April 18, 2025
How Decluttering Can Increase Your Happiness (And Your Family's!) with Mary Beth MacKinnon (Ep. 24)
Drowning in stuff while navigating midlife transitions? Professional organizer Mary Beth McKinnon reveals why decluttering now might be the greatest gift you'll ever give your family.
Mary Beth shares her personal journey of helping clear out her mother's home after a move to assisted living—a process made doubly painful because her mother was simultaneously grieving her husband and her possessions. This experience transformed Mary Beth's perspective on our relationship with our things and sparked her mission to help others avoid leaving this burden for their children.
Far from just practical advice, this conversation explores the profound emotional aspects of our belongings.
BY THE TIME YOU FINISH LISTENING, YOU'LL DISCOVER:
- Compassionate strategies for getting started without becoming overwhelmed
- The best tip I've ever heard for cleaning out photos on your phone
- Ideas for helping family and friends with the clean out or downsizing process
- Ways to make the entire decluttering process less stressful
🎯 OMG Moment: Give yourself grace throughout the decluttering process. Perfectionism is the enemy of progress, and even small improvements create a sense of lightness and accomplishment that motivates continued effort.
TAKE ACTION:
Find Mary Beth on Instagram @marybeth.mackinnon - and keep enjoying her tips and tricks!
Grab your free StoryCycle resource from Cheryl to navigate the emotional challenges of this process as well.
Listen to Cheryl’s interview with paper organizing expert C. Lee Cawley.
WHY THIS EPISODE MATTERS:
Whether you're considering downsizing, helping parents through transitions, or simply feeling weighed down by decades of accumulated possessions, this episode provides both the practical tools and the mindset shifts needed to create more space—both physical and emotional—in your midlife.
Find all the coaching and podcast resources at cherylpfischer.com.
00:00 - Midlife Transitions and Stuff Overload
04:07 - Mary Beth's Journey to Professional Organizing
08:42 - The Emotional Side of Downsizing
14:07 - Where to Start Decluttering
21:23 - Tackling Photos and Digital Memories
34:02 - Small Steps and Self-Compassion
38:07 - Final Advice and OMG Moment
WEBVTT
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You're listening to this podcast right now because, like me, you're in your midlife phase and people ask me a lot what is that?
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Well, 40s, 50s, early 60s, I would say we're trying to figure things out and we're in a lot of transition.
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Maybe it's with our parents, with our kids, with both, with our job, everything, wah, everywhere.
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What about looking around our house and noticing we have a lot of stuff and do we want to have that stuff?
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Or what about our parents?
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Do they still have a lot of stuff?
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Should we help with that in some way?
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How would we do that?
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These are tough conversations and not an easy topic.
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And, at the same time, if we can do some of that clean out now, what about the freeing feeling, the sort of emotional happiness that it could potentially bring?
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Let's talk about it.
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Welcome to Mind your Midlife, your go-to resource for confidence and success, one thought at a time.
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Unlike most advice out there, we believe that simply telling you to believe in yourself or change your habits isn't enough to wake up excited about life or feel truly confident in your body.
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Each week, you'll gain actionable strategies and oh my goodness powerful insights to stop feeling stuck and start loving your midlife.
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This is the Mind your Midlife Podcast.
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This past year, my sister and I worked for a long time and, to be fair, she more than I she's in the area.
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We worked for a long time on cleaning out my mom's house as she has settled into assisted living, and this is a story that I'm sure you could change the names and enter your name and a family member's name or a close friend's name into a similar story at this phase in your life and as we were going through this, stuff was just coming out of every crack and crevice.
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Stuff was coming out of everywhere and it's hard to deal with that.
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You don't know what to do with everything, and these maybe are things that matter to people, but do you know whether they matter to people?
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So many, so many tough decisions, and we ended up talking to each other about the fact that you know we don't want to have our kids have to go through this at whatever point.
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That would be appropriate, because now we see it is hard, and so today I am excited to be chatting with my guest, who I have actually known for many years.
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We're both in the Washington DC area and she's going to walk us through this subject, which can be very emotional and challenging and also, if you take some of the pieces of advice that she's going to give us, really emotionally freeing and just I'm trying to describe this feeling of lightness I get when I get rid of a bag of stuff and the desk looks a little better or the closet looks a little more open.
