Jade Boyd: So in order to simplify your life, it does take changing your circumstances, but it also takes changing you, changing your mindset and changing who you are and how you look at the world and how you look at your life. And that does not happen overnight unfortunately, it does take a lot of small changes over time to grow to that point.

I think there are a lot of women and a lot of business owners who have the goal or this vague dream of living a simplified life, but very few people actually put in the work that it takes to make it happen. And today we’re talking about what it actually takes to simplify your life. And it’s easy to see why a lot of people love this in theory, but then in practice, it’s obviously hard work. Simplifying your life does take a lot of work. It’s much easier to build a busy life and a complicated life than it is to build a simple life.

And I think our default understanding is that living simply should be easy because you’re doing less. You have all this white space, but in reality, it can take a lot of work to maintain that simple life and to have the boundaries and the discipline really in place to make that type of life possible.

And I want to start by asking you, what are you even imagining when you think of what it looks like for you to live a simple life? Because your version of living a simple life is not going to be the same as anybody else’s. It doesn’t have to be homesteading on a farm or wearing floral maxi dresses or buying chickens or becoming a trad wife, which is something that a friend told me about recently.

I had no idea that trad wife was trending, but that is the aesthetic that I think many of us jump to when we think of a simple life, something that is very idealistic and unrealistic for us. But it doesn’t have to look like that. It doesn’t mean creating this Pinterest where the kitchen organization system or making all of your food from scratch or drinking raw milk.

I think that we oftentimes confuse simple living with all of these, extremes when it comes to simplifying your life and like living off the land, but it doesn’t have to be that way. Your version of simplifying your life might look very, very different from that type of life. And that’s okay.

When I think about simplifying my life, I think about two things. The first thing is systemizing the things that are most important to me. So as you may know, if you’ve been around here a while, I break down my life categories into very simple categories, health, relationships, home, and business. Those are the only four categories that I think of.

So when I think about simplifying my life, I think of having systems in place so that I’m showing up for each of those four areas without it being difficult or complicated or hard showing up for my health, showing up for my relationships, showing up for my home and showing up for my business. And in reality, when it is hard to show up for the most basic things, the most important things in your life, life just feels hard.

And so in my mind, simplifying my life should start with simplifying the things that are most important to me. And making it easier for me to take care of those things and to be in the rhythm of showing up for those things in a way that it doesn’t feel like an uphill battle every single day.

And the second thing I think of when it comes to simplifying my life is living at a pace that actually allows me to be present and enjoy my daily life. No matter what the season is not rushing through life, not constantly waiting for the next season or telling myself I’ll have time for that when. I’ll make time for that when life slows down, but actually taking the time and setting the pace for my own life so that it is slowed down and I am able to enjoy where I’m at now.

I was recently having a conversation with one of my friends and I was talking about how, my husband does all of the dishes in our house, which I’m really thankful for. I do most of the meal planning and cooking, and then I leave all of the dishes for him to take care of, which works really, really well for us because dishes are my least favorite thing in the world to do.

And he like, doesn’t mind doing them at all, but I was talking about how I made this meal that took a while and it created a lot of dishes and I spent forever chopping vegetables and I just hated it. I do hate chopping vegetables. It is pretty tedious. Overall, I do need to work on my patience because I know that I can be short on patience for a lot of things.

And she commented, that she doesn’t want to resent everyday activities. Like, what is the point of rushing through things like chopping vegetables. Like, what are we hoping to get to? And her comment really challenged me and it made me think, what was I rushing to? Why did I want to get done chopping vegetables quicker?

What did I want to be spending more time for? And at the end of the day, we were just going to make dinner and then sit down and like watch a show and eat dinner, which is a habit that I don’t love that we do. And if you’ve been around a while, you’ll know last year we did a no streaming September, which was amazing, but I feel like we’ve fallen back into some of our bad evening TV habits when it comes to eating dinner in front of the TV.

But anyway. Who cares? Like, why do I need to rush through a simple daily activity that’s mindful and restful in order to watch more TV or insert like whatever the thing is that you’re hoping to rush through to get to, do you actually want to be spending time doing the things that you’re rushing through your life trying to make more time for.

It was really convicting for me and it really made me think.

And I do just think that there are so many women right now and moms right now who just feel disconnected and frazzled and itching for something more in their lives. And they still can’t figure out how to just be, and just enjoy the simple things of life, like chopping vegetables or doing dishes or taking a walk that Is in silence and not listening to a podcast on double speed.

