A Guide to Prioritizing Your Needs and Desires Throughout Your Home
As a Personal Success Coach, I often hear from many of my clients that prioritizing their needs amidst the clutter of life and allowing themselves to have desires, not just necessities, is an ongoing struggle. If you’ve ever felt this way, please know you are not alone.
How do we allow ourselves to reach for our wants and desires while keeping all of the other wheels of life spinning? Awareness, prioritization, and systems that support these goals is always my recommendation.
Awareness
Awareness is a key component in achieving any goal. The first step in moving forward is being honest about where you are right now. Without awareness, you can’t properly prioritize your life or find systems and solutions that support you in achieving your goal.
Ask yourself, what do I truly desire? What goals do I want to achieve? Write them down or talk through them with yourself. By identifying what you love, what brings you joy, and what desires you have in life, you can begin to separate things that support those items and eliminate areas of life that clutter those ideals.
Prioritization
Prioritizing yourself and your own needs, especially as a mother or wife, is much easier said than done. It can become easy to fall into a routine that puts your family, friends, and community above yourself.
It is not selfish to prioritize yourself. In fact, this is the purest form of self care. To give your best self to others, you must first pour into your own cup and meet your needs.
Support
Finding ways to support your goals and desires is a crucial part of achieving them. When you allow roadblocks and barriers that can be avoided to throw you off course, you can lose sight of the awareness and prioritization pieces of the process. So, how can you create a life that supports your needs?
Creating a supportive space is a great place to start!
The Kitchen
The kitchen is a space that naturally supports goals and desires focused on meals, nutrition, and hydration.
Keeping your kitchen clean and decluttered is an easy way to bring that awareness component to your nutrition and food. But, when it comes to your fridge and pantry, keep things organized so they’re easy to find and take the guesswork out of mealtime. Here are a few tips I always try to consider in my own kitchen.
Use glass containers to store food in your fridge or pantry. This makes it easy to see what you have and helps you to actually use your leftovers before they go to waste.
Build your meals with simple basics. Your fridge should always have fresh fruits, veggies, and proteins on hand while your pantry is perfect for staples like pasta, nuts, popcorn, and tuna.
Your freezer can be your best friend if you let it. Easily store frozen fruit for smoothies, veggies when fresh aren’t available, and meatballs or other leftovers.
Although the kitchen can get overwhelming, I encourage my clients and friends to approach it with a creative eye. Find 3-5 of your family’s favorite meals and stick with them as often as possible. Keeping mealtime simple is essential when managing a full schedule. When you enjoy being in your kitchen and visually seeing your food, it can bring a new fun element to your mealtimes.
The Bedroom
Your bedroom space naturally supports goals and desires focused on sleep, recovery, and stress management.
This is another area in which keeping clean and clutter-free can be a game changer. When it comes to the bedroom, focus on rest and recovery, not work or entertainment. For me, this means no TVs or screens in the bedroom but rather an environment that I can unwind and relax in.
Here are some cost-effective ways to create a relaxing oasis in your bedroom without having to do an entire remodel or break the bank.
Move any TVs or work-related items in your bedroom to another space that more appropriately suits them.
Set your bedroom temperature to a comfortable 66-70 degrees and utilize a fan if you like the sound or feel.
Add blinds or drapes to your windows to block out bright lights.
A lavender candle or relaxing music can also help make your space feel luxurious and help you unwind.
It is really important to prioritize your sleep and recovery, something that can be easy to talk about but harder to actually do. Take pride in taking care of yourself and prioritize your own health. If you don’t, who else will?
The Office
While not every home or family has a room to dedicate solely to an office, any office “space” naturally supports goals and desires focused on time management, finances, and family logistics.
Regardless of the kind of space you have, dedicating an area of your home to get into a work mindset while working on these items is essential. Without that, it can be easy to work from your couch or bed, which can make stepping away from work that much more challenging.
In your office, I recommend utilizing a few tools that will make planning and organizing much more manageable.
Use a large calendar to account for your upcoming month at a glance. This is the perfect space to capture commitments, birthdays, holidays, and other important occasions you need to plan additional details for in the next four weeks.
I also recommend using a whiteboard or something similar that’s easy to spot in your office for lists and things you need to prioritize. The whiteboard can help you prioritize things like groceries, to-dos, and things you need to purchase on your next errand run.
Folders and/or a filing cabinet is the perfect way to make sure those items you need to put in a place you’ll know where to find them actually get there. Folders can be great for storing family files, tax information, health records, and other important items you probably aren’t dealing with every day or month. This easy system helps you avoid that overwhelming “pile” of important papers!
I understand that work and finances don’t always cultivate feelings of fun or excitement. They can be overwhelming and downright something you dread. But by pushing them aside and not being prepared, you are only making the inevitable that much harder.
Set aside time in some consistent way to keep up with this all in a reasonable way. Frequent check in’s and organization can help minimize the overwhelm and stress it is bound to cause. I have found over the years that a 30-45 minute commitment once a week works well for me.
The Home Gym
The home gym is another space that not everyone may have, but the gym or workout area is a space that naturally supports goals and desires focused around fitness and movement.
The key to a home gym is simply having a space you can move and enjoy fitness in. By keeping things simple and effective, you can create an environment and system that supports your goals without joining a gym or committing to a fitness class, if that seems to be a challenge for you and your schedule.
Keep your gym space - whether it’s a garage like mine, a corner of your office, or an area in your backyard - organized and equipped with the basics you need to get in a good workout. Your home gym may want to include:
A kettlebell, dumbbells, and a pull-up bar
A yoga mat and foam roller
Mobility bands or mobility rings
These items are all fairly inexpensive compared to a gym membership and don’t take up much space. Even if you workout outside, these items can easily be stored in one area and carried somewhere else.
You may also want to consider finding a virtual trainer or online workout classes that support your goals but can easily be done from your home. I personally offer customized virtual training and accountability that may be a great fit for your current needs and desires. This type of coaching relationship has benefitted so many of my clients who are busy, working parents with a tight schedule!
Another huge pro to working out from home is the advantage of communicating to your family or children that health is a priority to you. Whether you have a formal exercise routine or not, what you do always communicates things to your children and others watching you. Be an example and show your kids that taking care of yourself should be prioritized and celebrated.
The Family Space
The family room or living space naturally supports goals and desires focused on relationships, hobbies, and fulfillment.
The older I get and the older my children get, the more I realize quality time together is much more important to me than quantity. We all have different things happening in our lives, and while we don’t have hours at our disposal to spend together, the quality of the time we do have really matters.
Find some things your family enjoys doing together and build the family space around those activities. They might include board games, reading, watching movies, or doing puzzles together. Make accessible the things you want to do together so that when the time comes to do them, you’re not rooting through boxes or searching for activities to engage in.
Your family space can also be a great area to support your own hobbies and interests. For example, things like knitting, musical instruments, and painting may all happen in your family space. When these things are accessible and easy to access, you’re much more likely to actually use them.
Create a space you enjoy being in with the ones you love.
Declutter and Be Intentional
In any area of your life and home, be aware, intentional, and focus on decluttering. Be sure to identify your goals in these different areas of your life and spend time listening to the things you desire.
While we all spend time in our homes, it is no secret that many of us have spent even more time in these spaces the past year and a half. So be intentional with the way you organize your home and prioritize your health and needs within those spaces.
Look for ease, efficiency, and simplicity within your space. And remember, the way you structure your home and prioritize your life does communicate to others in your household. What type of role model do you want to be?