EP 033: Elegant Living and Your Environment
March 31, 2021 | By Ashley Brown
Most personal growth books that are written about habits tend to have one common denominator. They typically state that in order to "succeed" you've got to have a supporting environment.
It doesn't matter if we're talking about getting the most out of your day at the office, loosing weight or recharging at home. Your environment matters.
That's why I always talk about designing and a decorating a home that's intentional, functional and serves your lifestyle with ease. The environment that you do life in matters so much.
This episode is all about how changing your home can directly affect your life. I also discuss the connection between elegant living and your environment. This episode is powerful and I can't wait for you to listen.
IN THIS EPISODE ASHLEY DISCUSSES:
The impact your environment has on you as you’re building new habits.
How your environment plays a role in the life you want to live.
The connection between elegant living and your environment
Why to start with your environment when it comes to making lasting change.
LINKS AND RESOURCES MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:
Ashley’s Facebook group
Reviews are everything on iTunes. Would you please take a moment and leave a review HERE.
I get it some days it feels as if you're riding the "hot mess" express and there's no end in sight. Hello, I'm Ashley Brown, mom of three little kids who used to let life's chaos get the best of me. Then I discovered that you can elevate your life, raise kids and make what matters happen all while adding a little more elegance into your everyday lifestyle.
I'm on a mission to help busy women overcome the hot mess and create an elegant life they love by starting with the essentials. Everyday life doesn't have to be so chaotic. Join me in discussions about ways to help you embrace simplicity with practical solutions and easy to implement ideas. So you can design a home and life you love. This is a source of encouragement. This is the change you've been looking for. This is the always elegant living podcast.
Hello friend, and welcome to the Always Elegant Living podcast. I am your host, Ashley Brown, and I'm so excited that you are here listening today. This is a great episode to tune into if this is your first time listening to the podcast, or even if you've been a loyal fan since the beginning, this is still a great episode.
I'm going to share something with you that I don't think I've ever shared with anyone, or at least not publicly on any platform. I love reading personal growth books. If I had to choose between a personal growth book and anything else I could read, I would choose the personal growth book every single time. I just love learning and expanding my thinking. I love learning about ways to level up in my life and in my business, in my marriage, and in my motherhood. I also love how empowering personal growth books are. When I'm done with the book, I feel like, "Yes, I can do this. I can make this happen." That's how I have continued to build successful businesses, a life that I love and a home that I love. I'm constantly reading about different things and gathering information and learning how to do it. I just always feel empowered to take action.
Anyways, one thing that most personal growth books have in common is that in order to "succeed", and I'm using air quotes here, "succeed", you've got to have a supporting environment. It doesn't matter if we're talking about getting the most out of your day at the office, or if we're talking about losing weight and changing your health story, or even just resting and recharging at the end of a long day, your environment matters.
For that reason alone, that is why I chose to create a course all about designing and decorating a home that's intentional, functional, and serves your lifestyle with ease and elegance first. There are several other courses that I can't wait to create, but I truly feel that when we start at home then we are setting ourselves up for success because your environment matters. If you want to elevate your life, then change your environment. Every single book I've ever read, that's ever mentioned anything about your environment always says that. Make sure you're setting up your environment for the success that you want. I truly believe that home is no different.
Also, because I love ease and that energy that I'm always trying to bring into everything that I do, I like starting with the environment around me first. It feels that it's so much easier to change my environment than it is to start with the deep, hard work that I have to do on myself. Maybe you feel that way too. Sometimes if we just set up our space in a way that's going to support us later then the deeper work and the harder stuff is just a little bit easier and we all know, I love ease and elegance. Those are my things. If something can be easy and be done and out of the way, then I'm going to do that first, because that just makes logical sense to me.
Before I transformed my home, I definitely felt like my home was very overwhelming. It was loud, it was chaotic, everything in my home just felt like it didn't function for the life that we were living. When my kids would do sports, it just felt like a fricking hassle to pull all the stuff out, to get ready for games and to get ready for the different events.
When we would go to the lake on the weekends, it just felt like, "Oh my gosh, do we really have to go because I have to pull all this crap out and then I'm going to have to put it all away and the house is already a mess and it's just going to create so much more of a hassle on the backend then is this even worth it?" The answer is yes. Yes, it's worth it. It is so worth it to go spend a day at the lake with my family. But the old me would just know that it's going to come with so much extra work and so much energy and I'm the one who has to deal with it all, so are we sure this is really what we want to do? Once again, the answer is yes, but it wasn't until I changed my environment to support the lifestyle that I wanted to live, that things really started to change in my actual life.
