How to Style Your Home for Success in the New Year

Success, productivity and joy go hand in hand. Your home can bring you happiness or stress, and it affect how you feel when you're in your space. Is it dark and over-cluttered? Clutter over stimulates your nervous system, and causes all of your senses to work overtime; which can be taxing. It refocuses our attention on things that don’t matter. Clutter is frustrating and it makes relaxing impossible. This is why the first step to a successful home is to eliminate clutter. In addition, proper lighting, and a color scheme that promotes emotional wellness, will create an atmosphere enabling success in your daily life.

Below are 5 simple tips to help make your space work for your goals.

1. Declutter for a Clear Mind

The easiest way to create wellness in your home is to declutter quickly. Pick a room and toss any obvious trash. Expired coupons and magazines you've read aren't going to contribute to your success. Move any non-kitchen items out of the kitchen. Open the drawers in kitchen and bathrooms and toss anything expired, dried out, broken, or otherwise unusable. Go through your home office and re-evaluate any project you've put off whether for home or for work, and outsource it. Clearing your mind and schedule of un-met deadlines will open you up for opportunity to take on something new, a huge part of being successful.

2. Get Organized

This is the real reason you feel stuck. Clutter equals unmade decisions. Projects, papers, and home items pile up because you choose to do something else. Streamline your decision making by making purpose a catalyst for your decision making. Ask yourself these questions when organizing your space: 1) Where- are you trying to go? 2) What- are you trying to accomplish? 3) Why-Does it need to be done at all? 4) What- do you need to get it done? Keep the minimal required to reach your goals. All the other stuff in the way is what you eliminate.

3. Design for Good Habits

Create design in your home in a way that is conducive to your success. Start by eliminating the easy stuff. As you take into account each item you'd like to organize, ask yourself if the item serves as a catalyst for purpose in your life. Quickly sort items into definite yes, definite no, and maybe piles. Get rid of the obvious “no” pile first. Keep and establish places for things in the “yes” pile to live. The yes pile is the only pile that deserves spending money and time on an organizing system. Re-evaluate the “maybe” pile based on available space, and compatibility with your criteria. If space is tight, and it won't help you in your success, get rid of it.

4. Add Colors You Love

Discovering joy or inviting focus into your home is easily done by starting with the colors you love. This will keep you away from being bound by traditional color schemes for a particular style. Use a color from a favorite art piece, area rug or other inspiring object as your base color, then you can create a color scheme around it. Colors have significant psychological affects on mood, energy, and sense of well being, so be careful choosing a gray, for example, just because you see it everywhere- if gray does not give you a personal sense of peace or joy, it’s not a suitable color for your space.

5. Update Your Lighting

Lighting can be one of the most important design features for your home or office. Research shows that an appropriate amount of light will improve mood and energy levels, but poor lighting can contribute to depression and other issues in the body. The amount and variety of lighting will directly affect focus, appetite, attitude, and many other functions of daily life. When choosing lighting for your home, the purpose of each room will affect what function you want the lighting to achieve. For example, the kitchen, which is a work space, would most often demand brighter, 5000K (daylight) light while the living room may call for more mellow, warmer lighting at 2700K (warm light).

Taking just a few steps toward improving the feeling of your space to infuse joy, focus, and success will set the stage for your best year yet!

If you decide you'd like a professional to help design your most joyful space, don't be shy... we'd be happy to help!

Talk to you soon,

Suzanne