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It's such a great light feeling if we can figure out how to do it and not drive ourselves nuts.
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So my guest today, mary Beth McKinnon, is a professional organizer and a decluttering expert.
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She has a fantastic and huge following on Instagram because she gives such great tips and she's hilarious doing it.
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So I am excited that she's going to help us with this whole.
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When do I clean out?
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How do I clean out situation.
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Welcome, mary Beth.
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Thanks for joining me.
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Thanks, I'm happy to be here.
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This is going to be fun.
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So tell us first of all, how did you end up even working as an organizer?
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It was sort of a fluke, just kind of a weird set of circumstances.
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I've had a lot of different jobs in my life.
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I've never just sort of been the kind of person that graduated from college and like, boom, this is my job.
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I've been an entrepreneur, I've done lots and lots of different things and I was always really interested in organizing.
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I organized myself, I just thought it was really fun, which I've now found out that most organizers have that brain Like we think it's fun At least someone does Right.
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Other people, like, dread the thought of it and I loved it, and so for many years I thought about doing it as a career, but I didn't know how, I didn't know what I needed to do to do it, and it turns out you basically can just say hi, I'm an organizer and you're an organizer If you know what you're doing.
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To become a certified organizer there's certainly a very, very long process, but I joined NAPO, which is the National Association for Organizers, and I connected with some friends and I just sort of hung my hat.
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My sister was my first client.
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I basically went to her house during COVID and helped her organize, and that's when I realized how much I really loved it.
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I woke up in the morning at seven o'clock and I was so excited to work and I thought I haven't had this kind of excitement doing something in a really long time.
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So I came home and I told my husband, hey, I think I'm going to be an organizer, and he's like all right.
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So that's what I did.
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If I may say, cheers to all the husbands out there who say, oh, okay, cause mine is the same and I have changed a lot of times what I'm doing.
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And he's like, uh, okay, and I love that yeah.
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Yeah, it was.
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He was super supportive and it's been the one and I think he also saw like how excited I was and I started working a job just assisting another like very seasoned organizer.
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It was my very first job like real job and he saw how excited I was every day when I left the house, Like he hadn't seen that in a long time and so I think just the fact that he knew how much, how happy I was, just you know, made everybody happy he knew how much, how happy I was.
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just, you know, made everybody happy.
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I mean, I know, if you're listening to this right now and you're getting frustrated because you're thinking I am not happy when I go to work in the morning, I know I, we know how lucky you are.
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That's amazing.
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It's amazing that you found that.
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Yeah yeah, yeah, and I found it at 55.
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So, like you, it is never too late to change your career.
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It is never too late to do to find that thing that you love.
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It's just not, thank you for that.
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That's such a good point, absolutely Okay.
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So now we have to get into the emotion of it, because you are talking about how this is fun and I'm glad it's fun, and everyone should have something to do that is fun.
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I think what I do right now is fun, and we're going to talk about cleaning out before a loss, and by that I mean it could be parents' house, it could be our own house, thinking ahead that our kids don't have to clean it out.
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This is hard stuff, yeah.
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So tell us about your realizations related to doing this ahead of the emotional impact.
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Yeah, so I discovered this with my mom.
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So my dad passed away It'll be 10 years in June, 10 years ago and my dad always wanted to downsize.
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He did not want to be living in the big house anymore.
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He wanted to downsize.
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And my mom was a very lovely yet quite stubborn woman and she loved her house and she loved her stuff and she had absolutely no desire to live somewhere smaller or get rid of any of her things.
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She was very, very happy where she was and it was okay.
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My dad was 80.
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She was five years younger, so she was 75.
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And they were still both seemingly quite healthy until my dad had a stroke.
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It's very unexpected.
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He was just and lost all of his, everything on the left side of his body.
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He had to go through therapy and learn how to talk and walk and do all the things and this is a man who was very active and all of that happened and it was very stressful for the whole family and the house was very big and there were all these things they had to do and my dad couldn't do it anymore and my mom had some mobility issues and she couldn't mow the lawn or do those things, and so it just became like this sort of thing while he was still living.
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That was like we really need to get them to move.
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And then he had another stroke, ends up passing away and leaves my mom with all this stuff.
