money for their god-given purpose so that's really what my work is about now 20 years later that is awesome well i have a feeling that the conversation that we're about to have today is one that my husband's gonna listen tothis episode and then he's gonna come home and be like okay so which of these things are you going to start putting into play at our home because yeah i organization is not my forte um i've always said that in business and in like podcasting and that type of i surround myself with people that can help me organize um but no one's organizing my home so he's gonna be like this was a good person for you to talk to now what did you learn in your conversation with jennifer courtney so okay i'm sure you have your own listof gifts and skills that i don't have so we all have yes that's true that's true i thought you were going to say i'm sure you have your own organized organizational system and i was like yes an ineffective one yes i do okay so at what point did you realize that like um or maybe i should say this how did organizing other people's stuff you know work for you when you first started uh were you just going into their homes or were you you know giving them tips or tricks what did that look like for youso i was going to people's homes when i first started i was doing it for free for you know friends in that i had worked at with um at the radio station so i was like hey i'm gonna kind of venture out into this new business can i organize your closets of course they're like sure go for it um and that's the cool part too i was never i didn't in the beginning i wasn't certified i didn't have any training this is literally just a god-given thing and so um then i started this little email calledweek free weekly organizing tips and i would send out one tip a week that was so simple that you couldn't pass it up it was just like you know just super straightforward and i didn't realize at the time but that became my first book all of those tips and i realized right then that organizing is kind of like i compare it to either hiring a financial advisor or hiring a fitness instructor where you're just like tell me how to get from a to z and tell me as quickly and as painlessly as possible that's what people wanted tohear and so that was how i started yeah that makes a lot i mean we do need people to come in to our lives and kind of help us in those areas where we know we're not doing great you know and sometimes it might seem like well do you really need someone to organize your house the answer is yes and we're seeing this all over the place now i mean like you said there wasn't all of this 20 years ago when you started but now we've got the murray condo you know like mindset we've got i've i have binged all of the homeedit on netflix i love that oh gosh we've got there's a whole store dedicated to organizing things so uh why why do you think that is why is all of a sudden maybe it's because for a year we all sat in our own disorganization and like i gotta do something about this but why is all of a sudden a need to organize our lives uh starting to bubble to the surface of culture well even before covet it was really starting i think it had a lot to do with being inundated constantly with consumption so it's so easy to consumenow because we are with a click of a button we can have anything delivered to our home we don't have to actually go out find it pay cash it doesn't hurt so much it's literally just shows up so we do a lot of that on a whim we see something on instagram next you know our cart is full on amazon and then two days later it's on our doorstep and we haven't even cleared out the previous things that we owned so i think that's it and i think that our time is limited we're busy we're running running running and whenyou are not organized you waste a lot of time um and then covet hit and we were staring at the walls in our home and realizing that we needed some extra help so it's right it's going you know it's it's been very interesting because over and i i say this a lot but in the beginning i felt like a lot of my um because i still work one-on-one with some clients and then i do online coaching and so the one-on-one clients more and more of them mostly are women they are not even home when i'm doingthis anymore they don't have the time to be home they are working full-time jobs and i'm in their home keeping things running and making sure that the right systems are in place so that's been a big change over the past two decades wow wow i thought maybe you were gonna say they're not in the home because they would save everything and so like they they have too much emotional attachment so i need them to leave the home so that i can get rid of their stuff or organize it some have told me i've literally hadwomen tell me i wish i'd like tornado would take down my house i don't want to look at any of this anymore i just want it gone and these are beautiful homes and this is how women feel because they are so ridiculously overwhelmed courtney it's it's sad they have everything but they're not happy because of it okay so is the overwhelming part is it the stuff is it the life or is it the combination it's the stuff and the lack of time i don't think a lot of us have time to just sit you know it's organization isso huge there's the putting things in the proper place but there's also the time management piece and a lot of people are struggling with time management and if you don't have your time management down pat then it's