2024 Organizing Business Word of the Year: Consistency
I love picking a word of the year for my organizing business and for my work at Pro Organizer Studio—and this year, the Word of the Year is CONSISTENCY. I’m excited to tell you a little more about why this is my choice for the word that will guide my work this year.
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FULL TRANSCRIPT
We are back in 2024 with the Pro Organizer Studio Podcast. I have missed you all. I hope that you had a fabulous and restful end of the year and a fun new year and all that good stuff. I did. I got so much resting and relaxing done over the holidays. I spent some awesome time with my family and my daughter, who's home from college and all of her friends.
It was just nice to see all of the teenagers back in the house. Just overall had a great holiday. I hope you did too, but I also spent a lot of time in the middle of napping and eating a lot of cookies, just thinking about my organizing business and pro organizer studio and everything that I am plotting and planning for this year.
I am excited for a really great year of entrepreneurship with this awesome, amazing community of organizers around the world. I was telling someone that I haven't seen in a long time about Pro Organizer Studio last week. And I was like, we have organizers on five different continents. And I just, I love that there's just such a wide variety of women that listen to this podcast and that are just chasing their organizing dreams around the world. So I want to start the year right here on the podcast by talking about something that I started last year and I'm continuing this year because I loved it. I am talking about my word of the year.
So, I do not like New Year's resolutions for all of the reasons that everybody knows. They don't really work. We're now two, two weeks, and I was about to say two years into 2024. No, we're two weeks into 2024, and everyone knows that New Year's resolutions, people start to forget about them about two weeks in, which is where we are.
And just in the interest of being totally transparent and honest with you all, which I try to do all the time, I am not a good person at goals. So goal setting, I know it's important. I really value it as a business tool, but I am personally not great. at setting really specific goals. I am more of a fly by the seat of my pants kind of girl, which I'm going to be honest, I would love to change that about myself.
I have tried to change it about myself, but at this point in my life, I just have started to be realistic and just embrace it as who I am as a person. And again, I'm a huge believer in setting goals and them being a great guiding light. If you are motivated by setting smart goals and breaking down the steps to achieve them listen, I want to be like you, I would really love to be able to be like you, but what I have landed on that does work for me and what I'm sharing today is the concept of a word of the year.
So I pick one word at the start of the year and then I use that as my guiding light, my North Star for the year. So over the holidays, I spent time reflecting and thinking and trying to decide what that word was, that magical word that was going to guide me through the year for my businesses, for Pro Organizer Studio, for my audience.
I'm not just picking a buzzword for me and for my business. It's really something that I would like to be inspiring to this audience. And so I spent a lot of time, I went through a lot of different words, but what I kept landing on is. What are some things that I have organizers say to me a lot? What are they struggling with? And then what do I myself struggle with? And what do I want to improve this year? And so out of all this brainstorming and all this thinking, I think I have landed on the most perfect word for 2024. And the word of the year is consistency. And here's why I landed on this as the word of the year.
So if you think back to being a little kid, a lot of us learned the story about the tortoise and the hare. So one moral of that story is slow and steady wins the race. So the hare was super fast and was so far ahead that he took a nap. And the turtle, the slow turtle, won the race because he was consistent. Even though he was slow. And I Realize that you do not come to this podcast for children's literature hour and fables! But I will tell you that the word consistency, that was really like one of the first things I thought of So here we are. I'm just using children's stories to help prop up my entrepreneurship
But I think now where all of us have super short attention spans, thanks to our phones. You know, we're used to watching 30 second TikToks and being like, Hey, boom, next TikTok, next one, next Instagram posts next, whatever we just have so many things in it. We're constantly scrolling and looking faster and faster. There's so much speed and hustle required for most of our daily life. You know, we're going from one thing to the next, we're going from one client to the next, and then we're going to pick up the kids and then we have to make dinner and, you know, all of those things is there's just a lot of hustle.
