Professional organizer breaks down his unusual job (exclusive)

In 2014, when Kayleen Kelly quit her job in the legal field to take her professional organizational company full -time, she thought she started a company that would mainly consist of putting stylish labels on things, making messy homes for “beautiful homes” and taking before and after photos.

She soon realized that her new job – born of her “natural talent” for organization – was much less about beautification and aesthetics than it was about the people she earned.

“Very quickly I realized that the mess and trauma, there is a strong link there, and the people who called me went through really dark seasons in their lives,” Kelly says exclusively about her unique profession.

When people think of professional organizers, they often think of the aesthetically curated, “Home Edit, Marie Kondo” type of organizer, which focuses directly on curating a beautiful, aesthetically pleasing, even instagramable space.

According to Kelly, it’s just one side of the industry. The other side is hers.

“Then you have the behavioral side,” she explains. “So it is chronic messy habits, trauma. And so very quickly I took projects that I call the chronic mess. It is high level that has taken over the whole house, and it has really hindered the functionality throughout the home.”

Many who are looking for Kelly’s service struggle with mental health problems, trauma, injuries, illness, undergo a divorce or experience the death of a loved one and reach out to Kelly to take on projects that they may not have the mental energy for.

“There is a lot of shame and stigma about having the mess,” says Kelly.

According to his experience, there is also a difference between hamstring and chronic mess, and explaining the difference between the two is part of the work she does to unload the mess in homes.

According to American psychiatric associationPeople with a hamstrings disorder experience “persistent difficulties to get rid of or dismissal with possessions because of an perceived need to save the objects.”

While a home with the chronic mess can look much like a hamstring situation, the difference between the two, according to Kelly, is that individuals with a chronic mobility are willing to declutter, but may not just know where to start.

Over the years working with their customers, many of whom have depression, anxiety or even post -traumatic stress disorder, Kelly has developed a mantra: “You do not need to be therapist to be therapeutic.”

By 2020, Kelly says she took her experience online to help people globally. Kelly, who publishes her content under his tictoch, Instagram and Facebook Accounts now have a great consequence on all her platforms. Her videos often get viral and her page @Kayleenkellyorganize At Tiktok, a total of over five million likes have.

Her content breaks down her tips and tricks for viewers who want to decorate their lives – including her appropriately named “Declutter Core” method. The success of her social media has enabled Kelly to scale back her business in recent years.

When she first started working from Jacksonville, Florida, Kelly hired teams to help her. Now, based from the Seattle area, Kelly organized organization-related tasks will complete twice a week-with the success of her social media to supplement her income.

Kelly does all physical work on gathering garbage, categorizing other objects, cutting out unwanted objects and finally containing them (the four steps in the declutter method) for their clients themselves to preserve their mental energy for the toughest part of the job: to make a decision to cut and what to clean out.

“It is very common for professional organizers to work with their customers practically, such as going in and having the client to sort with them, categorize, move things around, organize, do all this,” says Kelly. “I have never had a client who works with me or does the practical work. I do all that myself.”

Her three seconds of rule is one of her biggest tips she suggests only when clients look at declutter.

When you want to declutter, people should make sure they can see everything in the category they focus on. By going through each object individually and determining “yes” or “no”, the process becomes even more manageable. But the kicker? If you hesitate for more than three seconds, the item is an automatic hold.

The objects that Kelly sees people struggle with declitting most are clothing and paperwork, and which remains pretty much the same over most people she has worked with.

But after spending so many years in the organizational space, Kelly has seen some things that are not necessarily the norm.

“The weirdest thing I ever organized was a wig collection for cats,” says Kelly. “I color coded all the wigs and all different styles.”

She continues, she says: “I have done strange projects like it, and people have odd collections. But for me I am just, I am so robot with my categorization that it just becomes their own category, and I do not pay so much attention to it. So it is, it is hard to say,” Oh, this was the strangest, because it is the same method “in all individual projects”

While Kelly’s job is physically and mentally demanding, what keeps her up to the emotional change she sees in clients – especially during what she calls the best part of her job: The Final Reveal.

“When I meet these people, they wave with a white flag and they say,” Come to save me, I pull, “she says.” I see the appearance of their face at the end of the session. You can’t beat it. That’s what makes me come back. ”