How many flavors does Baskin Robbins have? 31. So if you go to Baskin Robbins and you pick up the mint chocolate chip. You say this is pretty good. But you know what? The chocolate chips get stuck in my teeth and it makes me feel like I'm eating toothpaste. It's not for me. Does that mean you're never going to eat ice cream again? No, it means that the next time you go back, you're going to try something else.

There is no one size fits all solution.

There is a multibillion-dollar industry built upon the fact that everybody has the diet for you. “This is the last day you'll ever do it.”

“It'll change your life.”

“It's the only one that's going to work.”

That's why there are so many diet fads. And that's why it's so important for you to learn your own body. No one is your as better expert than you at your body. No one can tell you how you feel. You know how you feel, and you know whether you feel good or whether you don't?

When you’re playing around with different diet plans, what do you do when Plan A doesn’t work? What's Plan B? Do you give up or do you course correct and try a different strategy?

When it comes to home organization, you've got all these different things that are really faddish right now. If you don't find what's right for you, it's not going to make a bit of a difference. You need to be able to shift with life.

I have a blueprint that I teach people that it's not a method, it's just a methodology:

1. You've got to rethink what you're doing. Where is it broken? And how am I going to fix it?

2. Reduce. You’re overwhelmed and overloaded, so what can you get rid of that will help clear out the space for more or for something new.

3. Restructure, how we put our systems together. Shift routines and habits to be more efficient.

4. Reassess. Look at the new method, how's it working? If it’s not working, start back from the beginning and rethink?

You might have to do that a few times right until you find exactly what works. You must be flexible; you have to be willing to reassess. If we think about jobs and school, they always have report cards, right? They have performance evaluations. Why do we do that? Because it's a good opportunity to assess what's happening, and maybe we need to change something. Now, if your kid went to school, the entire school year, and you never got a report card. You never had a parent teacher conference. You might get to the end of the school year and they may have been struggling in math the entire time. Had you found out one quarter in or two quarters in

You could have course corrected, pivoted, reassessed, reevaluated, put any term you want on it, but you could have found a different way.

I think one of the biggest reasons why we're so ready to throw in the towel instead of pivoting, is because of our emotions, we know that we are emotionally invested into this. When it fails, it's a big blow to our ego.

• Keep your heart set on the long term goal and love yourself every step of the way.

• Keep your daily thoughts on just the tasks and on the structure, on the system, on the logic of it all, on the goals that you've set.

• Then give yourself check points. If in a month you haven't reached that check point, then you know it's time to pivot. But you know that you haven't failed, because your heart is still set on the long term, right?

If you’re failing to reach your goals, maybe it's not the plan that's the problem. Maybe it's the execution.

Here is our homework for this week: 1: We want you to reassess where you are. Know what is working, and what isn't working, and be honest with yourself.. 2. Rethink this whole process. What are you doing? And why? Where is your heart set? And what's the structure that you set yourself up for success? Can you eliminate things that are going to help you be more successful? 3. Restructure the program. Do you need to do simply be better at what you’ve chosen to do, or do you need to find something new? Share with us here or on FB

“We overestimate what we do in a day but underestimate what we can do in a week.”

All of January we talked about goal setting and getting ourselves in the proper frame of mind to create success. One of the most important aspects of a good goal is that of having realistic expectations.

What are the ways we set ourselves up for failure is having expectations of ourselves that are way too high for the timeframe in which we are doing. What are the best ways we understand what we need to DO is actually by identifying what we need to STOP doing.

There are 3 things we need to stop doing when it comes to home organization:

Stop looking to Pinterest to solve all your problems. They’re beautiful pictures but they are solutions to other people’s problems in other people’s homes for other people’s families. That’s not realistic for you!

Stop going to Target thinking “if I just buy tu is bin it’s going to solve all my problems!” Buying bins is the last step in the process, not the first!

Stop pretending you have time to tackle the entire house all at once! That’s just simply unrealistic for so many different reasons!

Now that we know what not to do, let’s talk about 5 things you can START doing:

Start in one space at a time. Whether it’s one room or one drawer, just one space!

Find the catalyst space, the room that’s going to start the ball rolling and make every other project easier… your first domino.

Pay attention to the natural flow of action and energy and organize around that already established function.

Enlist outside sources to help you! (Now is when you look at Pinterest and Target to give you guidance to set up what you want to do!)

Take small and consistent action steps to get it done. Time expectations should be smaller than what you think so you don’t hit burn out.

The concepts are the same with your health! Here are the things we need to STOP:

Stop getting on Instagram and looking at the perfect bodies you want your body to look like. Those aren’t real pictures!

Stop listening to everyone’s advice. They may not even be doing what they say to do and what works for one doesn’t work for all!