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And so after about a year we realized that we just had to move her into somewhere smaller.
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It was just no longer safe.
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It was also really expensive the upkeep and all of that stuff.
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And so as we were going through her home and we were getting rid of things, she was losing not only her stuff, but she was losing my dad like all over again, because she had that grief.
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She was still like very, very deep in grief and then she was grieving like this you know this water bottle that I've had since I was 25, like all these things that you know, like we were taking everything away from her.
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And so I just sort of came to this realization that if I can save my children from that pain because it was very painful for my sister and I to see my mom going through that and if I can save my kids that pain from having to deal with that with me and my husband, that would be wonderful.
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But then also I want to be able to make the decisions with my spouse or whoever I am living with.
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What are the things that are important for me to keep as I age and when I'm ready to downsize, and I would like to not have to make that decision without my person.
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Yeah, like.
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I want to do that together and I don't want him to have to.
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You know, if he has to downsize, well, he'll probably just be like, yeah, just take it.
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I mean I don't know what he'll, what he'll think, but I mean, I think he actually probably will be in grief as well, I hope.
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But it's just, it's hard, Like they just, you know, you don't know, you don't know what, what I don't necessarily know what my husband might want to bring as we downsize.
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Right, I might, I don't really know what might be important to him, right?
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So I think making those kinds of decisions together and not leaving them to your children and then also just not leaving a gigantic house full of stuff for your kids to take care of, like is like the biggest blessing that you can give your family Like it really really is.
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I really, really agree with you and that is why I wanted to do this episode, because this is a hard topic and maybe I might normally not talk about something kind of this hard to think about on this particular podcast.
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But also the way you describe it is a shift in thinking too.
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It's a mindset shift.
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And what you're saying is how do I want to say this?
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I think maybe because I've gone through this with my mom and I think the way we might normally think is that we've had this whole big life and now we have to give up all our stuff, like that's awful, it's not fair, we feel defeated, why can't we have the stuff that we earned?
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And you're flipping it and you're saying let's do it now and feel maybe better about the process and have the emotions be easier to handle, kind of yeah, yeah, absolutely, absolutely.
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And you know I have an aunt who is very much in the thought of like getting rid of stuff.
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She has one child and she's like I don't want to burden him and she said I'm already going through, like my pictures, and if it's stuff that I don't even know, she's like I'm throwing it away because I don't want him to have to to deal with that stuff.
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And so it's, it is a gift to give your family if you can do it and also while you're still healthy and you know, some of the stuff you just you don't need, like you just we have so much stuff we don't need so much.
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Yeah, and you know, the funny thing is, as I've been getting ready to talk to you about this, I have this system that I use for my clothes in my closet, because I don't have that big of a closet, because we actually downsized five years ago.
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But I'll turn the hangers like backwards and then if a year has gone by and I've not flipped it around because I've worn it, I get rid of it, and I'm really adamant about that.
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But yet I have junk drawers and closets full of who knows what.
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So I'm not really applying the system everywhere and I guess I need to be Well it's just still it's little bits at a time.
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Yeah Well, okay.
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So then let's take in that direction.
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Let's say that someone is listening and feeling like all right, yeah, I have a lot of stuff and maybe I should start cleaning out.
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Where do we even start you?
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just pick one place.
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You just pick one thing.
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You can't, I tell everybody, you cannot expect to declutter or downsize your whole house in a weekend, right, you just can't.
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Like you're just setting yourself up for defeat.
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So you start one thing at a time, like I, with my clients, with my friends, with my following on Instagram, like my whole thing is what can we declutter in 30 minutes or less in a day, or five minutes or less in a day?
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What is something that we can take a little bit of and get rid of, and that is that seems so much more manageable of and get rid of, and that is that seems so much more manageable.
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And so if you have success decluttering your junk drawer and you can do that in a half hour, then you're going to, when you go into, like get your you know your pen or your scissors or your chapstick or whatever it is, you're like, oh my gosh.
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Like look at this junk drawer, like it looks so nice.
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I think I want to do my coffee mugs next.
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And you just do little things.
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You know, every day you do something because we're you know we're so overwhelmed right now.
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You know we're the sandwich generation.
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We're dealing with our kids who are in college or young adults.