going to be hard to get on top of the clutter so it's a combination this is a message for my husband you need to stop nodding right now because time management is absolutely something i have always struggled with um and but you're right i do find that if i will organize my timewhich is literally a chore for me uh i know some people they love their calendars and they like but to sit down and actually like plan something out i'm i i probably feel about that the same way that other people feel about going to the gym like i'm doing this and i'm hating every moment of it i you know for me that is that is the case um but i also understand that when i do that i personally experience more freedom because i know when i am spending time with my kids doing you know whatever it might be that was on theschedule it's fine even this week i scheduled it so that monday i was doing my work stuff tuesday i was doing stuff here at the house and wednesday we left and we went fishing as a family and when i we were out fishing and you know swimming in the lake my brain was not thinking about oh my gosh what are all the things that i'm not getting done because i had scheduled my week to make sure that my brain was free for that moment and so i know i know that what you're saying i know that what you're saying is rightbut it is it's so difficult and you have actually addressed this you are a best-selling author and you've addressed this in several books that you have and they're a part of your organized now series what are the different topics that you discuss in your different organized now series so volume one is basically all of your space so it's room by room in your home volume two is all about the clutter that affects our body our mind and our spirit and then uh volume three which is organized now your money business andcareer that's about your money your business so each book is 52 weeks broken down into a very narrow topic that you can get organized from beginning to end but it's so interesting because right there that's three books with you know three years full of topics that you can organize and i think a lot of times people don't realize that the more parts of your life you can get organized the better off you're gonna be and the more you'll enjoy your life because like you said you did a system and then when you wereenjoying your life you weren't thinking about other things because you're you knew you did the best with what you had time before right well and i love too that you're not even you didn't throw all those into one book it was like okay here's this small portion and this is what we're going to focus on not for a week but for a year we're going to focus on this small portion of your life and then in three or four years then you can look back and see like the growth that you've had buta lot of times i think we feel like oh my gosh if i'm gonna get organized i'm gonna get everything organized in my house and my life and my spirit and my mind and what you're saying is no no no yeah like this exactly saturday saturday from three to eight yep so i love that you kind of break it down into those smaller sections more like you know manageable uh things you have a new book that's coming out july 5th and um the the cover is beautiful which i would expect nothing less from someone who isorganized it just puts me at peace uh it is called it's called make room take control of your space time energy and money to live on purpose so that's going back to that stem idea that you said uh tell us about the book who it's for and and why why is this the right time to bring that book into the world oh it literally makes me feel emotional even just hearing it because it was such a process you know i wrote those those other books they did very well and then i took a break because it was just one after another and i kind of gota little bit burnt out and my kids were growing up you know i wrote those books when my kids were you know younger and then all of a sudden i took a couple years off maybe three years and i felt like god told me to write this book i was actually halfway done with writing another book courtney and really yes halfway and it was just like he just said nope you're writing this book and so in my heart i know that this is a not just a book but a movement and i feel strongly that there's a lot of organizers out there there's a lot oftv shows there's a lot of books out there but the you know the christian world we know that life is not about stuff and in the book i talk about stewardship and you know privileged giving and about how we can if we have these things we are to share them and how um we can use getting organized as a ministry by helping other local nonprofits and so i started looking at getting organized as a ministry in my own life and that's what i talk about in the book and the other important thing is is that i know we were all sent herewith a specific purpose in mind and just like with what i said earlier with my specific gifts and talents that god gave me since i was a child i realized that that was part of my purpose and so i don't want people to be a slave to their things i want them to have the space-time energy and money to follow their purpose because that's what we need to make change in the world and um you know i i believe you know i speak at a lot of churches and when i talk about organization people always ask me well i have all this stuff wherecould i give it they don't even know about the different things that they could do