Myth #4 : I am a disciplined/organised person

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I may be slightly more organised than most people but I would hardly describe myself as organised or disciplined.

I like things to be organised around me (chaos is very distracting) but that does not mean that I love to organise things or that it comes naturally to me. If left alone, I’d be too lazy to bother!

It is strictly due to circumstances that I am organised at all. Let me share with you that when I was a young woman living under my parent’s roof, I lived in a terribly messy room. I would tidy it up maybe once in 3 months or was it 6?! But it was definitely not weekly or even monthly.

My mom gave up telling me to organise it long ago. Her sister, my aunt, was amazed the first time she saw my room. She couldn’t believe that I, who was generally well groomed (read : vain), lived in such a messy room.

Fast forward to today, the house is still not a showroom piece and there are things strewn around the house even now as I am writing this article, especially on my table! But it is generally organised.

I know it is organised because the children know where each piece of item belongs to. There are 8 of us in this house and we are home most of the time. The house is lived-in. The children play all over the house (I don’t limit them since the space we have is not exactly big), we homeschool, we have a toddler! And did I say that there are 8 of us?

There will be mess.

But it can be tidied up in a jiffy. All I have to do is assign each child an area and they’ll be able to get it packed in no time at all. This can only happen because I subscribe to the mantra – there is a place for everything and everything has its place.

How did this happen? Not overnight I assure you. I read and read and read voraciously various books and websites, to learn how to organise and declutter. And as I slowly got myself organised, I liked what I saw and so continued. So much so that I can now dispense advice to people on how to be organised! 🙂 Actually organising stuff is the easy part. Maintaining it is the big challenge for me.

Being disciplined is also something I wouldn’t describe myself as! If I were really disciplined, I would have my meal plans ready all the time instead of often deciding what to cook on the morning itself! So much for telling everyone to plan their menus, right? See? It is much easier to dispense advice than to actually do it!

I have some discipline left over from my dancing days 🙂 Yes, I used to dance ballet with the Sylvia McCully and I would say that I was a very disciplined dancer. But erm…that discipline did not spill over to the rest of my life, unfortunately 🙁

Now mostly, I discipline (read : force) myself to get up and do what a mom is supposed to do and homeschool daily only coz we have to give a report to the Ministry of Education at the end of the year! So here I am, still struggling daily to be more organised, more disciplined, so that life is a little less chaotic and there’s more peace in the home. It certainly does not come naturally or easily.

Check out the rest of the other myths HERE.

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