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We're dealing with our aging parents who are in assisted living or nursing homes or having dementia or all the things, and we're still trying to work and make a living and make our husbands happy and do all the things.
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We don't have time to sit around and do the entire closet in a day, so little things.
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Do your t-shirts, do an office drawer, all those kinds of things?
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Do your stuff that needs to be shredded from your filing cabinet?
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Do you know that millennials and Gen Zs they don't have filing cabinets.
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They don't have paper.
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I'm jealous of them honestly.
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I know they don't keep paper.
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Everything is automated for them and for us Gen Xers and baby boomers, we have a really hard time wrapping our heads around that.
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Like getting rid of the paper.
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Like we are, you know, our paper is like our parents' tinfoil and baggies, like you know how they wash their tinfoil and baggies and they would, you know, reuse.
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Like for us, it's the paper I just have.
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And even for me as an organizer, like you can see, I have a four drawer file cabinet really hard for me to get rid of paper and I'm I'm getting, I'm trying to get my bills automated.
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I just don't really like to see all the things.
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So, and and for those of you listening, let me just say in the show notes I'm going to link an episode I did back in the previous, the previous version of the podcast with a paper organizer because this is the perfect thing If somebody's thinking oh, that's my problem.
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And we need to go listen to that episode.
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Okay, so what if let's?
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That's a great answer for starting on our own house, apartment, whatever.
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What if it's someone else probably a parent, but someone else and we want to help them get started?
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How do you have any advice for that?
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Because that's tricky, it is very tricky and you have to start like.
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You have to come at it obviously from a place of love and a place of like service, like I want to help you.
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Some people are going to be very amenable to that and they are going to they.
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They will welcome that help Other people.
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It can be very difficult, especially if there's any kind of hoarding disorder, anything like that.
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That's a really a whole nother ball game and in that situation I would recommend hiring a professional like mental health counselor to help with that.
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Because even as a professional organizer, I don't typically work with hoarders because they're they're not messy, because they just, you know, had too many things like that.
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It's it's a mental health condition.
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So you have to really be equipped to deal with somebody like that.
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But if it's like your parents, you have to literally come at them just from a place of love and a very, very deep place of patience, because they, you know they're sometimes they're going to feel like you're trying to take things away from them.
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If you, if you come to them and I wish I would have known this, you know, with my parents, because if I would have come to them and said hey, I want you guys to make these decisions together, like I don't want you to have to make this when dad's gone or dad, I don't want you to have to do this when mom's gone.
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I want you to do this together and I will help you.
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And then also, sometimes bringing in an organizer, bringing in a third party, can be really, really helpful, because there's a lot of family emotions when it comes to this stuff.
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But when you have a third party there, sometimes that third party can really help bridge that gap between the emotion and what needs to happen.
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And you have to just also, my sister and I were very we were probably a little mean with my mom and when we were making her get rid of stuff and pack up her house, like we just we were like you're moving into a two bedroom apartment, you don't need two 30 cup percolators, like you just don't anymore, like you don't make that much coffee, and so we just you know we had to give her some tough love, yeah, but you have to just sort of read the room and you have to be able to assess, like, what your relationship is with that parent.
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Sometimes you might even have to step away and just let an organizer come in and help do the work.
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But if you have parents that are, you know, I was talking to a friend who I've actually also been working with and her father just had a heart episode and his wife passed away a few years ago.
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He lives alone and he flat out refuses help.
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He refuses like any, and this is like health help, like in-home healthcare, like refuses.
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So sometimes you have a parent like that that just is going to like they're, they're just they're just gonna say no, and you have to respect that.
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You can't you really can't make them do things that they're not ready for or they don't want to do.
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But you can find ways to encourage them.
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You know you can.
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Yeah, because that's that's really all you can do.
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I really love what you said about encouraging them to make the decision together while the two of them are still together.
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That, just it, speaks to me and, to be honest with you, my parents are divorced.
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They are not together, so that would not have worked in my situation.
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However, it's a caring way of bringing it up that I would not have thought of.
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Yeah, yeah, and it also comes down to too, like I was.
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I was really sort of like hit.
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My mom passed away almost a year ago and she had dementia and she was in a nursing home at the end for the last like nine months of her life.