to use this to help other people so it's not just about helping yourself it's about helping others it's about showing your kids how to live this kind of lifestyle and i'm not a minimalist that has nothing to do okay i'm not people think that that goes hand in hand and it doesn't i'm about living in a home that i am proud to bring people in you know i'm hosting bible study tonight nobody else in mygroup holds bible study because they're just stressed out about their house and i'm like come on in because this is how i live yeah everything in the home i don't keep things i don't love or use my kids were raised this way and it's it's not that it doesn't get messy and it doesn't mean that things get out of their place but it's easy to put back and so that's what i want for all women i want them to come in their home and realize that you know having all this stuff is not necessarily making moneyhappier but if you could do a quick cleanup and put things back in their home you would be so much freer and so i'm just i'm proud of the book you know the other books were written with a different publisher they didn't want me to write a christian book i've fought for this book um i'm so proud that i'm now working with baker books and that they are they get it they get what the books about and what it's going to do to help people and i love the fact that you recognize that the chaos or the theclutter in our lives has a bigger impact on us it's it's not just surface level it's not just the fact that you know we can't walk through a room you know without tripping over something or you know every time we walk into a room we feel like it's messy when really it's not there's just too much stuff in there but you realize that it goes a little bit deeper and that sometimes that that there is a piece like i said the cover of your book is so like peaceful and i feel like i can do that for a momenti can do that for a picture or for a party um but what you're helping us to see is no no no it doesn't just have to be a moment an instagram moment where you know all the trash is on the other side of the camera where no one can see but instead instead it it's a moment where it's gonna affect our spiritual selves um and it's going to affect our relationship with god i mean you how can you sit down and have a moment at peace with god when your life is in chaos because you feel like you should bedoing something else you feel like you should be cleaning that thing that's unclean it's you feel like you should and because of that that chaos that is in your life you can't sit down and just be quiet and you alluded to this i took a quote from your book it said god did not create you so that you could work to gain more possessions and then be a slave to them and so i love that your book talks about this this idea of like possessions than just stuff that we acquire uh he does not want you to feel overwhelmed andstressed out he wants you to have abundance enjoy peace and love not just have more stuff and i feel like that goes against everything that culture is telling us yes you're right how easily we can get anything we want i was even listening to a news report on the buy now pay later it's like brand new you know in a lot of online stores and you can pay it in four installments and that used to be like a qvc thing but now it's on almost every website and they found that that here's the trick they found that ifpeople looked at it and said oh i only have to pay twenty dollars for the next four months instead of eighty dollars now they were more likely to push buy buy on that full uh cart instead of they call it cart abandonment where you put everything in the cart and then you are like oh that's a lot of money never mind and you just leave it all in the cart it is literally a trick to get you to buy more and i was like oh my gosh like here it is it looks like it's more affordable but it's actually not so can you tell ushow do this amount of possessions that the world wants us to have and tells us we need and how does that get in the way of doing the kingdom work that we are are destined to do so you know reason why well first of all let's just point out that marketing companies are getting paid big money to figure out how to get more stuff in your home i mean i haven't yeah i this is what i used to do i was just saying you are in advertising you understand that yeah so um i understand but we have to be intentional with ourspace because we're going to get messages more than ever i mean every time you pick up your phone you're going to get a message every time you log into your computer you're going to get a message and it's going to tell you that if you buy this you're going to be prettier thinner more successful wealthier happier and it's simply not true um so we have to be really careful but the possessions are they they all come with attached to some amount of time they're going to take away space they're going to takeaway energy they're going to take away and we're spending it in all these different areas and we don't have enough of that for our relationship with god or our purpose in the world or serving helping because that all takes time i mean think about how much just think about laundry alone the more clothes you have the more time you're spending doing longer right the more time you're spending putting it away and then you have to spend more money to wash the clothes and so forth and so on takes upspace and so next thing you know the laundry is pulling at you more than