Stop trying to do all the things all at once. We can’t change the way we eat, and shift our mindset, and spend 2 hours in the gym 5 days a week, and get more sleep starting all at once!

Now let’s green-light these next steps:

Tackle one part of your health journey at a time. You can’t do it all at once without it being too overwhelming.

Find the catalyst that’s going to help you in your health journey!

Pay attention to what comes naturally and build off those strengths. Go to the gym or work out at home? What feels the most natural?

Find outside resources to help you accomplish exactly what you want to do. Tune out the noise and zoom in on the facts!

Take small steps at a time.

There is no shame in being realistic! Rather, the feelings of guilt and failure come from setting the bar so high there’s no way to can get it accomplished. Start small.

It’s OK to course correct! Give yourself the grace to shift things around and celebrate the successes you are having rather than getting down on yourself for that isn’t working.

This is a conversation we are actually going to have a next weeks episode of the Hōm Bod podcast. All right, so I tried it and it didn’t work… No what?

Action Steps:

Relisten to what you need to STOP doing and write down the ones you need to work on.

STOP, actually stop doing these unrealistic, damaging behaviors!

We are so excited to see your journey! Comment here, message us, or find us on Facebook at Hōm Bod Podcast!

Make sure to subscribe to the podcast and share it with someone that needs it!

So many times we trap ourselves in poor behavior patterns that are of our own making simply because we think we want something. When we realize something is damaging us, how do we stop??

Let’s take a look into how to let go of both “stuff” and things on our calendar in order build a healthier, more productive lifestyle!

Ashley, like so many of you, deals with emotional eating and the consequent rollercoaster it brings. Here’s her story from just one day:

“Heather, I've got to admit that today was a really stressful day. I've been dealing with kids and on top of it just running like crazy because of different things that were going on in the classroom. And so I was back and forth from work and school. And you know what made me feel really good? Food!”

“I ate two pieces of white bread toast for breakfast slathered in butter. And for lunch, I had about 20 little pieces of chocolate and I felt great… then there's a big crash.”

Heather’s “Yeah, you had a serious trigger.”

Ashley ”I know, I've always known that I'm an emotional eater.”

We are in a reactionary state when we're grabbing that cookie, you're reacting to a whole day, maybe even a whole lifetime of triggers. There's no rational thought ever put into it.

As kids we have a blankie or a stuffie who brings us comfort. It’s not as socially acceptable for a 40 year old mom to carry a blankie, so food becomes your blankie.

So how do you get out of it?! You have to walk it back and figure out what triggered it for you. Then decide what is under your control. You have more control than you realize. How was your mindset in the moment?

What if you got out of bed and you said, I am going to have a calm, peaceful day. Life is going to happen and I am going to be prepared every step of the way. I am prepared I'm on top of things.

If you know what is coming and you know you have a plan, when the speed bump in the road comes, you're not thrown completely out of whack. However, if you’re barely hanging on and you hit a speed bump, man, you're getting bucked off that bronco.

Some skills that will help are:

Meditation

Deep breathing

Prayer

Silent moment of peace.

Learning how to plan and set yourself up the night before

The solution becomes swapping out a healthier option for the natural tendencies.

We love the concept of just trading. So many times we get so overwhelmed. I mean, here we are still in January, with resolutions we get so overwhelmed with all the things that we have to add to our plate.

If we can just substitute and change those negative things for the positive things then it isn't something else that we have to do. It's just replacing. The same thing can happen in our homes. Have you ever looked at your house and said, “I would love to change but I don't even know where to start?”

But why?

Ashley says in all of her years of doing professional organizing, nobody has ever given her an excuse that falls outside of the boundaries of only a few emotional ties that we have to our stuff.

1. Time - “I don't have time.” “I'm so busy.” We tackle that by giving ourselves deadlines and saying, “I'm going to make the time”.

The other fork to that in a problem is you need time to process. After you've gone through a big change, a loss, a move at whatever, you have to take the time to process which means you can't shove everything in a box. Be careful because, nostalgia can be fake. 2. So something that's truly nostalgic, is going to do two things. It's going to make you happy. And it has it has to connect you to something greater. 3. Guilt - We feel guilty, both hanging on to it or getting rid of it. What we're going to do to combat that is to be grateful and show gratitude.

4. Perceived value - we project value on something that doesn't necessarily hold the value we think it does. The solution is to find the true value and proactively attain the value from the object.

5. Fear - “I'm afraid that if I let go, something bad is going to happen.” “I might not have it when I need it.” Unfortunately with this thought, you're setting yourself up for failure or setbacks.

Homework:

You already have your list from last week... now start swapping! Take one item that has a negative emotion association and find a replacement! Something functional and healthy.

Studies have shown that 95% of our purchases are based on emotion, not logic. This speaks volumes about marketing, and what they're actually achieving, based on digging into your emotions. We want to talk about emotions versus logic today.