00:20:23.791 --> 00:20:36.579
And I would go in to see her in her room and out of her 86 years of life, all she had left was a recliner, a nightstand, a lamp and a few pictures on the wall.
00:20:36.579 --> 00:20:37.623
That was it.
00:20:37.623 --> 00:20:41.553
And because she had dementia, she didn't know that that was all she had left.
00:20:42.942 --> 00:20:45.247
But we collect all these things.
00:20:45.247 --> 00:21:01.520
We think we have to have all these things all the time around us, particularly our parents, our generation, the boomers, the Gen Xs because that's just sort of how we were brought up and our parents it was the depression, you know.
00:21:01.520 --> 00:21:13.871
And thankfully our kids now are way more minimalist, like they don't want stuff, like that trend, that change is happening and it's really awesome to see.
00:21:13.871 --> 00:21:18.073
Like it's gonna probably put me out of business, but that's okay, like that's okay.
00:21:18.073 --> 00:21:24.508
You know, I read this article one time titled our kids don't want our brown furniture.
00:21:25.169 --> 00:21:29.983
Oh, like gosh, you know, they just don't, they don't want grandma's hutch.
00:21:29.983 --> 00:21:31.727
I'm sorry, yeah, yeah.
00:21:31.727 --> 00:21:35.452
So it's just, you know, we just all have too much.
00:21:35.452 --> 00:21:44.086
We all have too much and we have to get to the point where we're okay with, like, letting that too much go and be okay with having less.
00:21:44.500 --> 00:21:50.020
You know, one of the things I've heard people in, let's say, gen Z say and obviously we're both.
00:21:50.020 --> 00:21:57.087
This is very general, everyone might be different but one of the things I've heard them say is well, we want experiences.
00:21:57.087 --> 00:22:04.333
We don't need the stuff, we want the experiences, because then we have the memories and I have started to love that perspective.
00:22:05.862 --> 00:22:41.521
Yeah, and that's a really great thought too and that is also something that you can go at with your parents, with, or whoever you're helping through this process is we want you to be able to enjoy your retirement, to enjoy your grandchildren, to be able to do things with us, and why don't we get you to a place where you're more comfortable, where you don't have so much stuff, and then you don't have to worry about cleaning the house all the time or having the lawn mowed or the garden or whatever it is, and then maybe you can come visit us or we can go on vacation together or we can do things that we love.
00:22:41.521 --> 00:22:46.492
That are experiences, and you're not going to be so tied to your home and your stuff.
00:22:46.980 --> 00:22:47.299
Yeah.
00:22:47.299 --> 00:23:22.112
You know, yeah, and I think, as you said, some people will really get it and will be absolutely open to doing it, and other people are not going to get it and are going to absolutely not be open to doing this and are going to feel like we're trying to take their stuff away and we have to be made, and then that's really hard for everybody, because people are forced to move into a situation that they never wanted to do and then a lot of times they can't even make those decisions.
00:23:22.875 --> 00:23:33.347
You know, and that's even something that kids can talk to their parents about, like, do you want to have something happen and have to move into assisted living and not even be able to come back to your house and figure out what you want to take with you?
00:23:33.347 --> 00:23:35.632
Right, you know, because that happens a lot.
00:23:35.632 --> 00:23:37.075
Yeah, happened to my mom.
00:23:38.500 --> 00:23:43.130
Okay, I'm going to brighten it up again, yeah.
00:23:43.450 --> 00:23:45.114
Stop talking about depressing things.
00:23:46.839 --> 00:23:49.806
Important but also difficult, and that's fair.
00:23:49.806 --> 00:24:00.941
So one of my I always joke that one of my love languages is pictures, and that's not really a love language, but it's still like I love my pictures, I love having pictures.
00:24:00.941 --> 00:24:04.369
I have them on the wall in the stairway, all over whatever phone.
00:24:04.369 --> 00:24:10.488
Of course, let's say that we start going through our pictures and we say we want to clean out.
00:24:10.488 --> 00:24:13.032
Do you, do you have some advice on that?
00:24:13.032 --> 00:24:23.207
Because to me, like I have album upon album upon album and boxes and my mom has slides and you know it's all kinds of stuff, okay so well, let's talk about our photos first.