opening up your bible and it's just it's a constant struggle for us because they're distractions and i i believe that satan is using them as distractions he knows that we'd rather go grab something off you know you'll get a cutesy instagram promotion and next thing you know you click that button and you're sucked into the world and you've just spent a hundred dollars and you're you're happy right you feel i call thetarget five minute high because how many times have you gone into target for one thing and then you leave with a cart full and you feel happy like you feel high as a kite but that happiness does not last so it's so interesting to me that we want to take the easy way out by clicking the button and getting that five minute high where really if we were to spend five minutes just five minutes learning you know something from the bible that we could carry with us every single day that joy lasts so much longer and honestly courtney when i wrote thisbook i studied a lot of what god spelled out about organization and time management he is the creator of it there's so much wisdom about this and it has nothing to do with marketing it was there from the beginning of time he laid it out for us so we just have to remember where our joy really comes from it's not going to come from the stuff that's right god wasn't in the business of selling things no no and you know it's it's been powerful to me um to clean out a lot of people's houses after they've passed on and seetheir possessions and hold their possessions and i i feel space very deeply and what always gets me is i've wondered how many hours did they spend on this stuff how many days did they work to accumulate this stuff did this stuff bring them joy and peace or was it a burden and the funny thing is it what's it mean now none of it went with them yeah yeah i'm i'm thinking about a podcast that i just recently listened to and and the person being interviewed shauna neequest is her name she's another author yeah and yeah and so shewas talking about how uh one of the small adjustments she made in her life was on her phone on the home screen and so when she opens up her phone what she sees is her kindle app and then i forget a couple other things but what she doesn't see on her home screen is her social media um and i would imagine for those of us that are like big with online shopping that would be another thing instead of like sitting down and scrolling through instagram or facebook with if we have 10 minutes right uh instead when we open up ourphone the first thing we see are better options for us whether it be like a bible app or um you know something like proverbs 31 that has their uh i forget the daily five or uh you know just like a five minute devotional or kindle you know that's you know a book reading app and so you can go on there and read for the 10 minutes that you have instead of mindlessly scrolling and going oh i need that oh i need that and allowing the world to influence us instead we're looking at our phone and saying okay i'm going tospend this moment to influence my own mind to let god influence my time can you talk about that you're talking about organizing your stuff and organizing your time uh how to talk about the organizing of your time and how that helps in every other aspect maybe even the idea of collecting stuff yes so i coach a lot about time because i think that we we think it's just like everything else you think when you're not good at something that everybody else has this really like magical formula yeah my yeah my systems are very simple because andi'm not one of those people you know i i love the home edit but i don't need to have like everything labeled and everything rainbowized i just think that it's fun and i do that sometimes in homes but i also think you have to create a system that the person living there can keep up with yeah and when you're not on a tv show you know things don't stay that way so we need to be reel it back and make things super simple and for time management it's the same thing there's a simple process thatyou can do it really you know it really has to do with here's your to-do list and then here's your amount of time that you have available which let's say time is a gift from god he gifted it all to us equally all portions are the same no matter where you grew up how much money you have the color of your skin it doesn't matter it's a resource that he gifted us and it's what we use you know it's how we use that resource that really makes a difference so i really teach about being in control ofyour time not managing your time because time can get away from you and people and things are constantly trying to steal your time away just like the cell phones right just like social media so controlling your time planning in advance with a system that is based on your intentional living your priorities and making sure that when you look at your week you know mapped out it is showing the priorities not just dictating to you um a lot of times i'll ask people raise their hand if they know what their priorities are and they willraise their hands right because everybody knows i know my priorities and then i'll say well who's living out their priorities every week and then they put their hand out that's right there's a huge difference because you're not going to live out your priorities if you're not intentional with your time um so you need a system for that and that's the cool stuff about you know i think organization is so important