52: Declutter Your Space to Have More Time and Energy to Rock Your Mom-Life with Abby Haggard

I’m excited to share this amazing interview with you all today. I had the blessing of meeting up Abby Haggard of The Fullness Show to chat about her new course releasing this week. There’s so much heart and fire in Abby when she talks about freeing up your time and space to show up fully for the ones you love more. I can’t wait for you to meet her and glean the wisdom and divine inspiration from her words in this episode and beyond. 

“Free yourself up for what actually matters”

Abby Haggard

Say Yes to Less for a Motherhood of Fullness.

Brittni: Welcome in my friends to this episode of Meant To Bloom. Today I have a very special guest. It’s Abby from The Fullness Show. Abby, go ahead and tell us a little bit about you. Let my listeners get to know you some. 

Abby: Yay. Thank you, Brittni. I’m so glad to be here. This is a huge treat for me. I’ve followed you for a little while and love your content, love your community, and so I’m excited to be here.

I am a stay-at-home mom, wife and mom to five little kiddos right now. And my entire mission, my entire heart is to help women and especially mothers find fullness in the season that they’re in. Not when their kids are out of the house, not when they have time to themselves, not when they’ve gotten a great night’s sleep or not when they’ve, you know, spent time doing X, Y, Z.

But right now, in the season that they’re in, and my whole mission is to just simplify and bring them into a place of fullness in their motherhood and in their life right now. Because ultimately, when we thrive as moms, everybody thrives. There’s that, you know, lovely saying that says Moms, when mama ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy.

Moms are the heartbeat of the home in a lot of ways and. I wanna help moms, make that heartbeat sound, and life giving and calm and peaceful and just, just create beautiful environments for their homes and their families to be raised in. And that’s my, that’s my whole mission. So I’m excited to partner with you.

I feel like we have the same kind of heart and mindset and I know that this conversation is gonna help a lot of women. And that’s what I’m here. 

B: Yeah. Oh my gosh, yes. I was gonna say like your heart is so aligned with mine. Your mission’s so aligned with mine, and I love it. I love like the multiple perspectives that we get when we align our missions together and it’s like, Oh, we’re, we’re wanting the same goal, but we both have like such a different approach and history behind it. And yes, I just love the connection.

A: Yes, me too.

B: I’m real excited for all the women who are gonna end up following both of us from now, listening to you online, and they’re gonna come over to you and be like, Oh yes, Brittni never talked about that. I know something different, but it’s leading me down the same path to like happiness, all of that. I love that.

A: I love it. Yeah. That’s beautiful. So excited for it.

B: All right, so Abby, what was like the big thing that led you to Seeking Abundant Life to know that there was more?

A: That is such a good question and I’m gonna try to keep it brief. I feel like that’s so hard to do. My like big moment came when I came to the end of myself. I don’t know if you’re familiar with the Enneagram, but I’m an eight on the Enneagram. And the eight is a very self-driven. They’re known as the snow plow of the personality types where if we’re going to do something, and if you get in my way, we’ll run you over because we’re on a mission.

I’m a healthy eight, which is really good. I’ve worked really hard to get there so I don’t necessarily run people over anymore, but I definitely have this mindset of like, I can do it. I can do it. Just get outta my way, let me do it. And I took that approach with motherhood too. It’s a good approach with fostering and adoption and all the things that we have found ourselves in.

And when I came to the end of myself, it wasn’t pretty, It wasn’t polished. It wasn’t beautiful. It was ugly. It was broken, and it was, it felt very, very raw. When I got there, I was overwhelmed. I was stressed out. I wasn’t enjoying my life. I wasn’t enjoying my motherhood. I felt trapped in this, you know, season of life.

And it was kind of like I had this true encounter with God where he was just like, Are you ready to let me lead now? Like, are you ready to surrender this life that I actually died to give you? And I’ve actually promised you this full and abundant life. You’re trying to do it on your own when I actually have the grace that you need to do it.