That's kind of what I want to chat about on this episode today. By changing my environment and doing that one task first, it made all the other necessary changes that needed to happen so much easier. By setting up my home in a way that allowed me to live my life with ease, it transformed everything for me and that is why I am so passionate about making sure that your home is designed and functioning with ease and intention behind it.
What do I mean by that? I mean, if you are a busy baseball family or you have kids in sports and activities, then set your home up in a way that serves your lifestyle. For us, we have a baseball closet in my entryway closet. I know I've mentioned that before and honestly it kind of rotates with the seasons because my boys snowboard in the winter and then they do baseball in the spring and so we just rotate it out. But oh my gosh, it's so much easier to grab everything we need for practices and games. All the crap like the wagon, the blankets and everything else. If you're a baseball mom, you know what I'm talking about. There is a lot of stuff that comes with us to go to the games and the practices.
Then we live where it's really cold, so half the practices have snow on the ground or it's currently snowing, and then the other half of practices are about 70 degrees. You never know which kind of Northern Nevada weather you're going to get, so you have to prepare for all of them. Plus, I have three kids, which means everybody needs hats and gloves and jackets and boots, and everybody needs the sunscreen and all this stuff, so it's just a lot. When I transformed my closet to having all of that stuff in one easy-to-access place, instead of going to the garage and pulling everything out that I needed every single time, multiple times a week, because hello, baseball season equals two practices and two to three games during the week. It is busy.
But when I finally realized that the overwhelm was just in how I was setting up my environment, then everything switched. Things became so much easier because instead of going to the garage to get baseball stuff, which is where normal people would put it or where you would think you should put it, I just went to my entryway closet. It made so much more sense because as we would load and unload the car, it was just all there. The same thing for snowboarding season. I would switch it out and put all the snowboarding stuff there, so that way we don't have to dig through extra crap. Just by setting up my environment in a way that was serving the lifestyle that I was already living helped so much. It helped control the overwhelm, it helped keep the chaos at bay and that is what I want for you.
Elegant living and your environment go hand in hand. You cannot live life well or elegantly or beautifully if you always feel like your environment's out of control, like it's just pure craziness and chaos. You have to marry them together. When you create an environment that supports the lifestyle that you're currently living, then things automatically elevate, things automatically transform into a more easier way to do stuff. That's what we want. That's what creates the ease in our lives and in our homes. When you're intentional about how you design your home and how you've set up your environment, and then of course you make it look beautiful with all those beautiful touches that I always talk about, and you have the things that you need, then your environment is going to be elegant. Therefore, you're going to be living in an environment that supports the life that you want.
Sometimes this concept can feel a little more overcomplicated than it actually is, but it's very simple. Just as in all those personal growth books that I read and stuff, if you want to succeed and you want to level up and you want to elevate your life, change your environment first. Change the things that are around you, change how what you are seeing and using every single day is serving you to serve you better.
When I went about trying to create a home that was easy to maintain, part of having a home that's easy to maintain means that I'm able to do the things that we already do a lot more easier. Things such as having a baseball closet or a snowboarding closet and switching it out, so I just call it a sports closet. Or having an entryway that's very open so when we do come in the door and there's five people and we're all dumping a bunch of gear down, it's open and there's space to do that. Then we can quickly put it away.
If we went to the Lake for the day I could quickly put the towels in the washer. And we can do all these things because my home is set up in a way, knowing that this is how we live. This is our lifestyle and it's what we want and I love it all and it matters, but my home before was not reflecting that. As we would come in from different events and different things, stuff would just get piled up until the next weekend or the next time we needed it and it would still be in that pile and then we'd have to grab stuff and be late and it just created so much chaos because my environment wasn't supporting my lifestyle.
The same thing is true for how you decorate and design your home. If you want a home that's easy to pick up because you're running around and you're living life and you're doing all the things, then don't have a million things in your home. If you have a million things in your home, it's going to take you a long time to pick it all up. I always go with, "I want to be able to pick everything up in this room in five minutes." If I have more stuff than I can physically pick up in five minutes, then it's too much and I need to make decisions and it has to go. That is elegant living and my environment or changing my environment is shaping the lifestyle that I want because I do not want to spend any more than five minutes picking up a room. Or I do not want to spend any more than five minutes dusting and organizing and cleaning up chaos. It's just not important to me, I don't care. Of course I want a beautiful room and a beautiful home and a beautiful space to do life well in, but not at the expense of having to spend so much time and energy to maintain it. That's not an even trade-off for me.
Instead I found a way to create the environment that's still beautiful, but works with my lifestyle. My lifestyle is I can do five minutes to pick up, but that's it. That's all I'm willing to give. When you're talking about elegant living and your environment, they go hand in hand. What do you want out of your home? How do you want it to serve you? How do you picture living your life and how can your home support you in that? I feel that our homes are meant to support us, not the other way around.