for everybody but it wasn't taught in school and a lot of people have said to me i want to be goodat this but nobody ever taught me how to do it and it's something that you can learn at any age and it's something that you can teach your child from you know the time they're a toddler yeah and i think that just comes from being consistent you know when you look at you know i as a mom have to be consistent if i expect my kids to also be consistent and yes we all fail but you know we can teach our kids that you did mention something about priorities and i know that you believe that that uh our organization helps us to live outour purpose i 100 agree on that because if we are not organized like my husband and i there was a while where we could not live out some of the dreams that we wanted to administering to other people because we were not debt free and so all of our money was focused on paying off our debt so that now we get to bless other people and and it's not like well are we gonna bless this person or are we gonna pay the bills this you know month we don't have to think about that so much right but as i have kind of worked into my later30s one of the things that i've seen from women which i think is different than if i was talking to like a group of 16 or 18 year olds you say what is your passion what is your purpose uh a 16 year old maybe a 21 22 year old could give you this is my passion and this is my purpose but then something happens like in the 20s and the 30s where number one your priorities shift because there's marriage or there's um a really like important job that you're doing you know big corporate job or you've got kids that you'retaking care of maybe you're staying home so you've left what you thought your purpose was to now being a stay-at-home mom and then also you've just gotten older but and so i say well what what's your passion and they're like i don't even know like i i used to know i used to think i knew but i have no idea so how can we if we're sitting there going i mean i'd loved for this to help me to find my purpose but i don't even know what my purpose is how can we figure that out so that we even have an end goal in allof this organization that we're doing in our life yes and you do need an end goal you you know you don't of course you're going to have maintenance but you do want to follow a plan step by step beginning to end to get to the other side of this which is you know what i teach but as far as purpose goes that you want to start incorporating even in that process of getting organized in your time management where you just give yourself time to daydream and imagine the possibilities if you can't imagine thepossibilities when we all know with god everything is possible anything is possible you have to believe that and then i think what you're saying and i've thought about this a lot is when you're younger you have more time to daydream and imagine and as we get older we are so much more realistic and we're you know consumed by all the to do's and the tasks and the taking care of everybody and we are responsible for more things and more you know we have a house we have a car and we have a job and all these things so we don't evengive ourselves the time to daydream and it's so important because you're not gonna you're not going to realize what your purpose is if you don't take quiet time daydream sit with god let him speak to you that's how i figured this out that's been a 20-year journey if i wasn't doing that i would have never heard it he could have been whispering to it you know it to me for years and i just didn't hear it um so it's important i think that going back if you have old journals if you can kind ofreconnect with who you used to be you might see some clues i think that there's lots of clues about purpose even when we're young um even when we're children and we just kind of miss it talk to your parents ask them talk to teachers coaches who was i then what did i love what was i good at and somewhere in there you can start putting the pieces together of how you could utilize your purpose now and the biggest thing is that purpose isn't about us anyways it's about the people that we help the people we inspireand the reason we're doing that is because god will be glorified in that so it's all about his glory and he knows that he knows that we can use that purpose to get the message out to him and you know lord knows we need that more than ever these days we need inspiration we need everybody living on purpose i believe there was a perfect plan and if we all did our purpose it would happen you know we wouldn't have this kind of world and so he knew what he was doing i mean he's the perfect organizeryeah oh i like that god is the perfect organizer yeah and it is easy to kind of let the busyness of life distract you from your purpose and i think sometimes then that is when we begin to feel almost selfish with our time of like this none of this is what i want to do none of this is what i want to spend my time on and instead i'm just doing for other people at all at all times and the the question i think a good question to ask at that point of time is what is it that you want to be spending your time on because if you'reonly ever focusing outward and that's what you're saying like and never taking the time to look inward to sit and be calm to daydream i love that when was the last time you daydreamed i'd i couldn't tell you uh [Music] i'm not the only one i know in fact my husband and i we go hunting