We’re just living life at a pace where those things feel really uncomfortable to us. We’re always rushing to the next thing, and that is not the way that I want to live my life, but it does take a lot of hard work to break out of those habits and routines and to live life differently. We are legitimately too busy and too overstimulated to actually live and even notice and be present in our own lives.

And I am obviously, maybe you can hear this in my voice, I am just really passionate about this idea and this philosophy and this way of living. And I really do want to empower a new generation of women who do know how to live simply, who do know how to slow down, who do know how to be present for their own lives, to take care of themselves, to live more intentionally, to prioritize the things that matter most to them, to look back on the year or the last 10 years and not regret the way that they spent their time or feel like they just rushed through things and missed the good things in life. I want to help more women be able to eliminate the unnecessary things of life that cause overwhelm and stress and instead simplify their lives, systemize the things that are most important to them, and live at a slower pace. Train themselves to live at a slower pace so that we are able to enjoy our season where we’re at while we’re working towards what we want.

And I’m obviously passionate about helping business owners. This is what the podcast and my coaching program is all about, helping business owners grow their businesses. But I also think that as business owners, we need this. There are so many benefits that come to our businesses when we are present in our everyday lives, not only for our personal health and the way that we’re able to show up for our businesses, but also just in like the creativity and inspiration and stories and human connection and all of those intangible things that make you a better business owner, make you a more connected networker. Make you a more interesting storyteller.

All of those benefits come from actually living your life and not being overwhelmed by your life and showing up as the worst version of yourself because life is chaotic when it comes to taking care of your business. And so that is why, and I previewed this in an earlier episode, but that’s why I’m launching this membership.

It’s called the Simplify Your Life Membership. The wait list is open right now, and it’s going to be launching this fall. This is a quarterly membership for women. In business who do want to stop managing their life and feeling like every day is an uphill battle for women who want to slow down and start living their life every single day by doing those two things, systemizing the things that are most important to you, health, relationships, home and business, and also slowing down your life and we’re going to do this in community with accountability because this is hard work.

So for the rest of this episode, we’re going to talk about four prerequisites for simplifying your life and why they’re so important. Because going back to what we talked about at the beginning of the episode, I think a lot of people have the goal or this vague dream of living a simplified life, but most people don’t know what to do to make that possible or feel like it’s too hard and so they don’t take action and do the things that they do need to do to make a simple life possible. And I know that I have been frustrated with this myself. I read a lot of books about slow living, about minimalism, about simple living, and most books that I read are very inspiring. There’s great stories. there’s even some like tangible tips and resources and it makes you feel like, yes, I want to do this, but then there’s no plan in place. There’s no structure in place. There’s no workbook or process or system or anybody to help you figure out how to apply it to your own life.

And so that is why I created the membership, which is going to launch soon. So again, you’re interested and head over to the show notes and join the waitlist.

Okay, so we’re going to dive into the four prerequisites for simplifying your life. I’m breaking this into four broad categories. The first thing that you have to do if you want to simplify your life is commit to it. It takes commitment. And so at some point you do have to ask yourself, are you like flirting with this idea of living simply? Or are you committed to to living simply because they are two different things and you’re going to see two different results in your life depending on if you’re just like flirting with it, testing the waters, versus if you’re all in actually committed to making the hard changes that make that type of life possible.

And there is a big difference between reading the books and listening to the podcast and being inspired and being knowledgeable versus actually implementing those changes in your daily life. And simple living does require some trade offs and say no to things. And that can be really hard. The easy thing to do in the age that we live in is to just default to complexity.

Complexity is easy. Saying yes to things is easy. Having a packed schedule and adding every event and activity to your calendar is easy. Over committing yourself is easy. Those are all the default things, but committing to simplicity and simplifying your life, it does take time and intention and hard decisions and it’s work.

And this can be for big things like deciding whether or not your kids participate in sports because sports add a lot of complexity and busyness to life, or it can be in the small things like for example, we got rid of our microwave recently and switched to a toaster oven, which I mean this is for a few reasons.

One, I have read some research and my sister in law had told me some stories about potential dangers of microwaves and how it affects your health. And to be completely honest with you, I’m not sure how much of that is true. I’m not very interested in science, but the stories are kind of scary. And I mean, if you Google it, you’ll see the headlines, which are a little scary, but on the other side of things. And what actually made us get rid of the microwave is that food tastes better when you actually heat it up the right way and it doesn’t get soggy. And it’s like a minor commitment to slow living because it does take longer for us to heat up our food now, but again, it’s better.