00:24:23.488 --> 00:24:26.500
okay, because again, this is where our kids are.
00:24:26.500 --> 00:24:29.968
Have the the niceness they don't have to deal with this.
00:24:29.968 --> 00:24:41.484
All their pictures are on their phones and if they want them, they will print them, but they're not like us who you had to send the film off to the clerk or whoever and get doubles.
00:24:41.484 --> 00:24:44.330
So you had two pictures of everything.
00:24:44.330 --> 00:24:46.721
Because, oh, my goodness, what if we don't?
00:24:46.721 --> 00:24:52.141
What if we lose one, like, yes, the doubles, we have doubles of everything, right?
00:24:52.480 --> 00:25:06.387
So what I am doing right now for myself with my photos because, again, I'm just like you, I have a lot of photo albums of pictures, because when I got those pictures back, I would take the half and I would just stick them in my album.
00:25:06.387 --> 00:25:16.667
And I've started going through all of those photo albums and I'll do it just when I'm sitting down and watching tv at night, like just hanging out, and I go through them.
00:25:16.667 --> 00:25:25.201
If there are any pictures in those albums that are like blurry because, yes, I saved the blurry ones of, like the back of someone's head.
00:25:25.201 --> 00:25:27.163
If they're people, I don't even know who they are.
00:25:27.163 --> 00:25:40.346
If they're, uh, suns my dad had about 700 metric tons of sunset photos like vacation photos from you know, like landscape picture.
00:25:40.346 --> 00:25:44.810
So I had so many of those and some of them I will keep.
00:25:44.810 --> 00:25:53.444
But for the most part I've been going through my photo albums and pulling out bad pictures, pictures that I don't know, people, pictures that are just like why is that there?
00:25:53.444 --> 00:25:55.869
And throwing them away.
00:25:56.109 --> 00:26:03.243
As a starting place, I used to be a scrapbooker so I did scrapbooks for my family.
00:26:03.243 --> 00:26:09.741
I have one kid up to eighth grade and one kid up to sixth grade and they actually love their scrapbooks.
00:26:09.741 --> 00:26:12.228
I kind of want to finish them through high school.
00:26:12.228 --> 00:26:14.873
That may be a retirement job, I don't know.
00:26:14.873 --> 00:26:18.990
But so I still have some pictures that I printed out that I've saved, that I'm going to do that for.
00:26:18.990 --> 00:26:26.413
But the stuff from like me when I was like single and stupid not not all of those things need to be saved.
00:26:26.413 --> 00:26:37.903
Like they're still in photo albums, but like my kids aren't going to care, like they're just they're not going to want any of those.
00:26:37.903 --> 00:26:38.346
So I think it's just.
00:26:38.346 --> 00:26:41.155
You know you can keep them for yourself, but you can tell your kids you have permission to get rid of these when I'm gone.
00:26:41.155 --> 00:26:43.201
Like, if you still like them and enjoy looking at them.
00:26:43.201 --> 00:26:46.571
Keep the, keep the good ones, just go through and sort them, sort them out.
00:26:47.440 --> 00:26:56.692
If you have pictures of like family, like your parents, like your, like my mom, when I had to go through her stuff, I threw away every single picture of someone I did not know she had.
00:26:56.692 --> 00:27:05.513
She was like she had so many pictures, black and whites, of like stuff from her childhood stuff from, I mean, and her.
00:27:05.513 --> 00:27:09.990
She had a large family but her closest sister had passed away.
00:27:09.990 --> 00:27:11.492
I knew a lot of the other.
00:27:11.492 --> 00:27:16.108
Her other sisters wouldn't know who the people were and I didn't want to burden them with the stuff.
00:27:16.108 --> 00:27:19.542
So I looked at my sister and I was like, is it okay if I throw these away?
00:27:19.542 --> 00:27:24.862
And she was like, yep, so we, just we got rid of a lot, a lot of stuff.
00:27:24.862 --> 00:27:29.292
There are a couple of different companies that will do digitization services.
00:27:29.292 --> 00:27:39.708
So if you do have some special old photographs, slides, videotapes, you can get them digitized, which is what I did with all of our like home videos.
00:27:39.708 --> 00:27:45.032
Okay, because I, you know again, like with our kids, we had everything on the video camera.
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