As always, we help get your home, your head and your health, happy!

So think back to The Little House on the Prairie days, if you were lucky enough to be close to town, you have the option of shopping at the general store. If you didn't, or for the majority of the time, anything that you needed. What did you do for it? You had trade with someone that came by? All the store had to do to say, back then was, “Hey, this is what we've got.”

Stores just put a sign in the window and customers would go in and buy or trade for whatever goods they needed. Fast forward another hundred years to pre world wars. We started to be able to mass produce, as well as preserve, goods. Suddenly you had multiple companies making and selling, soap, for example. Then we moved into the 1930s and 40s, we had radio and the beginning of TV advertising. Suddenly you have competition and variety.

Fast forward another 150 years. What do we do now for our marketing? It's all about the experience. Consider the evolution of sales and marketing. We've gone from just basic logic, “Hey, they have so they have sugar. I can go buy it.” to “Hey, there's a difference between theirs and mine.” to the emotion the product makes you feel. It's all about the experience.

Watch any Super Bowl ad, the successful ones either make you laugh, or they make you cry.

Now, what does that mean, with regard to the stuff in our house? It means that instead of looking at our stuff, and seeing a pile of stuff, we look at a pile and we get overwhelmed, because every single thing we have in our house has an emotional attachment.

Your thought process goes like this: I bought that but I didn't really want it. I didn't want to buy it, but I can't get rid of it because I spent money on it. It was supposed to be the be all, end all. It was supposed to fix all my problems. It was supposed to fix all of these problems. And it's not. It’s so frustrating!

In the health and wellness world, we need our emotions to motivate us, because logically, we all know what we should and shouldn't do. I've never met anybody who truly believes that smoking is good for you. I've met a lot of people who have said to me, I know I shouldn't. But I...

Think of something that you really want. For example, you really want to change how you feel when you get out of bed in the morning. You don't want to be tired. You want to wake up with energy. You want to feel good when you put your clothes on. That invokes a really positive really positive emotional response, “I want to feel that!”.

When you have that feeling as your goal, nothing's going to stop you. You're emotionally driven to feel the way you want to feel. So the only way to really achieve what you want to achieve, is to choose something that creates that feeling. You have to drill down and figure out how you want to feel. And ask yourself, “How do I want to feel? What is my reason? What is my WHY?”

You're just not. If you just think you should, or think you want to, and there's no emotion attached to it, you're not going to make that decision and you're not going to commit 100% of the way.

This week for your homework: figure out what emotionally drives you both in your home and in your health. Sit down with a piece of paper write down all of the emotions that you feel in both your home and your health. Then consider what drives the emotions? Where does the logic come into play? Is there even logic behind your choices? Then start removing the emotion from your home. Start shifting that emotion toward the places that you need it. Detach emotionally from your stuff, and attach positive emotions to the changes that you want to make in your health.

Almost 90% of resolutions fail by the end of January! So why are we making them?

They don’t work… just stop! Our mission today is to help you set achievable goals because where a resolution is just a statement, a goal has a destination.

Example

Resolution: “I will lose 20 lbs by Dec 25.” Fine, but that’s just a statement… how are you going to get there?

Goal: “I will work out everyday, 5 days a week.” Now that’s something I can do!

Among the top most 10-15 new years resolutions are always things like “lose weight, get healthy, save money, get organized, spend more time with the family,” etc… We say them every single year, but we don’t DO them!!!

If we want lasting change we need to make some changes to traditional resolutions.

A good goal has to have 3 things:

1. Achievable (within reason)

2. Measureable, able to track

3. 100% under your control! The actions that lead to better result! This one is the missing link. This is you controlling your behaviors, not your bank account, hair growth, or the scale.

Heather’s tips for successful Goals:

1. Write it down! It boosts your success by 42%!

2. Find an accountability partner – increases your odds by another 19%

3. Check in with your partner weekly – you gain another 5%!

Again, 100% under your control… When it comes to your home, everything depends on YOU!

Ashley’s tips for success in the home:

1. know what you want out of your space. See what the possibilities are instead of what you have in front of you, stick to it until you find exactly what you want.

2. YOU are the MAGIC in your own space. YOU have to decide what you want and ACT accordingly. Once you know how you’re going to act, then you can employ the use of “Stuff” to get you to where you want to go. Then what you buy/keep is done with intention and you can keep it under control.

HOMEWORK

Write down 1 goal, find an accountability partner, check in with them once a week! Share your goal with us on Facebook! www.facebook.com/HomBodPodcast

Where our journeys began and how we can help you along yours!

Join hosts Ashley Stuart, Professional Organizer, and Heather Dumas, personal trainer and health coach, in a new Podcast designed to make your home, head, and health happy!