So less productive, but better food. And also I’ve noticed that I’m actually more productive. So I’m going to take that back. Because, you know, in microwave minutes, when you microwave something for like two minutes, you might have time to like wash a dish or take out the trash or something and then your food’s done, but when you have 10 minutes, I’ve just found that I do a lot more housework in that 10 minutes when I’m waiting for my food. So it’s actually been kind of a productivity hack. But all of that is besides the point. My point was we had to pay to get rid of the microwave. Kaleb had to take it to the dump and to dispose of it. It was like from the 70s, it’s 50 years old. It was like time to get rid of the microwave anyway. So we were going to replace it and we just decided to replace it with a toaster oven slash air fryer slash convection oven thing, which we really, really love, but we had to pay to get rid of it. And that is a very small example of a commitment to simple living, but it did like physically cost us money to simplify one area of our life. And I think that when, again, we think about simple living, we think removing things is this easy, effortless, seamless thing, but it’s not, it does take work and it does take some commitment.

And the last thing I want to say about commitment is that saying no to new opportunities is hard. If there is. a new sign up for a new event or somebody asks you to volunteer for something that you’re not already committed to and you have to say no to them or decide to say no to them for the sake of simplifying your life, that is hard. But it’s even harder to step back from your current responsibilities and obligations because oftentimes we see that as failure, especially as business owners. I’ve seen this with so many business owners who have found the need to step back from their businesses. Whether that means like simplifying their services or cutting back on the number of clients that they’re taking or taking the summer off or taking the holidays off or stepping back from business altogether for a season or stepping back from their podcasts for a season.

There are so many emotions that come up with that. And oftentimes our default is to feel like if we step back from something that we said yes to, or we told ourselves that we’re going to do that, that means that we’re a failure. And I just want to call that out because your yeses and your current commitments may not be aligned to your current goals. In the past, previous you might have said that growing your business and adding that new service was a top priority and a goal. And for that season, it might have made a lot of sense for you, but it is okay at any point in your life or business to reassess what your current goals are. What are the things that you’ve outgrown? What are the things that actually aren’t working are not contributing to your overall wellbeing or the overall success of your business. And it’s okay to say no to those things. That does not mean that you’re a failure, that means that you are taking the next step, a brave step, and committing to living a life that actually feels good to you and doesn’t just look good on paper.

And I’m not going to tell you that that’s easy. It’s still hard. It’s still very emotional. It’s still uncomfortable. And that’s okay. That’s why the first prerequisite is commitment, because it does take doing some hard things to simplify your life.

Okay, the second thing that it takes to simplify your life is small changes over time. We need to stop having the all or nothing mentality where you’re either living your life as it is today or you’re living this completely different version of your life that is your ideal, simple living lifestyle.

There is so much space in between and it’s going to take you some time to get to that ultimate reality.

This is definitely something that I fall into. It’s so easy to romanticize these like overnight evolutions where your entire life changes. You have this plan and you think tomorrow or next week that you’re just going to show up and everything’s going to be different, but that’s not how things work in reality.

One, because your circumstances, again, it takes work to change your circumstances and change your commitments and change the way that things are structured, that takes time. But two, simple living isn’t just about what you do or what’s on your calendar. It’s also like your internal feelings towards your life and your ability to slow down because you can take the day off tomorrow.

I’m sure that most people listening to this, you could have a sick day or a mental health day and just not do anything and slow down your life. And I, think for most people listening to this, that would be extremely uncomfortable and you would not enjoy it.

So in order to simplify your life, it does take changing your circumstances, but it also takes changing you, changing your mindset and changing who you are and how you look at the world and how you look at your life. And that does not happen overnight unfortunately, it does take a lot of small changes over time to grow to that point.

And again, that’s why I am launching this membership because it does take time and it does take commitment and it does take small changes over time. And in the membership, we’re going to do bite sized monthly challenges. And we’re not going to try and overhaul your entire life overnight. It’s going to be fun.

There’s going to be community who are like minded and challenging and supporting you along the way, but it is bite sized, small changes, one thing a month, and surprisingly, those things start to add up really quickly.

When I think about small changes over time, I always think about, how that intersects with simple living. I always think about how I have detoxed my house products, like my skincare products, cleaners. laundry detergent, all of that stuff. And it started when I found out I had contact dermatitis, my face was swelling up.

And this happened like four or five times where I’d have to go to, the dermatologist and I got an allergy panel test and found out that I was allergic to like these eight different things. Most of them I in normal life would never have encountered. But the one that was causing it, or I would say the two main ones that were causing it, one neosporin, which is what started it, I put a whole bunch of neosporin on a cut that I had from playing volleyball, my entire leg, it was disgusting. And I had the worst allergic reaction to it, but I had never been allergic to that before. And then the second one is cocomitopropyl betaine, which is this really, common ingredient that’s in basically every soap and detergent.