And I started this journey of just truly surrendering my heart and my life to the Lord again when I thought I had already done that. And started walking that out. Truly, truly, every day, five minutes at a time like, God, I need you, God, I need you. I cannot do this without you. God. I need you. And when I started doing that, I started finding myself in conversations of  encouragement and like pointing me in a direction of “you can change your life.”

Like you can change the way you think, you can change the way you do things. You have power and permission to do that. And was ultimately led to a beautiful, beautiful mentor that has been my mentor for the last four or five years, Ally Casazza, which we share. She’s also your mentor, your business mentor, and I realized that she did it.

She literally changed the narrative of her story and her motherhood. And I was like, I know, I know that in the scripture it says in John 10:10, it talks about how Jesus came to give life and life more abundant. The enemy he came to steal, kill and destroy. And that’s where I was, that’s where I felt like I was, And Jesus was saying, I have this for you.

It’s not just something like, when you accept me as your savior, you’re not just accepting, you know, a free ticket to heaven. You are, you’re accepting a new birthright. You’re accepting a new identity. You’re accepting an inheritance from heaven. You’re accepting the power that’s lit in me, that is now in you when you say yes to me and that full life is yours.

That abundant life is yours. You just have to walk in it. It wasn’t hard. It’s not hard. It’s not striving. It’s not getting everything right. It’s not reading your Bible every day. It’s not spending time every day. It’s not all these rules and regulations that we find ourselves in. It’s literally saying, it’s literally like opening up your entire mindset to say, God, what do you wanna do? 

Like, what do you wanna do? Because I was living in this pattern. I’m sorry, this is a long, long answer, but I was living in this mindset and this pattern of like, I had to do it this way and the way that my mom did it or that my grandmother did it, and I dropped all of that.

And I just said I’m ready to rewrite this story and started taking some serious action. It started with the things in my home. It started with the things that were draining me of life, and it was clutter. It was stuff that was just completely taking up all of my mental energy. And it moved into some serious mental work, like realizing toxic thoughts that I was thinking all the time. And so that’s kind of where it all started. That’s kind of where it all came from and I’ve been on a mission ever since to not just live that way myself but to bring other women along with me and help them realize that this is theirs too.

We’re not living out of our alignment when we are living in overwhelm. We’re just not realizing what we have access to. And so I wanna help people see that they have access and power and permission to walk in that too. And that’s my whole mission. That’s my whole heartbeat. And that’s really what started the journey of living in fullness.

B: Oh my gosh. I love that. And again, there’s such alignment there. It’s a different story, but there’s still the same like having that moment where God just meets you and is like, you’re ready to surrender now. Like I can finally, you’ll finally listen to what I’ve been playing in the back of your head this whole time I’ve been here waiting.

A: Exactly. Exactly. It’s so true. 

B: So I feel like when you don’t go deep with someone who teaches about less and the decluttering, I feel like a lot of times when you just like to get a surface idea of it, it feels so… It doesn’t feel deep until you hear a story like that. Oh like there’s like meaning behind it. It’s not just so that there’s less for me to do, it’s like opening up my heart in a new way.

A: Yes. 

B: And I love that. And I’m just wondering in what ways has decluttering for you opened new doors in your life?

A: Great question. I love that question. So it’s funny cuz I talk all about this and then I teach decluttering, I have a course on decluttering, you know, people are like what? Like how does that connecting, how does that walking in the fullness connect? When literally the word is, your word is fullness, but you talk about less? And that is literally what you’re making room for. 

When you get rid of the things that are not serving you and the things that are sucking the life out of you and sucking the time out of you and the energy out of you, that’s literally stealing from you in so many different areas of your life. You have freed yourself up for what actually matters and for the things that you want to do.

The things that free up your brain space to actually have a capacity to where you’re not living on the margin of your life all the time, where you’re just completely like, I have no room for anything and I have no time for anything. And where we gotta be here and we’re doing this and now I’ve gotta clean my house and it takes me hours and hours and hours and I can’t have anybody over because it’s embarrassing and it takes me hours to do my laundry and pick up and you know, dishes and everything, the toys are just coming out of the walls. 

