Description: 

Behind the scenes with Katie and her friend C.Lee Cawley, a certified professional home organizer and organizing educator.  This is your behind the scenes bonus experience where I introduce you to my friend C.Lee and you get a little more candid insight into my life and who I tend to hang out with. We also chat about why she’s perfect to take over the podcast this week.    

 

Transcript

Katie: Welcome to Everyday Happiness, where we create lasting happiness in about 2 minutes a day. But today is a very, very special bonus episode.

I am here with one of my dearest, closest amazingest friends, C.Lee Cawley and I can not wait for you to meet her because she is taking over the whole next week of the podcast. This is going to be so much fun. Welcome, C.Lee! We're so excited you're here.

C.Lee:Thank you, Katie, so much. I love the idea of a podcast takeover.

Katie: We're going to totally crush it. I can not wait to dive into all the things, but first, tell my audience a little bit about you. What are you all about?

C.Lee: Absolutely. I am a Certified Professional Organizer. There are actually fewer than 400 of us worldwide, something I'm very proud of. And I've been organizing for 20 years now. I started my business in 2003 and we're coming up on 2023. 

I originally started doing residential organizing in people's homes. And now I've transitioned to being an online expert and educator in all things organizing. And I'm teaching students around the world, so it's a super exciting time.

Katie: This is so fascinating. You know, I love organizing. Part of my Intentional Margins® is order. Like making sure things are in order, like the squirrels that are running around like they have ADD in my head, making sure they're in order, making sure my papers are in order.

I love a clean kitchen in the morning. We talked about that during my family meeting. Somebody's always doing the dishes, so when the children go to school, the kitchen is clean. 

So I, of course, have always been picking your brain about all things order and organizing, which I love. But also you're a really happy person.

C.Lee: Yes, I am an optimist, for sure. I think it came from my father. My dad, Pete Cawley, never met somebody who didn't become a friend, never had a bad day in his life.

And I do think there is and you've talked about this on the podcast, some of it's nature and some of it's nurture, and I am a naturally optimistic person, so it served me very well in life, I have to say. I can't imagine being any other way.

Katie: I love it so much. Very similar. Again, which I don't know if we mentioned this to the listeners before, maybe in a previous episode, because I have talked about my friend before, but we're basically neighbors. We live just a couple of miles apart from one another, so we get to see each other in real life, which is so much fun.

And I want to talk about something that I haven't brought up yet, but you and I became part of a little happy hour group right before COVID started, and I would like you to tell our listeners about that. And then I will, like, pipe in with my perception and see how it is and how it changes. So do you remember what we did in February of 2020?

C.Lee: Yes, and I was so excited. So you invited me to join our friends, Ellice and Lyndsey, both of whom I knew. I knew Ellice fairly well. Lyndsey, not so much, but I knew, and I knew you. But we weren't close friends by any stretch of the imagination, and you invited us to a happy hour at a local wine bar. And I remember being so excited, thinking, “Oh, my God, the cool kids invited me out to play!”. And I was thrilled!

And I think to myself, Katie, what kind of divine intervention was for us all to meet in person and have such a bonding experience? We laughed, we ate, we drank, we talked and talked and talked, and I feel like we were there for hours because we all were connecting on so many levels, and we were able to do that in person just before the pand