🌸 Home organization for female entrepreneurs
Lean into your Masculine side so that your Feminine side can flow.
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Howdy folks,
Today’s newsletter is a little different. Today, we’ll be talking about something I don’t hear that much about in female entrepreneurship circles regarding supercharged business growth: home organization.
Just looking at the above photo makes my chest clench.
I filmed this over the weekend as I had a huge realization about how home organization is key to business growth:
If you are anxiety-prone (who isn’t?), seeing your home in chaos so frequently, especially when you have a spouse, pets, and maybe kids, plus the constant background chatter of the car needing an oil change and the lightbulbs needing replacement, can make the essential tasks of moving your business forward that much more challenging to prioritize.
I’m just going to say it: I don’t think messy homes and pet puke on the carpet bother men as much as women.
It can be easier for men to laser-focus in on a task, get it done, then think about eating and doing laundry afterwards. Meanwhile, for many women, ignoring laundry and chores to get business work done, only to see the sink pile up with dirty dishes and the bedroom fill with wrinkly, smelly clothes, only creates more of a chaos feedback loop.
How do we prioritize business growth with a household that needs tending to?
I brought this question up in my Reality Mastery coaching program with Quazi Johir, and while he is a male, he did recommend getting a house manager on TaskRabbit for $25-$50/hour.
💡 A-ha.
I've resolved to get a house manager.
I’m sick of getting dragged away from my business life because of things like my 2003-Honda CR-V’s air conditioning not working (and it could be due to a multitude of root causes, but I currently don’t want to spend 3 hours on the weekend diagnosing it). Plus the lightbulb in my foyer needs replacing, but I have no clue what type it is.
Why don’t I already have a logbook of what kind of bulb it is? And why don’t I already have a Honda expert on-hand who would merrily diagnose and fix a Honda CR-V’s air conditioning?
I recently had lunch with my friend who is also a female entrepreneur, and while talking about business life, we ended up relating about how our progress in business has been affected by our messy homes lately.
Peace (and success) in business life is correlated with peace in home life.
I told her about my aspirations of getting a house manager, and she totally agreed.
😖 Do you have resistance to getting a house manager?
While aspirational, I’m still scared to get one.
Emotionally, it feels like a maid (and honestly, it is.) If you grew up poor or middle class, a maid in the US was for the hoighty-toighty people “over there.” (I recall the sound bite my Chinese mom would always say growing up was that it was so much more affordable to hire a maid in Hong Kong than it is here.)
I judged the people who had a maid for their house when I was growing up. Currently it feels embarrassing to need one. Are there voices in your head that say, “You should get a smaller house,” or the perfectionist “just get your life together, why can’t you even do that?”
To those voices I retort, I live in a tiny townhome with just my husband and cat for godsake’s, I don’t think it’s “more than I could chew.”
I truly believe this is less a challenge with minimalism as it is a challenge with systems.
I head to the grocery store when I feel like it. I do laundry when I see the smelly pile and I react to it. The afternoon goes by and I’m still figuring out how to link my Instagram to my Facebook.
Only in awareness did I realize that this lack of structure has a huge part to play in my business. Therefore, in order to master my business, I knew I needed to master myself first.
🥑 Mastering time, food, and laundry
I ordered these weekly magnets from Amazon and started penning in everything I could think of that occurs on a daily and weekly basis: food planning, food shopping, laundry, taking out the trash. As soon as I wrote it all out, I felt the cognitive load of relying on only my memory lift off my shoulders. It was like going to the freaking spa.
Currently, I am trying out doing smaller loads of laundry 3x a week rather than a huge-ass load 1x per week. I’m actually loving it.
To get Jeff on board with all of this, I told him that this was important to me, and that my success in business was heavily related to structure at home. I also communicated that we needed to split chores and reliably do them according to the schedule while also tracking our consistency. So far, he’s agreed. ;)
👚 Drawer organization
Over the weekend, I also examined Jeff and I’s clothes drawers, looked at how we’ve been throwing everything in with little sorting, and realized how it’s that much more of a cognitive load to figure out what to wear in the morning, what to pack for workouts, sorting laundry when it’s dirty, and getting it pretty to wear all over again.
Enter: drawer organizers.
I spent the weekend folding clothes into little cubes Marie Kondo-style and now they’re the prettiest drawers I ever did see (and how I convinced Jeff to get on board with organizing too, which is half the battle in any relationship):
During the week, I’ve pressure-tested these systems, keeping what I liked and tweaking what I didn’t.
During the week, I was able to spend the majority of the day working on my business, delivering to clients, making sales calls, and creating content, while knowing that there is a system to fall back on to get laundry done and and pick out clothes for the day.
This is truly the beauty of the bedrock of the Divine Masculine energy. The Divine Masculine can get a lot of flack with women; a lot of them grew up too masculine, feeling like their creativity was stifled, myself included, and are reconnecting with their Feminine these days. But without the riverbed of the Masculine, how can the river of the Feminine flow?
After all, the Masculine and the Feminine do only one thing in union anyway: balance.
More organizational tidbits along with book marketing content will be shared over the coming weeks. Plus, the next challenge will be keeping these organization systems as I travel, as I will be headed to Bulgaria for the month of July with WiFi Tribe.
👇🏽 What are your thoughts on hiring a maid or a house manager for your home? What’s been your system to keeping your office and home tidy so that you can keep your entrepreneurial mind clean?
What about gender roles? 😜
Leave me your thoughts in the comments.
Thank you for reading! ❤️ Hit the heart button on your way out to help spread this message.
Much love,
Renee