Inviting Calm into Your Life and Home: Emily P. Freeman and Myquillyn Smith

In our ongoing quest to squash the chaos in our lives, we’re talking to two experts (who are in fact sisters) who literally help us create space for our souls and our homes to breathe. Emily P. Freeman hosts the Do the Next Right Thing podcast where listeners flock to hear her soothing voice guide them with small ways to achieve mental clarity and avoid analysis paralysis when making decisions. Her sister, Myquillyn Smith, better known as The Nester, has the superpower of helping us create peace in the physical places we live with smart solutions that tweak our spaces to bring us calm–because when our homes feel out of control, our inner chaos rises as well.

Highlights from this discussion with Jen, Emily, and Myquillyn include:

• How Emily and Myquillyn played with their Barbies as young girls was indicative of the roads they chose later in life
• How sometimes the things that we are influenced to purchase to help us conquer chaos can become triggers for chaos (ie: THE BASKET PEOPLE)
• How to not get bogged down with the pressure to plan your whole life, and how looking at past decisions can inform the decisions you make in the future
• What it means to “quiet a room” in order to bring calm to your living spaces

Join Jen, Emily, and Myquillyn as we all seek a little refreshment for our lives and homes.

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Thought-Provoking Quotes

"We would play Barbies—like I'm talking multiple levels of Barbie life. But the thing is, the way we moved through our Barbie life as kids echoes into adulthood. It is the way that we live our lives as grownups." - Emily P. Freeman

"Decision making and discernment is not something we can quit, ignore, graduate, retire from, or often delegate. It is always with us. Unfortunately, sometimes it's great, sometimes it's not. And let's not forget it is a great privilege to be able to make a choice at all." - Emily P. Freeman

"There are tons of studies about clutter and chaos and what it does to our literal heartbeat, the stress that we feel." - Myquillyn Smith

"Our best teachers for decisions we are going to make in the future are the decisions we've already made in the past." Emily P. Freeman

"The work of discernment is so much less about what should I do or not do? It's about can I trust myself?" - Emily P. Freeman

“If you think of every single singular item in your space, having a voice over the months, over the years, maybe decades—it gets louder and louder.” - Myquillyn Smith

“We think creating a beautiful home is about what we add in, but often it's about what we remove.” - Myquillyn Smith

“If you cannot put your decision into a sentence, then it is not time to make the decision yet.” - Emily P. Freeman

Resources Mentioned in This Episode

The Next Right Thing Podcast

The Next Right Thing Book by Emily Freeman

The Next Right Thing Guided Journal by Emily Freeman

Emily P. Freeman's For the Love Podcast Episode

The Cozy Minimalist

17 Questions that Changed My Life by TIm Ferris