The Magical Power of a Daily Routine

At this very moment, you are creating your tomorrow with your habitual thoughts and subsequent actions. If you love the consequences these habits are dilivering to you, you’re on a magnificent journey through this life you’ve been given. But if you don’t particularly like the way your life is going right now, you have the power to choose new thoughts that’ll create wonderful consequences for your tomorrow.

Do you know who Ordelle Daily is? She’s a fictitious character I drummed up and wrote a poem about to explain what a BO (Born Organized) is. Here’s a letter from a reader who remembered Ordelle Daily

My passport expired and I had to renew it today. Part of the process was to have a current photo taken to put in the new, little, blue book I'll get in about eight months if I'm lucky. When I got to the business where they took the passport photo, the very efficient clerk, told me where to sit, how to sit and the importance of sitting very still, and then she said,

“Are you ready?”

“Yes,” I answered and proceeded to make a friendly smile for the camera.

She immediately took the camera off her eye and said, “OH NO DON’T SMILE! THAT’S NOT ALLOWED!”

“Okaaaay,” I said, recovering from her overreaction to the simple happy gesture I let my lips display. Once again I got ready for the photo shoot, this time with a blank stare void of any joyful, inner emotion.

“Click,” the camera said.

“Good” the clerk said. “What d’ya think of this?”

 The only way to establish a new habit is to put the action you want to become a habit into a daily routine so that you’ll do it enough times for it to become automatic. Before an action is a habit and part of your daily routine, just think of all the options you have. Options are what pull you away from doing something you've decided to do to change the status quo. In other words, you have to learn to be an option stopper, whereby you don’t give yourself the option of not doing the action you want to have become a habit. 

For example, if you want exercise to be part of your daily routine, then you have to stop giving yourself options out of exercise. Until exercise is a habit, your options will always look better than exercise. But if you’ll be an option stopper, one day you’ll realize you have a new habit, you're happier and life is better! 

Have you ever stopped to think that right now your life as it is, is the result of your daily routine? It is. For most SHEs, we have such a developed sense of spontaneity that we're not all that excited about consciously creating a routine...until we get a taste of the freedom a good routine gives us in addition to more free time to play.

It’s Never Too Late to Say Thank You!

I was talking to a good friend of mine who is definitely a BO, and I asked her, “Have you ever not written a thank you note for a gift or for having a meal at someone’s house and such?” She answered immediately, “Oh no! Never! Energy drain!” She’s a massage therapist and has studied a great deal in the holistic health field. She went on, “If I didn’t take care of a thank you as soon as possible, I wouldn’t be able to get my mind off the person. Why would someone not take care of it right away?”

Well, Miss BO, here’s why! We’re creative. Our creativity gets in the way of getting a quickie thank you (it takes less than five minutes to write a thank you note, address an envelope and put a stamp on it) off in the mail. We are victims of procrastination because we want to create just the right words that come straight from our hearts.

We were devastated!

 Years ago, my sister’s neighbor was killed in a freak accident (a tree fell on him in their backyard) and we were all devastated. His poor wife was left with three small children and our hearts were broken for the family.

 My sister spent an hour at the Hallmark store looking for just the right sympathy card, but none seemed to fit the situation. She went home and called me saying she’d like to write her own sentiment and could I help her. Of course I was moved to be part of a thoughtful note to convey our sympathy. I told her to write something and I would make it rhyme.

No More All or Nothing at All

There's a huge difference between a drastic transformation and change that takes place as gracefully and gradually as a baby turns into a toddler. But when we're fed up with our old ways we tend to want an instant fix. That's what impatience is all about.

Take weight for example, we want the weight to come off faster than we put it on. We get frustrated with a loss of just one pound in a week, yet if we gained a pound a week, we'd gain 50 pounds in a year. I don't know anyone who's done that and you probably don't either. 

As SHEs we tend to have that notion: All or nothing at all. When we want to get organized usually we've come to a place where every room is laced with chaos. When we decide to fix our finances it's when the power's been shut off or we max a few credit cards and sink into financial depression. When we want to lose weight it's usually because we've let it go so long that it has our attention. We're not like the frog that stays in the water as it's heated to boiling and cooks to death, instead, we schlep along until we snap.

To do, or to be?

Did you know breads and grains are loaded with sugar?

Eating sugar in all its sneaky forms spikes your insuline and that's one of the main reasons our bodies store fat. Lower your intake of sugar in all of its tricky forms and you'll lose weight. 

In this cooking video you'll see how easy these tortillas are to make.

These tortillas have flour, so they're low in carbs, AND they're delicious!

If you’ve spent a lot of time reading about de-junking, de-cluttering, streamlining and simplifying and the information hasn’t helped you with your issue of having too much stuff, maybe considering this will help. Having too much stuff is a good thing! Think about it. All of your stuff, your books, furniture, jewelry household utensils, food, clothes, and on-and-on are answers to your desires. Even the stuff you inherited or someone gave you; represents the answers to your desires. “Ask and it shall be given.”

It’s likely you are financially better off than your parents and maybe if you experienced poverty in your childhood you’ve had a stronger desire to have nice things, than someone who always has had them.

In the 80s, Peggy and I helped 100s of women streamline their homes through Project CHAOS (Can’t Have Anyone Over Syndrome). Many were women who had parents who lived through the Depression in the 1930s. Our mom was one who remembered that Depression and while she was always organized and never had too much stuff, she wanted to have nice things and spent her life continually improving our home and its contents.

The following is correspondence between one of our Club Organized “elite” members and me. If you owe thank you notes, this conversation will inspire you to write them now. 

      Hi Pam,                                                                   June 13, 2015

Here it is, almost the end of May and FINALLY we, here in the Pacific Northwest, are getting some sun! In case any of you north westerners have forgotten, the sun is a big yellow ball that's in the sky (which is blue not gray) and it hurts your eyes if you look at it.

It has been so long since the sun has shone through my windows, I’d forgotten that sucker is not only hot, but it’s a revealer of slipshod cleaning. Have you ever noticed that your windows (especially the ones in the kitchen) can look pretty clean, until the sun shines on them? It can be shocking, because suddenly you can see all kinds of streaky schmutz that didn’t show before! I swear that sun is like a priest bringing out a confessioner’s dirty little secrets. Maybe we should wash windows when the sun is shining on them, that way they couldn’t lull us into thinking they’re clean. Just like we’d be way nicer if a priest followed us around 24/7.