and um he asked me a couple years ago we were sitting on a hillside and the goal here is you're sitting looking through a set of binoculars at a hill a hillside across the ravine and you're just looking for deerperfectly quiet the sun has just come up and he's like hey so what are you thinking about and i'm like is that a deer under that bush i'm gonna count to ten and if it doesn't move i'm gonna assume it's a rock and move on and he's like seriously that's all you're thinking about i'm like seriously but do you know how long it's been since i only had to think about whether that rock was a deer or a bush and it took almost 48 hours before my brain like detoxed almost and uh and then he was like what are youthinking about tim like oh i'm thinking about this song as i'm looking for deer on the you know tree side and or on the the hillside and so i think we almost we might even have to go through detox of our brain and our uh systems that we've set that are inefficient before we can daydream and and be effective yeah you know yeah i think you have to sometimes take yourself out of your everyday environment nature is obviously the best place to daydream for me when i'm you know sitting i go back and forth between florida andnew york and when i'm at the beach i feel the closest to god because i'm seeing this beautiful masterpiece and i obviously am being proven it's proven to me that anything is possible and so i think it's the same my husband's a big hunter too and he always says that is where he feels closest to god yep yeah and it's it's interesting because um we just some you know it's sad too because how much time do we even spend in nature not enough time right yeah and it that's where you can really just take a journalgo sit somewhere that inspires you where it's quiet you're just hearing the breeze or the waves or the birds and just sit and whatever comes out on that page just let god speak to you and and don't talk yourself out of it because we do that okay i remember honestly i i don't i just think most recently but i probably did this every step of the way when god told me to create my ministry i thought who am i to create a ministry like i tried to talk myself out of it and i didn't realize at the time thateverybody can have a ministry you know it doesn't have to be this big to do this big famous thing we can't compare ourselves to other people it's god create us in our purpose perfectly just the way we are you know we don't have to be like anybody else and god doesn't want you to be because his purpose for you is not the same as those other people and there are individuals and lives right around you that you can affect with the ministry that you're doing that yes those those famous peoplewhoever is in your brain right now they will never meet those friends that you have they will never be able to affect them on a deeper level sure they can maybe go to a conference by that person and be affected by that but guess who's in their everyday life it's you and so god can use you in a much bigger way if you will allow him and you're right if you will allow the space if we are if our life is so frantic that we can't focus on anything else we miss opportunity for ministry we miss opportunity to serve othersthere's a song by brandon heath called give me your eyes and he wrote it one day sitting in an airport looking up and seeing all of the different people that were walking by him in the airport and his prayer was give me your eyes to see these people like you do god not you know in my my humanistic way of you know maybe judging where they came from or whatever and that's almost what we have to do here as you're talking about organizing your time is god give me your eyes give me your plan give me you know these moments so that ican sit still and see who you've put in front of me um but if he wasn't sitting still looking at these people he couldn't see them through jesus's eyes because his eyes weren't up they were you know focused on what he had to do in that moment um okay i'm gonna be selfish here and i'm gonna ask you for advice okay there are moms out there going this sounds great and i feel like my kitchen maybe my living room could be organized but let's talk about kids and all the things so two things how do we organize ourkids things and how do we deal with the twice a year onslaught of new stuff christmas and a birthday where it's like oh good more stuff to figure out to put places and the kids love it so you don't you know do you say no do you say please don't buy our kids more things how do you how do you deal with it so there's so much so much so i think children are born with a little bit of a hoarding tendency they love to keep everything they think everything is special which is so awesome but they will want to keep likeevery shell and every rock they find and that's just how it is and i haven't seen i've i've seen that across the board for many many kids that i've worked with um we by the way we brought a dead fish home from the lake yesterday so that my son how are you going to keep that courtney uh so until he dissects it my son wants to dissect it and look at it and soon yep then it needs to go stinky yeah i think that we i believe that organization is the skill we need to teach our kids just like reading ridinga bike all of that because i don't want children to grow up and feel overwhelmed in their own home which is what i deal with a lot and it makes me sad um so i taught my kids this process from a young age now