My home should not require every ounce of energy from me in order to maintain it. In fact, it's very much the opposite. My home needs to support me and the things I'm doing. It needs to provide a roof over my head and shelter and a safe place, a place where we can eat dinner together as a family and hang out and play games and bond and just spend time together. It's also a place where I need to get work done and where we live and sleep and do all the things that we do at home, which means that every room in my home or each environment that I'm creating within those rooms in my home need to support the life that I'm already living.
When your environment supports how you want to live, that is elegant living. That is moving past living in chaos, moving past the drama, moving past all of that overwhelmed because now your environment is rising up to meet you where you are, where your lifestyle is and where you want it to go.
This is why love personal growth books so much because although a lot of the books that I read really do apply to business, I always love to translate it into life. Of course, just like you need to set up your workspace to be productive and efficient and all of that stuff, you need to set up your home space to be productive and efficient. More than that, home is where we start our day and end our day. I definitely don't want to be starting my day in chaos and I don't want to be ending my day feeling like I still have a million things to do and I've never gotten a chance to relax. And why are there so many dishes and why is there so much stuff everywhere and I still have to pick up all this and now we have baseball stuff in the corner over here, and we got kids' laundry over here.
No. Set your home up in a way that serves you. Design your home in a way that meets to where you are currently living your life and do it in a way that's beautiful. Do it in a way that's easy for you to maintain. Do it in a way that's elegant and intentional and has purpose behind it. That's what elegant living is. Elegant living and your environment are one in the same. Elegant living and your environment are one in the same because you can't live elegantly if your in environment if it's not supporting that lifestyle. If you're coming home and your environment within your home is just not working for you, then you can't be living your best life. You can't be living elegantly because your home isn't working the way you need it to. When you switch your environment and you make the changes and you do the work that you need to do to create an environment that supports the life you want to live, that is when everything changes. That's when we elevate our lives, that's when go out and make big stuff happen. That's when you can do better work. That's when you can be a better mom.
Do you know how hard it is to be a good mom when you are so worried about the dishes and the crap everywhere and the laundry you have to get done and just the general maintenance of a home? It's hard to be a good mom. It's hard to be present and listen to your kids' stories about the day. It's hard to want to help them with their homework and do the extra reading and do all the things when there's a million things that need your attention as well and that are also equally important, not that one's more important than another, but when everything feels like a priority and it's all calling at you, it's really hard to be the mom you want to be or to be the woman you want to be. It's really hard to chase dreams and do hobbies and heck, even just relax and read a book for gosh sakes. It's just hard to do those things when your environment doesn't support that.
For me, getting my home in order was a necessity. It wasn't because I just want a beautiful home because I'm snooty and I want to have a home where everyone go, "Oh, look at me. She keeps her home so good." In fact, it is so the opposite. I need my home in order so I can do everything else that I'm called to do. I need my home in order so I can be a great mom, so I can help my kids with their homework and not feel like I have so many other things going on. I need my home in order so I can enjoy going to baseball and enjoy doing these activities with my kids, while they're little and young and still want me around. I need my home in order so I never have to worry if going to the lake on a wonderful, beautiful Saturday is worth all the energy that it's going to take to clean up from that, because it absolutely is. That's why we live here because it's beautiful and I want to be able to enjoy that.
But there was a point in my life where I couldn't enjoy that because it was just so much extra work on the backend. That's when I realized things had to change and it wasn't just things had to change, it was very specific. It was my environment needed to change. My home needed to change. It wasn't that I needed to get better at doing laundry and better at doing dishes because I still struggle with those areas sometimes, even though I have all these rhythms and routines in place. It's gotten a ton easier, but absolutely there are days that I miss all of that and you know what? It's okay. Because I don't feel overwhelmed by it anymore. It's easy to fix now and it's not the end of the world like it used to be. Now, because my environment is set up in a way, designed in a way that supports our lifestyle, everything else got easier.
I want this episode to encourage you that elegant living and your environment go hand in hand. If you want to be a mom who doesn't yell at her kids, then have your home put in order, because if you are not stressed out about your home, you know what? You're not going to be as stressed out with your kids. It just goes that way. Do I still get angry with my kids and sometimes feel overwhelmed? Absolutely, but it's not because my home is so overwhelming too and it's the last straw. Now it's because they're having some issues and we got to work on it and all of that. It has nothing to do with my house now.