Like, it’s just insane. And when you’re living in that zone, there’s just no time for your soul. There’s no time for you to actually dig in and look at where you’re at and what you want. There’s no time to sit down and look into your children’s eyes and get to know them in the season that they’re in, cuz they’re ever changing and they’re ever growing and there’s no time to sit and, you know, relax with your spouse and just kind of, you know, dig into their heart and, and get to know them more and date them, you know, and even though you’re married, like you still need to date them, right? You still need to dive into that relationship. And there’s just no time.

You have no time because everything – All the stuff in your house has taken your time. All the stuff on your calendar has taken your time. And when I decided to declutter, it became a lifestyle change. It wasn’t just  ‘I’m gonna declutter once a month or a couple times a year and just kinda get rid of crap.’

It was like, No, I’m going to be a guardian of the gates of my house. 

And does that mean that presents can’t come in and we don’t celebrate birthdays or Christmas? No, absolutely not. But it does mean that I am, and I have taught my family to understand that we have a revolving door in our, the gate of our home where things are welcome to come in if they serve us, if they make us better, if they make us happy, but they don’t get to stay because we don’t, we don’t serve those.

And eventually we will if they stay too long. So the revolving door brings it right back out after it’s spent, its time that it needs to be in our home. And so when I’ve decluttered and when I’ve taught this lifestyle change to our family and to myself, it was this realization that, You know, time is valuable and you only get so much a day.

You only get so much energy a day, you know, amount of energy a day. And I wasn’t gonna let that clutter and that excess and the obligation that comes with the stuff that we’re given or that we even buy to steal from me anymore, and to take any of those precious, precious drops away from me of that time and energy, cuz I wanted to give it to other people.

I wanted to open it up and serve my family and love my family in deeper places. And so getting rid of clutter has freed up my schedule. It’s freed up my time as a mom, it’s freed up my mental space where I can sit down and we have this thing called you and me time with all my kids, all five of ’em.

And I spend 20 minutes a day with each of my kids and my husband does it too. And we spend intentional time looking in their eyes doing what they want. We’ll go for a walk, we’ll go for a drive. We’ll go jump on the trampoline. We’ll go just do a game or something that they wanna do and get fully invested in it.

We leave our phones behind, everyone has to kinda leave us alone and we dive into that time together. And I would’ve never been able to do that. You know, years ago when I was drowning in stuff. I would never have been able to do that if I had not taken back my calendar and been like, ‘Sorry, we are not doing everything all the time – this is a no for us. We wanna make time and margin and create margin for our family.’

And so the doors are, they’re just wide open now. I can’t even name ’em all. But decluttering has definitely been a game changer, a lifestyle changer, and I’m so grateful for it. 

B: Wow. I love that so much. What I was thinking in there when you were talking about that, When you have way too much stuff and your time is so spread thin, it’s kind of like emotionally living paycheck to paycheck.

A: Yes. 

B: There’s no time, there’s no margin to build wealth.

A: Exactly. You’re just constantly going from one to the next, without that blank space in the middle, you know? 

A: Oh my gosh, that’s so good. That’s a great way to say it and unfortunately, our society says that’s how you live your life, you know? 

B: Right.

A:  And common culture motherhood says that this is how you’re supposed to do it. And I remember like even saying, like asking people, I had just had my third kid, I was breastfeeding. I was, you know, not sleeping. All the things, you know, the norm. And I remember asking people like, How do you make this easier? Like, what do you do? Like I was talking about, I was talking. Like stuff in my house and talking about what I wanted to change, and they just kind of would smile and be like, Welcome to motherhood. Like this is what it is.

B: Right?

A: And mothers that were older than me, mothers that had been through it and were kind of outta that season and just kind of laughed like, and uh, I was like, I got mad.

Like, I was like, not. Not, not us. I’m not buying that anymore. Like I don’t wanna live like that anymore. And like what you said just now, emotionally living paycheck to paycheck I think has become a common culture and a common thing in our society. And we need to take it back and we need to say enough, I don’t, that’s not how we’re gonna do this anymore.