And so it's also really easy for us because of these short attention spans and because of everything we have going on to also start chasing the next shiny thing. So I see it a lot in organizers that I work with in our inspired organizer group or one on one coaching. And they will ask me, Hey, what do you think about me doing, you know, insert shiny business thing here. And then when we break it down, I find out that they aren't doing some of the key foundational things of an organizing business. Slow and steady wins the race. Sometimes the quote boring things are precisely exactly what every business needs to succeed, but we're chasing the shiny thing because it's new, it's different, it's fun, it's exciting, whatever.
We need to do some of these boring things and do them consistently. The other reason I love this word is because sometimes I will work with people and they'll do the foundational thing, but they'll do it one time. I wrote one blog post. Cool, I'm done for the year. Consistency really hits for organizing businesses, because what I want to remind you of is doing the foundational things in your business consistently, like a very good habit, making sure those things are set every month before you move on to the fun, shiny object consistency means we're checking the boxes on doing those things repeatedly, because that's what brings in the results.
Consistency also means that we're making sure we're doing the things we tend to avoid because of “fill in the blank with the thousand reasons that we have to avoid the things we don't want to do”—consistency makes all of those things easier. I was talking to a friend today, we were talking about, you know, trying to improve our fitness lives. And she said, what was that thing in Atomic Habits where he said, just drive to the gym, like driving to the gym is just the first part of starting the habit. I want us to use consistency. To do those things that we've been avoiding and let's just take those tiny steps to make that something that then it becomes second nature to you.
We're just going to do it all the time. I want to be really clear too. I think this is the perfect word of the year for organizers. But mostly, I have picked this word because it is the perfect word for myself, okay? It just happens to also fit with what I see in the organizing world.
But to be clear, and to be fully vulnerable and transparent, I need this word in my own business life. I have an immense amount of stuff going on, a lot of demands on my time. I have an organizing business and a full time job here at Pro Organizer Studio. I have a lot of people in my business and my personal life that need me. And so sometimes the result of that is I'm not able to be as consistent on these really important things because of maybe it's the crush of requests that are coming at me. And Enneagram 2, I love helping people more than pretty much anything on earth. So I always want to be able to help people.
Grow their businesses. But I need consistency because I need to remind myself that keeping that word as my North Star this year, so that I'm actually serving my clients. Both organizing clients at Home by Eleven and the organizers I coach at Pro Organizer Studio, better.
Because I'm keeping that big picture in mind. I'm staying consistent with the important things rather than what I did a lot last year, I found out was, “Oh, I'll do XYZ tomorrow because I have to answer these 100 emails.” The urgent versus the important. For me, consistency is doing those really important things.
So here are some examples of what consistency means to me at Pro Organizer Studio. When I was at the How To Summit, so many lovely people came out to me and were like, I love the podcast. And when I was talking to these people, I would sometimes say, well, you can tell if I'm having a busy week because there isn't a podcast up.
So guess what? Not only do I love doing the podcast, but I want it to be a tool for people to make their businesses. better. So that means it's a non negotiable that I want to have one podcast episode out per week for the rest of the year. I don't want to allow things to get in the way of doing this thing that is important to a large number of people, because I'm busy doing something for maybe one singular person because I got an email from someone who isn't even a part of our community and I feel like I have to answer it right away, okay?
So I don't want to allow those things to get in the way of doing this thing that is really important. I also want to say that this word of the year concept could lead you down some bigger paths as well. An example of this, building on what I was just talking about. For me, concentrating on consistency means I might have to say no to some things I would normally just say yes to and plow them onto my to do list where I am promptly crushed under its weight like a ton of bricks.
I might have to say no to some things, or I might just have to be a little bit more honest about a longer timeline to get things done. I love serving people. I love helping people. And sometimes what that means is I end up overextending myself and being like, yeah, I could probably get that done before the end of the week.
