National Honesty Day: Accept Yourself
As some of you may know, April 30th is National Honesty Day. Honesty means telling the truth and being honest with others, obviously. But it also means challenging yourself to be honest about who you are, what you represent, and how you present yourself to the outside world. Sounds easy enough, right? Wrong! We may not be aware of it, but many of us go through countless machinations to present a certain ‘front’ to strangers, coworkers, even friends. We are that uncomfortable with genuine interactions in today’s society and driven by social ‘norms’ that we hide our true selves from people, thinking we won’t be accepted if we shed that armour.
The ‘truth’ is, we are much more apt to be successful at work and in life if we are true to ourselves and behave in an open and genuine manner. ‘To thine own self be true’ is an adage to live by in this age of hiding behind screens and curated profiles of who we are and how we live. None of these curated images depict reality: they only feed the notion that our lives are picture-perfect. In reality, the images are depicting a single moment in time, just before the kids have a tantrum, or fall off the bike, or you burn the souffle (that picture definitely stays off Instagram, am I right?).
One of our mottos is “No Shame, No Blame”. This means that once you find out what your personality type is, you accept it and work with it to best succeed. You can take the Pixie Quiz as many times as you like, but chances are, you’re going to end up with the same result again and again. Whether or not you choose to honor that result and work within the confines of it is up to you.
Pixie Mentality
We founded Pixies Did It! We exist with the intention of giving individuals a roadmap to organizational freedom and peace. Our first question was: How does one know how they organize unless they first know what personality type he or she is? For the two go hand in hand, as our book shows. For instance, if you are someone who needs to see things in order to remember them, you need to create contained piles of paperwork or bills in clear containers in order to avoid filing and forgetting about them. If you are an anal type A personality, you need to learn how to communicate your ways of organizing things to the rest of the people in your family (who are probably not as nitpicky as you when it comes to organizing processes). The key is to learn who you are as an organizer, and then to accept that result so that you can move forward in the organizational process with ease and comfort.
Pixie Principle Number One
The very first Pixie Principle is: Know and Accept Who You Are. This is the first principle for a reason. If this principle doesn’t happen, the rest won’t either, and nothing will get done. Our goal is to show you as clients, consumers (and fellow humans) that by accepting your personality type, you are opening the door to getting organized in a way that will be easiest for you personally. In a way that is tailor-made for your individual personality and way of living in the world.
A brilliant quote by Katie states: “If we just try enough, find enough time, or get off the couch, we’re convinced that we’re going to have a magazine-perfect home.” This is the opposite of what we are trying to achieve by coming up with personality types for you to match with. The magazine-perfect home is just that: confined to a magazine. Perfect homes exist nowhere else. Once we’ve accepted that fact, we’re off to a much more realistic and productive start in our organizational journey. That said, if we are Organic Freedoms and write things on our hands, and aren’t necessarily organized people in the typical sense, we might feel pressured to squeeze ourselves into the Organic Structure personality type, or even the Classic Freedom personality type, both of whom are more traditionally ‘organized’. However, doing this wriggle dance will do no one any good in the end. The key here, once again, is to figure out what works best for YOU. If you’re an Organic Freedom, OWN it! Love yourself just the way you are, and know that in knowing who that is, you’re a step ahead of the game.
The better you know and accept yourself, the better you’ll be able to know where to put things so that retrieval is easy. And retrieval (one of the other most important Pixie Principles) is the key to being organized. It doesn’t matter if you’re Sally Homemaker or Miss Piggy — if you can easily remember where things are when you need them, you are an organized person. Imagine that!
So take the time to not only explore the book and take the quiz, but really sit and contemplate how you best like to do things. Understanding who you are and how you operate is the key to unlocking your greatest organizational potential.