there's a lot of things going on here there's a part where mom thinks that her way is the best and if they put that organizing piece onto the child then they don't do it the way they want it and so they just do it themselves we can't never heard that never ever do that anymore we're raising someone'sfuture spouse and future employee so we need to like remember that um but also we need to teach kids that it's okay to pass things on to others when we are done loving and using it and that that is a blessing i used to tell my kids before christmas would come before they were gonna get inundated with more stuff i would say let's go through a room and let's find some stuff that you can give to another child and i would explain there's kids that don't have dolls there's kids that don't havethese matchbox cars so let's you know and i would praise them like make them feel really important for doing that um and then they would get used to it as a tradition every year we would do that before and it would be like they would be excited and so um just being an example and teaching that but also making it super easy for those toys and the games making like getting down even if you have to get on your hands and knees and see things at their eye level i think a lot of times we have this bigger brain and we're taller andwe have more experience from like how hard is it to put your books on the shelf you know we think it's so easy but to them it's overwhelming so you're not doing your children and a good service by having too much stuff in their space because it's overwhelming of course they're going to pull it all out and play and that's great but to put all of it back is too overwhelming so what i used to do is when um i would cut their toys in half and i would flip-flop them so okay i put half of them awayand then every six months i would flip-flop them and they would think it was christmas all over again because they forgot about them yeah you know it's just like when you clean out clutter and you find toys and you're gonna like i also um run a family consignment event and it helps families clutter and then we help charities so when the kids see that what their mom is bringing out of their car to sell they're like i love that i play with that all the time and she's like yeah no you don't and they forgot about it souh-huh flip-flop um and then it's okay as a mom to make decisions for your kids if you know their room is too overwhelming and they haven't touched a lot of things i think a lot of moms think oh i can't go in there and i can't help that situation because it's their stuff but if they are not mature enough to make all of those decisions yet so it's perfectly okay to go in and kind of eliminate some things if you know that it's not as important as they think it is because they're going to naturallywant to hang on to that stuff yeah so i really think it's important to teach them to have open hands and that stuff is not what brings you joy it can bring you temporary joy but it's not going to be lasting joy and you can use a you know example of a previous age so if they're eight years old you could say well do you still want to play with your rattles from when you were a baby and they would be like no what are you crazy yeah it's like it's okay because you go through stages of growing up and we let things go and thenwe're into new things and then we let them go and then we're into new things so just teaching and um guiding and making it fun just make it fun don't make it so complicated if you have four bins and they're all different colors just say the cars go in the red bin let's you know let's put all of the cars to bed before we go to sleep you know who can put the cars to sleep faster whatever just make it fun don't be like you're not getting ice cream if you don't put your matchbox cars awaybecause that's not that exciting you know what i mean yeah make it fun praise a lot and cut things in half um even when they were my kids birthdays were right after christmas i didn't give them all their gifts i held some back for snowy days when they were gonna be bored and stuck inside um they didn't know the difference and they were happy when it was a snowy day and we had a new toy to play with see that's the opposite in it here in arizona we do it for days when it's like 120 outside yeah you can't go outside yeah yeahoh that's great i love the idea of you know the swip swapping i put my um my i feel like my cold or my hot weather clothes i can wear all year long you know except maybe my shorts um but my uh cold weather clothes i put away and then in the fall which is like november here in arizona when it gets cool enough finally i can pull it down and it's like i got a whole new wardrobe and all i did was just put them away so i'm not staring at them all the time during the summer going well i can't wear anything in my closet because it'sall too warm well what i'm looking at i can actually wear and so i love that idea of only giving them like half those toys and then pulling the other half away and then probably when you look at that other half you can say oh when i put this away this was a cool thing but i can see that the little brother has now grown out of this item you can get rid of it before you even give it to them you know give them these new toys and i can see that being really helpful in maybe getting rid of more of that that stuffabsolutely yeah that makes a lot of sense well before we go to our final question tell us uh how can we find you