After purchasing a video on “Holistic Organizing” created by a colleague, Erin Elizabeth Wells, I invited her to be a guest blogger and share some of her valuable insights with my readers. Below is Erin’s post. Enjoy!
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During a recent visit to Raleigh, North Carolina, my dear colleague Geralin Thomas, of Metropolitan Organizing, asked me to write a guest post for her blog answering the important question: “What is Holistic Organizing?” In recent years there have been an increasing number of professional organizers using this term, and while I won’t attempt to speak for all of them. I want to offer an answer that captures how we use the term at my company, Living Peace.
Fundamentally, there are two parts of the organizing process that occur during EVERY person’s life transitions. Holistic Organizing raises awareness and honors the importance of these two experiences as essential to becoming more organized and creating lasting life change.
Holistic Organizing:
- Increases awareness of the many levels of personal change involved in EVERY life transition: Physical, Emotional, Mental, and Spiritual. A holistic organizer should be prepared to acknowledge, honor, and make space for the fullness of the client’s experience as she reinvents her life through the organizing process and creates an environment that can be supportive of her current priorities and goals.
- Recognizes the central role of loss and grief inherent in ALL life change. Even the joyful events in our lives often mean that we must say goodbye and close previously loved chapters of our personal stories. Most people can recognize the role of loss in events such as divorce or the passing of a loved one. However, we can experience similar emotions and challenges when getting married, having children, starting a new job, or retirement. A holistic organizer will be able to support and honor the confusing and conflicting experiences of her clients as they navigate reorganizing their lives in the midst of such experiences.
To help clarify, what Holistic Organizing is NOT:
- Green/Sustainable Organizing - This work is focused on issues of environmental sustainability, encouraging recycling & reuse, and conscious consumption.
- Faithful or Spiritual Organizing – While a holistic organizer should be comfortable encouraging and supporting a client’s spiritual practices and integrating them into their home, work, or daily life, they should be open to doing so within any faith tradition as determined by the client and not bound to the Organizer’s particular tradition.
- Quick "Results Focused" Organizing - Holistic Organizing acknowledges that life changes occur as part of a process that must be driven and focused by the client’s pace not the Organizer’s. Therefore, holistic organizers are likely to work predominantly side-by-side with the client rather than independently zooming through a project to create a specific quick or attractive superficial result.
While some organizers might integrate some of these other specialties along with their holistic organizing work, I feel it’s important to define the distinctions between these different areas.
At the core Holistic Organizing:
- Centers on the client’s life transition and process.
- Holds the client as the ultimate authority and expert in his/her own life process.
- Provides a hybrid "coaching & consulting" approach that co-creates the best process and outcome for each individual client.
The experience of working with a holistic organizer should be: integrated, authentic, rooted in the present, honoring of the change process, and creating space for peace and growth.
Geralin: Thanks Erin! That was very informative and now, I have a few questions for you, to help readers get to know you a little better.
Do you have any habits you’d like to give up?
Erin: staying up too late playing with projects and writing
Geralin: What historical event would you most like to witness?
Erin: To see Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech LIVE – now there is a REAL motivational speaker.
Geralin: Which personality trait has caused you the most trouble?
Erin: Inconsistency – I’m great for ideas and energy, and I benefit from having a team to help implement consistently.
Geralin: Have you thrown away anything you wish you’d saved?
Erin: Honestly, not that I can think of.
Geralin: How is your inbox organized?
Erin:
@Action
@Newsletters to Read
Folders by how I know the person: Family, Childhood Friends, College Friends, Organizations, Orders, Clients, Colleagues, etc.
Geralin: I like how you organize your folders; how you know the person – as in chronological order?
Erin: I suppose it’s kinda chronological, but I would call it more “relationship” order. What is their relationship to me, and that’s the folder they end up in.
Sometimes people I meet through other friends end up in the friend’s folder too. So, someone I met at my college friend’s wedding might end up in the same folder with my college friends because that’s how I would think of remembering her. All the people I knew through my “ex” have a folder as his friends, etc.
There are some exceptions to the rule in my business world – particularly chapter-related stuff where emails get sorted by major project or committee. So that everything related to writing chapter P&P documents lands together. But, it works for me… so well that to be quite honest I’m now really curious what other people do. Gonna have to go dig through your guest posts to see other systems.
Geralin: What distinguishes the organizers that are listed on your “find a holistic organizer” page? Have they taken a ‘real life’ course at conference, or completed a specific number of hours of training?
Erin: They are people who have attended or listened to my conference sessions and consider themselves to have a similar “holistic approach” to their organizing work. They aren’t “certified” or endorsed by me in any way, just a listing of like-minded people. I consider it part of my way of giving back to the industry to help people find an organizer in their area with whom they might resonate.
Erin Elizabeth Wells is a Certified Professional Organizer (CPO) and CEO and Founder of Living Peace, LLC, a professional organizing company that assists residential and small/home office clients to improve their organizational systems throughout the greater Boston area and beyond.
Living Peace® has a holistic approach to professional organizing that looks at the entire picture of the client’s life to develop systems that will support the client’s needs on all levels- physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual. With a Masters of Divinity degree from Harvard Divinity School and a background in interfaith work, Erin and her Living Peace® organizers focus on supporting clients to create the systems and habits to support all of their clients’ goals.
Through her company, Living Peace, LLC, Erin also offers productivity and strategic life consulting services as well as motivational speaking and workshops internationally. Find out more at www.Living-Peace.com.