There's no way I can get it done before the end of the week if I'm being consistent about the things that are really important. So here's an example.In my organizing business recently, I have been telling people that I can't take new client appointments until March at the earliest. So normally, I'm going to be honest, I would be saying to them, Oh sure, let me move my schedule around so I can see you on XYZ day. And I really, really don't have time for that.
But I would take the urgent thing that's right in front and just slam someone into my schedule. And then that means I can't be consistent on the other stuff. So consistency for me might not be something that it appears on the surface.
This word can be your bigger picture thing. And it seems like a simple word on the surface. Oh, just be consistent, but it might mean that you have to make some bigger changes in your business or your life to accommodate it. So speaking of life, I also want the word consistency to apply to my personal life. I am absolutely the kind of person who can let work take over. I've always been that person since I was a kid, I let. You know, whatever I'm working on. When I was younger, it was school. Now it's work. I can let work take over. And I'm frequently pretty out of whack on work life balance. I always strive to do the right things for my family. And I want to make sure that I'm taking time to take care of them in the way that they need. But then what that means is when I have work slamming in and then I have family stuff that I'm trying to do, what ends up happening is I'm probably doing a bad job on taking care of myself.
Or maybe it's just doing something that I want to, like reading a book, or, uh, I like to do Legos. You can judge me if you want. I love doing Legos. It makes me really happy. It's just very calming to me. It's like my version of adult coloring books. Or the big one, for me, I am really, really bad. at cooking meal planning, all that kind of stuff and exercise.
So consistency for me this year is also going to be not just about work, but how to encompass a better home balance, including a way more consistent approach of how I fuel and take care of my body. I am creeping up on a milestone birthday, and that makes me really think more about like, hey, what do I want for my life, for my health? That type of thing. And also being healthy helps me be a better person to the people that I need to help. To my organizing clients and to my coaching clients.
A huge part of the word consistency is building good habits. So the first thing I'm doing is rereading, I think this will be my third reread the book Atomic Habits by James Clear.
I know that this reread is going to be critical to help me start developing the consistency that I need based on habits. If anyone wants to join me in reading this, I would love to have you. If you have not listened to me talk about it before, I will yell from the rooftops for the rest of my life. What a great book. This is not only for our businesses as entrepreneurs, but I heavily heartily recommend this book to organizing clients, especially with clients that I know are going to struggle with upkeep of their organization. I always recommend this book to them. It is not super long. It is extremely digestible. It is not academic at all. It's just the sky has such an amazing way of explaining the, the beauty of habits. I highly recommend you read it or reread it even if you've read it in the past.
So as we go through this year, you can keep me accountable on whether I'm being consistent. Am I taking my own word of the year that I'm talking to you about? Am I approaching the year with consistency? I want to be able to provide you with a lot of thoughts about what consistency means in our organizing businesses. And I'm going to be doing that in a lot of different ways.
But, I want to add something. If this word of the year resonates with you and you're like, Oh my gosh, yes, this is what I need, this is also my word, I would love to have you but, if you feel like there's another word that fits a lot better, I would absolutely love to hear it. You do not have to pick my word. you can email me at hello@proorganizerstudio.com. You can DM me on Instagram. Tell me what word you are concentrating on for the year. I would really love to have everyone think about, Hey, what's my big North star word of the year. How am I going to use that? Even if you're a goal person, even if you're really, really good at setting goals. Try to think about what that one word is for you this year.
Okay, so I am off now I'm having a work retreat weekend with myself. I am alone. I'm getting a bunch of work done this weekend I am going to go tackle my huge list of things that I have for the best people I know the organizers that I work with.
So I've got some website rebuilds I'm working on. I have some one on one coaching I'm working on. And then I'm adding a ton of new content to our Inspired Organizer program. That's all of what's on the menu for me this weekend. I am caffeinated, I am energized, and I am ready to get things done. So.
Thrilled to be back with you on the Pro Organizer Studio Podcast. I can't wait to be consistent this year with all of you and I will see you next week on the pod. Have an amazing week, organizers.