Best Results Organizing

As I reported last time in NAPO2018: Advancing at a Retreat, this was not set to be our usual annual conference and expo. Indeed, there was no expo, and the atmosphere was more of a sleepaway camp than a high-rise hotel conference.

BACK TO SCHOOL

The grounds of the Q Center, a former college campus, were beautiful, with little lakes and fountains dotting the vista.

However, if you recall your own halcyon college days, you may also remember rooms more like the saddest staterooms on the Love Boat and less like luxury hotel suites. (See below for Paper Doll‘s cozy quarters.)

That said, the plentiful food was delicious, and NAPO members came from throughout the United States, as well as from everywhere across the globe, with a healthy accent on our organizing friends from Central and South America.

Food and tiny beds aside, we NAPO members flock to our conferences for the camaraderie and education, and both were in full force this year. After a leadership event for chapter and committee volunteers, NAPO2018 opened with a keynote address from therapist, coach, and speaker Jessica Butts on how to “Live Your Life from the Front Seat,” a rousing presentation on capitalizing on your best attributes while understanding and making the most of your Myers-Briggs (personality) Type Indicator (MBTI).

ON THE RIGHT TRACK

There were four main educational tracks for this year’s retreat format, most reflecting a slight change in focus (less technology and professional development, more self-care and self-growth) vs. other years. Certainly, we did have some traditional coursework. For the Business Growth track, attendees’ options included:

• Oh, the Places You Can Go! The Life Cycle of a Professional Organizer
• How to Streamline Your Business Marketing
• Build Success with and Gain Chronic Disorganization Clients When You Develop and Use a Collaborative Network
• Quickbooks Efficiency 101: How to Save Tons of Time
• Grow Your Business with Employees, Subcontractors, Mentors & Virtual Assistants
• Leads Inspiring Leaders: Winning Strategies for Personal and Business Growth

For the pure Organizing Education track, we could take sessions entitled:

• Opening Doors to Sustainability – Environmentally Conscious Organizing: Simple Sustainable Secrets for You and Your Clients.
• Transform You & Your Kitchen for Healthier Eating: How to Create a Functional Kitchen & Eat Well
• In Five Minutes or Less, Would Your Clients Be Ready for Anything?
• Multitasking Makes You Stupid: Discover the Myth of Multitasking and Learn the Powerful Effect of Focus Instead
• Behind the Scenes of the Successful Organized Family: Teaching Clients to Be the CEOs of their Households
• Microsoft Outlook: Beyond the Basics

Beyond these sessions, though, we had two intriguing tracks from which I selected the bulk of my classes. From the first, the Experiential track, I actually attended four of these six sessions:

• Space Planning for Professional Organizers
• From Inking to Accomplishment: How to (Finally!) Achieve That Big, Bold Goal
• Delivering an Experiential Workshop for Success
• Cultivating Creative Space with Vision Boards
• I’m OK, You’re a Complete Mystery! Discover the Owner’s Manual for Human Beings and Exponentially Improve Your Relationships with Clients, Prospects, and Beyond
• DIY Hand Tools for the Professional Organizer

In “From Inkling to Accomplishment,” Kathy Vines, CPO® led us in group and one-to-one interaction to help us (and help us help our clients), turn our ambitious aspirations into goals we can actually achieve. We learned how to fight the “cocktail of self-doubt and perfectionism” and silence the negative self-talk that sometimes cuts us off at the pass.

We also had practical opportunities to break our dreams into small, actionable steps, identify sources of inspiration (to keep us motivated when self-doubt does creep in), and learn how to capture the knowledge and resources as they appear. Indeed, Kathy’s comment that we must all “prepare for the inconvenient epiphany” will likely have the starring role in a future Paper Doll post on capturing information beyond the typical notepads and Evernote suggestions.

NAPO’s Immediate Past President, Ellen Faye, CPO®, presented two sessions in one with “Delivering an Experiential Workshop for Success.” First, she taught us the core principles of a high-quality experiential workshop – creating a safe environment and using best practices to spark creativity and provide time for processing and integrating information. Then she actually presented an experiential session on creating a personalized “success formula” by helping us identify our core values and revamp our schedules to focus on work that reflects those values. It’s hard to describe in a paragraph, but (to bring in a prior lesson), inconvenient epiphanies were had, and eyes were opened!

In the session, “I’m OK, You’re a Complete Mystery,” Patty Kreamer, CPO®, provided a fascinating and energetic counterpoint to our opening keynote on the Myers-Briggs Type Indicators. Patty taught us about the DiSC Behavioral Style Model. In both cases, we learned how to identify our own styles and interpret our clients’ styles so that we might better communicate based on how they learn best and what they prioritize.

Most entertaining was the example Patty gave regarding Influencers (the little “i” in DiSC, also called Promoters). Patty referenced NAPO’s POINT community, an email platform, contrasting those who write brief, laconic responses vs. the chatty folks who write whole novels. For those of you who follow Paper Doll‘s lengthy blog posts, you won’t be surprised that I jokingly self-identified, raising and waving both hands. From the podium, Patty opined, “Yes, Julie, we know that’s you. Novels. But QUALITY novels!” As Patty taught us, understanding ourselves better is the first step toward becoming more effective when working with others.