If you're ready to change your life, to elevate your life, even to make life easier, change your environment, get your environment in order. It sounds like it could be a really daunting task, but it doesn't have to be. You can get rid of clutter, you can set things up in an easier way, you can set things up in a way that even if it saves you 30 seconds each time you go to do something, that time adds up and time and time again, it's going to add up little by little by little and eventually you're going to buy back your time. Putting the effort and the energy into creating your environment is really an area of your life where you're going to see and feel the return on investment. Because like every personal growth book says, "Change your environment, set it up in a way that supports you" and you'll begin to change everything else.
That's doesn't just apply if you're dieting and want to lose weight, or if you're trying to be more productive at work. I feel that if you change your environment at home, because home matters so much and home is everything and it's where we start and end our day, then it's going to directly impact everything else you do in life from being a better mom, to being a better wife, to being a better friend and a person and a human being yourself, to being a better employee, a boss, a business owner, whatever it is. When you set your environment up in a way that supports you and the lifestyle that you want to live, you are setting yourself up for success. How could you not want to focus on this?
Like I said earlier, for me, changing the environment was way easier than doing all the hard work required to change myself because that stuff takes a lot more time. I'm still always working on myself, I'm still always doing that deep work. I'm still always trying to raise up and evolve, but you know what? My home supports that. Since that time when I've done it all once and made my environment work for us, I haven't had to go back and redo it because I did it right. I put the time in, I put the energy in, and I created an environment that supports the lifestyle that I want to live, that I want to raise up to, and that's what I want for you.
If you feel like making an elegant home you love seems kind of trivial, I want to remind you that it's not. Home matters. Your environment matters. Where you're raising your kids and how you feel when you come through that door matters. It matters if it feels overwhelming and it matters if you don't feel inspired in that space. Half the reason I did create a home that I have created is because I had clients coming in and I was trying to make high-end sales and I felt that I couldn't ask for the dollar amount that I was asking for in a very basic home because my business was all about elegant artwork. I felt I needed to have elegant artwork on my walls and display it in a way that could show my clients what their home could look like with my art on their walls as well.
You know what? It worked. That was a strategy that when I put energy behind creating a home and creating a showcase for my clients to see my photos in my home the way I had them displayed, it made them buy the exact same sizes that I had because they wanted that too. Even though that was my initial driving factor, the reason that I still have my home that way is because it's so much easier to maintain my environment inspires me. It has allowed me to create a second business. It has allowed me to be a better mom and it has allowed my family to thrive so much more in a home that just is beautiful and that they're proud of and that they love coming home to.
My family and I, we are homebodies by nature. This pandemic has not been as hard as it could have been, or I know as hard as it has been on other people because we love being home. In fact, we thrived even more during this time because we are home so much. All that means is that I did a few more tweaks in our home to support our new reality, but you know what? It worked and our environment supports us and that's what home is. Your environment matters. Home matters. Elegant living and your environment go hand in hand.
If you are ready to raise the bar, if you are ready to elevate your home in a way that's purposeful, and if you are ready to create a home for yourself and your family that is designed from the perspective of "You don't want to maintain your home all weekend and you don't want to spend so much time dedicated to your home, but you still want it to be beautiful" then my new course is for you. Everyday Home Elegance is everything you need to know about creating a home that's intentional, creating a home that's functional, and creating a home that's easy to maintain and beautiful to live in. I created this course for you. If you are ready to level up your environment, then get in there. I walk you through how to do it step-by-step starting with why home matters and how to actually design your home in a way that serves your lifestyle, because that's what our home is there to do. It is there to serve us, not the other way around.
If you're feeling overwhelmed at home, if you're feeling overwhelmed in your life, change your environment. The easiest way to do that is to just start doing it. Make the changes that are going to support the life you want to live, or the lifestyle you are already currently living. I wish someone had told me this way back then when I felt so overwhelmed, because I wasn't reading these books then obviously, otherwise I would've known the answer, but I wish someone was there to walk me through it. I wish someone just told, "Hey, if you do this, you know what? It's going to be so much easier for your kids to get dressed every single morning and then you're not going to have to help them."
"Oh really?"
"Yes." All of that is in the course. I help you through everything you need to know to design a home that is meant for you and your family and your little ones, and even your dog to live their best life in. Go check it out at HERE and I can't wait to see you in there.
The episode is over and now it's time for you to take action.
What can you do today that will help you create who you want to be? Little by little progress adds up and in turn makes a big impact.
If you'd like to continue the discussion head on over to facebook.com/groups/alwayselegantliving.
If you loved listening to this episode, as much as I love sharing it, then please leave a review on iTunes. And if you're ready to take action and dive deeper into the topics that I discussed on the podcast, visit the courses.
You have the power to create who you were made to be. You can move past the chaos and start living a life you love with ease. And remember, I'll be there cheering you on.
Until next time. I'm Ashley Brown.