I think that, you know, with therapy and with Jesus, and with, you know, community around you, good friends who sharpen you and pray for you and believe in you, that kind of life, we can, we can become emotionally wealthy and emotionally intelligent to where we’re able to lay those boundaries down and not people please and try to meet all the goals and do all the things.

So I love that. 

B: Yeah. All right. So we know you have a new decluttering course out and I wanna hear about that. Who is that? Like who listening right now needs to get into that? And what is the story you get from it?

A: Yes. If you are tired of picking up all the time. If you cannot pick up your house in 30 minutes or less, you need a decluttering course. If you are constantly avoiding having company over because you’re embarrassed of your home, you need to do a decluttering course. If you are finding that you just dread it. Adding anything to your calendar because you just, you feel like you’re drowning and overwhelmed. You need a decluttering course.

If you are struggling with spending time with your spouse or your kids or having time for something that you love to do, like a hobby or something that gives your soul some life. You need a decluttering course. Everything that involves stress or overwhelm is usually linked to and can start with your stuff.

The studies that have been, the thousands of studies that have been done on the relationship with stress and clutter are like, you can’t even count ’em. It’s absolutely like unanimous stress and clutter go hand in hand in the workplace, in the home place, in the creative place. It’s just not feasible.

And most people are like, ‘that doesn’t really bother me’. But your body does, it responds to clutter, your eye sees it, and it bothers your soul, and it distracts your mind and it depletes your mental energy. And that is something that we can’t allow. We can’t allow that to take up our beautiful, beautiful life and this precious, you know, window of motherhood that we have with our littles and our, even our bigs and the, and the kids in our home and the grandkids that you have, we can’t allow it to steal anymore.

And so I think anyone that is just, in any of those categories, whether you’re a mom or you’re not, or you’re just, you know, you’re a grandmother, you’re an empty nester, you’re a single, this is for you. And I go so deep into it. Not just the ‘how’ of decluttering, which I’m very, very practical, I give you lots of practical things.

But I go into the mindset, into the deep things of where you might find yourself, talk about, you know, your past and if you lived in a home that lived paycheck to paycheck, you had a scarcity mindset, maybe you had a deep loss in your life and you have attached to things. Talk about how you know, sometimes we cope with overwhelm or being in retail therapy. I was in that category. I would go to the retail shop to make myself feel better, or I’d panic buy because I didn’t wanna be without something. You know, when it came to little furniture, things on the garage, sale sites and stuff like that, we all can find ourselves in this place with a story of our stuff. 

And so if you’re in that mindset or in that space, in that season, you belong in this course and this is going to help you So much, so, so much. 

B: Wow. I’ve definitely been guilty of so many of those things. Thank you so, so much.

A: Yeah. Yeah. 

B: Like this is one of those episodes where it’s like, I can’t wait to go back and like re-listen to it myself and you too, pick up on the pieces that I know I missed when I was listening to it. 

A: Yeah. Thank you Brittni. I’m so glad to be here and I love, love your heart and what you’re doing and your mission and like I said, I definitely, I believe that it unwinds so beautifully.

B: I’m so glad you’re here. I’ll put all the links down in the description of this episode. Is there anywhere specific you want me to, You want listeners to just go right now immediately and be like, Let me go find Abby. 

A: Yeah, I’m on Instagram @AbbyLHaggard. You can find me on Facebook too at Hello Fullness with Abby Haggard. I’m in works with my website. It’s almost live, It’s abbyhaggard.com. Love to have you there too. I have a freebie too that I’m gonna give you Brittni, that you can link below. But it’s a decluttering 101 freebie that I would love for anyone who’s just like, I don’t even know where to start.

I don’t have the finances to buy a course. I’ve definitely been there. I totally relate, and this is a freebie to kind of get you started, is to get your toe in the water, kind of what you can start doing and the mindset you can start moving into. So I’ll link with that or I’ll send that to you as well.

But yeah, those are the great places to find me, message me. I’d love to meet you, get to know your story and encourage you along the way. 

B: Amazing. Thank you so much, Abby.