My last session of the conference, and certainly the most experiential, was “DIY Hand Tools for the Professional Organizer,” taught by our colleagues Carol Jones and Roberta Andrade (the latter coming all the way from Brazil).

Having gone into the class not even knowing that sheetrock and drywall were the same things, literally everything in that class was new to me.

I got to use metal anchors to screw a hanging rack into drywall, learned the safety rules for using utility knives, and when to use a mallet vs. a hammer – hammers with nails, only, please! Perhaps the most useful thing I learned was how to easily insert Monkey Hooks in the wall to hang pictures – no hammers or nails needed.

Our last track, and the one that most fit the concept of a retreat, was the Self-Care track. Professional organizers are as at risk (or more so) for burnout and overwhelm, and our clients are surely in need of guidance for self-care, so the sessions in this track were remarkably on-point. They included:

• Learn to Be Limitless: Silence Self-Doubt and Claim What’s Yours
• Organize My Own Day – Who’s Got the Time?
• Goodbye, Work-Life Balance. Hello, Better Boundaries!
• Simple Self-Care: Sleep. Create White Space. Walk.
• Yogic Tools for Organizers’ Needs
• Bringing Meditation and Mindfulness into Organizing and Productivity: Strategies for Self-Care and Work with Clients

In transformational coach Heather Vickery‘s “Learn to Be Limitless,” the curriculum seemed to have been built after peering in the windows of our group of high-achieving professional organizers and productivity consultants. We learned skills for setting better boundaries and communicating them more fully, reframing the limiting voices that stop us from achieving, and identifying the myriad ways to improve our own productivity and that of our clients, including the courage to delegate. As Heather said, “Just because you can do it all doesn’t mean that you should.”

Heather also imparted some great life lessons for understanding how the willingness to be vulnerable and authentic can take us from fear-based to possibility-based decision-making and reminded us that the keys to our empowerment are in our own hands.

Ironically, “Simple Self-Care: Sleep. Create White Space. Walk.” was taught just after lunch and a long NAPO-wide meeting at the farthest outpost of the Q Center campus. Sluggish, we all took note that having too little white space in our schedule, too little sleep, and a stressful race-walk to the classroom meant the title of the session could not have been more appropriate.

Lisa Luken and Laurie Malloy presented a scientific research-based guide to the essentials of self-care and even provided a bibliography of resources to help us (and our clients) get enough sleep and increase the quality of it, eliminate overwhelm by increasing white space (both tangible and temporal), and use the power of walking, particularly in nature, to improve our creativity. The advice provided helped us hone our insight into what drains our energy vs. what allows each of us to gain energy. In fact, I’d have written this post days ago if I hadn’t committed to putting these lessons into practice, getting more sleep and injecting fewer tasks in my schedule! (So, blame Lisa and Laurie for the wait!)

OFF-TRACK BUT ON-POINT

The tracked sessions weren’t the only elements of this retreat designed to shake things up. For those able to face a 6:30 a.m. session, we had a variety of mind-body options, including yoga and “Claim Your Feminine Power: A  Bellydancer’s Perspective on How to Lead, Love, and Live as a Woman (Without Losing Your Mind),” a title that did not seem to offend our small but loyal group of male colleagues. (I suspect the chance to sleep an extra hour and have a leisurely breakfast appealed to them as much as it did to me.)

Another option was “Applying Buddist Principles to Professional Organizing and Productivity Consulting,” a session that appealed to me intellectually, but – if you will allow me to mix spiritual practices – the spirit was willing, but the flesh was weak (and I slept right through that Sunday 6:30a option).

On Friday night, for those of us who managed to get through our dinners quickly, we had two alternatives: a follow-up session with our lively keynote speaker or “Unleash Your Inner Superstar.” I opted for the latter.

Little did we know that our demure colleague Lynn O’Dowd, CPO® would present a full-on Lady Gaga concert (with forays into an Aerosmith singalong) in service to teaching us how to quiet our self-doubt, push our limits, and (to use the words of a long-ago NAPO conference speaker), recognize our magnificence!

On Saturday, we had another set of special (but sadly, simultaneous) session options: “Learn How to Make Your Wardrobe and Personal Brand A Perfect Match” and “It’s All In Your Head: Harnessing the Power of Self-Talk.” I attended the latter, presented by Mary Fran Bontempo, and haven’t nodded in agreement or laughed so hard in a long time. In that session, we learned about how the language we use influences the way we feel, gained perspectives on coping with (scary) change, and got some commandments.

My favorite was, “Thou Shalt Ignore More,” referring to finding ways to keep everyday frustrations (from rude people to bad combovers) at bay by ignoring more of whatever really has very little to do with us. Expanding on a Sheryl Sanberg quote, Mary Fran wisely shared, “Before you can lean in to your own life, you have to lean out of everyone else’s.”

Lest you think we professional organizers are all work and no play, be assured that we were extremely well-fed at the Q Center’s all-inclusive and voluminous buffets, and we danced our way through our Saturday night President’s Reception. You’ve likely never seen anyone boogie along to Despacito and I Will Survive in such an efficient way!

Next year for NAPO2019 in Fort Worth, Texas, we’ll be returning to a traditional conference with our favorite vendors in tow, but I suspect the success of the experiential and self-care tracks will live on longer than any bruises from bumping into walls in our tiny sleeping chambers.