how can we pre-order your book i think you even mentioned that there's a giveaway for the book going on right now yes there's a giveaway on goodreads going on right now the name of the book again is make room um you can also go to my website jenniferfortberry.com slash make room there's all you know it's it's anywhere books are sold amazon barnes and noble lifeway baker books stuff like that and the podcast is the 29 minute mom where it's all about inspiration organization and education for busy moms and um i have also just started a brand new online coaching program for women that want to live a life of order and purpose and it's called the created order neighborhood so you can just go to creativeorderneighborhood.com and i did that because i love working one-on-one with people but it's i want to help more women and i can't get to everybody you know so yeah it's just awesome because it's a community of women that are all like-minded that are just like yes i want to clear the clutter out of the way get good at time management so that i can figure out my god-given purposes and start living it out and they're so encouraging and supportive of each other which is awesome so yeah i mean there's all sorts ofstuff i mean there's no reason why you have to let clutter slow you down and aggravate you and overwhelm you but you can't like we said earlier it's not going to happen in one weekend just break it down into tiny baby steps don't think that you have to do it all right now just start making you know putting a dent into it bit by bit even if you want to organize your kitchen set a timer work on it for an hour this week maybe you'll get three cabinets done give yourself a pat on the back celebrate your win and keep going nextweek got it i think that's a a great final tip right there uh go and pre-order the book pre-orders may seem like well i'll just get it when it comes out but pre-orders actually are very helpful for authors they let publishers know about the interest in the book they let um sellers know what the interest in the book is how many copies they need to have available um and so pre-orders are very important so go and order pre-order make room you can like she said you can get it anywhere that you get books our last question that we ask is becausenone of us are meant to live life alone and you're certainly creating community for other people who is it that's helped you along in your journey i feel like i couldn't even just say one person but what i will say is that i have seen that when i'm listening i have been guided the whole entire way and that god has specific people in my path at the right time that have been able to teach me and guide me because everything that i've done so far i don't have other people in my life doing it like in my everydaylife where i can learn from them so i really had to kind of figure it out as i go and i will i'm always grateful when he put somebody in my path that can actually tell me the next step or show me the way and i will say this that now that i've been doing this for a while i think it's important for me to do that for other people and i just did a podcast um for for a girl that is a new new to this whole thing and she she just said so many times like thank you for helping me and let me on your show normally podcasts both say nobecause i'm new and what i told her and i live by this is when i started i actually reached out to peter walsh and he actually spent several times with me on the phone or being interviewed and me asking him questions and he guided me when i was new and he was not new he was a big deal yeah and it's like that's what it should be about we should all be looking ahead for the people that can pull us up and putting our hand out to the people behind us and so i think that's you know i could go on and on about the peoplethat god placed in my path that have put their hand out and pulled me up yeah yeah absolutely i and i i love even that idea of like we're reaching out to people that are doing seeing doing these um things that we want to do and we're not discounting ourselves like i i don't know if i should like i'm too new at this thing instead saying no i'm i'm con i'm convinced that this is the direction i need to go and so i'm going to get the help that i need or the community and then once we've been giventhat to then turn around and offer it to others um offer that same community that we've received so that someone else feels the same way and receives those same benefits that we did i love that well thank you so much for everything that you shared i am sure that i'm going to have a conversation with my husband about all of the organizing that we need to do right actually we do have one of the college girls from our church uh moving in with us uh in the fall and so she he said uh you realize like that's anentire room that you have to clear out uh so that she has it and i'm like oh gosh that's a lot of like organizing and right now it's like our extra storage guest room kids play room so it is it serves a lot of purposes and i'm like i know i know so that is my goal for the summer is that one room you got it you got this girl that's it i got it so thank you so much for joining me i ever do a little tiny bit every day but thank you i'm gonna do that and thank you for everything you'redoing with your show i just pray that god blesses it and that it gets out to the women that need it you're doing amazing work so good for you thank you jennifer i really appreciate that [Music]