It’s the ingredient that makes things sudsy.

The rest of the things that I’m allergic to, like, they don’t even matter. One of them is like an ingredient in rubber tires or something like that. So it’s not like I’m going around sitting on rubber tires and rubbing my eyes all the time. But these two, I actually had to be very conscientious of how I removed these from my life.

I mean, neosporin was easy. There’s some other antibiotic or like cleaning stuff that you can put in your skin and it’s all good. But cocomitabropil betaine, it took me so long to find shampoo and conditioner and soap and switch out all the products that had that in it, cause when I went to my medicine cabinet, it was literally almost everything.

And I was like, oh, this is why my face is swelling up and my eyes are swelling shut because I’m rubbing this crap all over my head in my face and it’s, yeah, allergies are weird how some of those things pop up where you’re not allergic to things and then you are, but anyway, talking about committing to small changes over time, that started this awareness in me of what was actually in my products and what I was using. And I got used to reading ingredient labels and had to do a lot of research about how things were made and what those ingredients were and like alternative names for ingredients. And I would not wish it on anybody cause it was not fun and still is not fun at all, but that’s how I found out about EWG, the Environmental Wellness Group and how they have product ratings on different consumer products and they’ll rate all the ingredients.

And EWG verified products are basically products that are very safe for use and more natural. And so gradually over time, this is like four or five years later at this point. And I still have a couple of products that I would like to eventually swap out, mostly like the really strong cleaners that actually get stains out.

And stuff like that, that honestly are kind of helpful to keep around for those one off circumstances. But it took me so much time to swap all of my products because there are so many products that we use on a daily basis and we don’t really think about it. But then you open up like your medicine cabinet or just look in your shower and see how many decisions and how many products you have to research and then test out until you actually find one that you like.

And oh my gosh, it is a long process.

But at the same time, now that those decisions are made, I am so much happier and feel so much more confident with the way that I’m living my life and the things that I’m putting on my body on a daily basis. Especially going into motherhood, one of the first things I did the day that I took a pregnancy test, I took like eight pregnancy tests just to like, make sure, and then I was like, wow, this is happening.

Like, what do I do? Like, I need to do something, I’m guessing. So, of course, I Googled what to do when you get a positive pregnancy test, and there’s all these blogs of like, you know, the listicles of everything that you should do right away. And And I remember one of the first blogs I read said to start detoxing your products.

And I had such a feeling of relief at that point. It’s like, oh my gosh, one thing that I like figured out before I got pregnant, because the list as if you have ever had kids or been pregnant, the list of all the things that start getting added to your plate, especially for your first kid, it’s endless.

And so the feeling of having that one thing taken care of was so, it was such a relief just to know that my body was in a good place and I could use any of my products on my baby too, and it would be fine, but again, it took me four years, maybe five years at that point to get to the place where I did feel good about it. And it would not have happened overnight. It did take swapping one thing at a time, researching one product, testing one product at a time to get to that point. And that is true in any area of your life that you want to simplify or any area of your life that you want to improve.

It does take that commitment to small changes over time.

Okay, the third prerequisite for simplifying your life is to change your mindset to think that less is the solution instead of more.

And this one might seem simple, but I think this is one of the hardest ones. And I see it in myself all of the time. When I have a problem in my life, the automatic solution that my mind jumps to is like, well, a product would solve that or hiring somebody would solve that. Something more needs to be added to my life in order to solve this problem.

We’ve been renovating our house for a long time and I definitely see this whenever we go to a new room of the house and I’m trying to figure out like what the design plan is going to be or Caleb and I are figuring out how we’re going to renovate and, you know, how we’re going to make this space work for us, which has been quite the journey.

But every time I look at a new room, my mind automatically jumps to like, what can we add to it to make it functional? When in reality, what has been most helpful and most freeing is to remove as much as possible and to get rid of as much stuff as possible. And when we get rid of things, the design actually becomes a lot easier and a lot simpler.

I’m not a talented interior designer. I would say that I have good taste, maybe even optimistically above average taste when it comes to interior design, but I am nowhere near as skilled as an actual interior designer. And if I were to try to do complicated or complex design styles, especially maximalist interior design, which I actually really like when I see it done well, but if you’ve ever seen something that’s done in a maximalist style, it’s like, how can we include as much stuff as possible? And there’s a bunch of mixed materials and different patterns. It’s usually pretty colorful.

That is really hard to make it look good. I mean, it’s easy to include a bunch of crap in any given room and just shove as much stuff and like different colors and patterns as possible, but it’s really hard to make all of that look cohesive and like it’s designed well. And there’s so much in between minimalism and maximalism, there’s a huge spectrum of interior design in there.

But when I lean on the end of minimalism, design actually gets a lot easier. And I actually like what I’m able to create without having to be skilled. And also, things are organized better, they’re more functional. It’s cheaper because we don’t have to buy a whole bunch of stuff, but it’s hard when we’re looking at the Pinterest boards or looking for ideas for certain rooms of the house to jump to the conclusion that less would be better than having more.

I think the stereotypical example of this is like the Instapot where everyone’s like, you know, what’s going to make my life simpler? Getting an Instapot and then it takes up a bunch of space in your cupboard and you never use it. But I think for a lot of problems that we have in our homes or in our lives or in our businesses, even our minds jump to like, what do I need to get? What do I need to buy? The solution must be doing something more, right? Or adding a marketing channel or adding a offer or getting more clients. But a lot of times if you explore how could less be better, there are better solutions.

And there is so much evidence and research and science to show that we as women and just as humans thrive when we’re surrounded by less things, kids are more creative and more innovative when they have less toys. Women are less stressed when our homes are not filled with visual clutter.

And there are like a million and one benefits from spending time outside where there aren’t any things at all. But somehow our default is to always assume that is what is best for our health or our improvement or our relationships is like a new gadget or book or outfit or retail therapy. But that’s, it’s just not the solution.

Committing to simplifying your life does take a mindset shift to assume that less is going to be better than more.

Okay, and lastly, the fourth thing that is a prerequisite for simplifying your life is community. This Is just not something that you can do alone. Simplifying your life and living a slow and simple life is completely countercultural, and it’s probably not going to make you popular. No one likes being judged for their decisions. And if you do commit to slow and simple living, you’re probably going to be doing things a little bit differently than the people around you. And you might get judged for that you might make some people upset if you’re saying no to things or not doing the things that they feel obligated to do, but surrounding yourself by people who do share your values and who are experiencing the wins that you want to experience who are actually like cheering you on and supporting you as you simplify your life and who are also making changes in their own lives that may feel uncomfortable and are kind of like in it with you that can make or break your commitment level and like whether you stick with this for the long haul and whether you’re like brave enough and committed enough to make the changes that are going to be really hard in the short term or long term community makes a huge difference.

And going back to that story that I told earlier in the episode with my friend and how she challenged me to like, well, what are you rushing through cutting vegetables for? Like, what are you trying to spend more time on? Like, we do need people in our lives to push us a little bit, no matter how committed or passionate we are about simplifying our lives.

And like I said, there are a million ways to simplify your life. The simplified life does not look like a certain thing. It looks like a million different things. And you have to do it in a way that feels aligned to you and being surrounded by people who are implementing the same principle, but in different seasons of life or adapting to their specific situation or tailoring their life to their like season of business. It’s going to give you a lot of creative ideas for things that you might try. I need to see other people who are simplifying their lives to challenge me on what’s possible and also to give me ideas on how to do things differently and we all just get better. When we’re able to share that information and when we’re sharing our creativity and our ideas and what’s working and what’s not working, like, hey, we tried this and it was a complete flop, don’t waste your time doing it. That is so extremely helpful, cause like I said, simplifying your life is hard and we don’t need to make it harder on ourselves by trying to do it all on our own.

So, to sum up the four things that I think you need if you want to simplify your life, they were commitment, small changes over time, a mindset shift to less instead of more, and getting involved in community. And again, this is why I’m launching the Simplify Your Life membership. There are just so many books and resources that talk about the why of simplifying your life and most of them on very specific aspects like home organizing or simple recipe books, cleaning routines, stuff like that. But I have not been able to find anything that connects the why with the how, and a way that actually empowers people to build their own systems, like a whole life operating system, not just like this tiny niche area of your life that obviously this home cleaning expert is doing perfectly, which is not realistic for my life.

I need a process in a system for adapting all of these things and simplifying every area of my life in one place. I need a whole life approach and you do too, which is why I’m launching the membership. And of course, we’re going to have bite sized challenges an accountability and community every month to cheer you on and support you along your journey to committing to simplifying your life.

So again, if you’re interested in learning more, this is going to launch later this year and you can join the waitlist now using the link in the show notes.

So until next time, business minimalists, take what you learned today and get 1 percent better this week.