Toni Reece: Hi there. This is Toni Reece, and welcome to the Get Inspired! Project for Berks County Living magazine. Today I am with Rachel Gambone. Hi, Rachel.
Rachel Gambone: Hello, Toni.
Toni: How are you today?
Rachel: I am terrific. It’s great to be here with you.
Toni: Thank you. Rachel, tell us a little bit about yourself.
Rachel: I am the owner of an organizing business called Reorganize with Rachel. What I do is I go to people’s homes and offices and help them get their things organized – particularly their papers and their digital information. I have a connection with Berks County Living because I’ve been invited to be a guest blogger, so you can now find some of my tips twice a month on their content, and I’m delighted to be a part of this project.
Toni: That’s fantastic. Thank you for being part of the Get Inspired! Project. Let’s go into the first question. What does inspiration mean to you?
Rachel: I thought a lot about that, and for me, inspiration means two things. It means not only a clear vision of something that we want to accomplish that’s meaningful to us, but also a sense that we know what steps we need to take to get there.
Toni: I like that. How do you know?
Rachel: I think we know if we can define at least one next step to take. We don’t have to know all the answers, and we don’t have to know all the steps, but I think if we know at least one step that we can take today or tomorrow to move in that direction, that’s enough.
Toni: That’s what inspiration is about for you.
Rachel: It is, because to me, if we make the goals a bit too lofty or a bit too abstract or out there, that’s not quite concrete enough for me. I like to know that there are actual things we can do to at least move in that direction. I may not be able to become an NBA player or a professional ballerina, but if I could get out there and perhaps take a weekly class and feel like I was learning something and felt a little more graceful or a little more athletic, that would mean a lot to me.
Toni: So really, inspiration for you is almost a sense of self-improvement.
Rachel: Yes. I am one of those people who feels very fulfilled if I’m learning something and feel like I’m growing.
Toni: How do you put that into practice here in Berks County?
Rachel: Through the privilege of getting to help people get organized, I get to sit with them and listen to what they want to accomplish. There’s many ranges of goals for being organized and many degrees of being organized, and all of them are good. My goal is to help my clients get to what they want to accomplish themselves. I get to be the listener and then the facilitator.
Toni: Wow. How do you react when you see somebody inspired by taking that first step, and really, more specifically, what is it you see? What does inspiration look like, not only for your client when they’re working with you, but for you?
Rachel: I feel inspired if when I’m listening to a client I feel like I understand what they want to do, and understand their style well enough to be able to offer some concrete suggestions that will help them make those steps and make the improvements that they want to.
Toni: Then what happens to them?
Rachel: This the most rewarding part about what I do. Normally, at the end of our first day of working together, people are very excited by the progress that they’ve made. They feel that they can see the light at the end of the tunnel, that it’s actually going to happen, and thanks to the time we’ve spent together, they feel in control of what they can do on their own to continue the project.
Toni: Can you give me an example, Rachel, of the last time you were inspired?
Rachel: Yes. Let’s see; that was a few weeks ago when I was recalling the memory of a good friend’s mother who passed away about a year ago. This person is someone who is always positive. No matter what happened in her life, she always was able to put on a cheerful face and take every day as a gift. That inspired me greatly, because it’s so easy for us to get down in the dumps or for us to get bothered by trivial things. Most of us have both trivial and big challenges in our life. As we know, our moods can be contagious. I feel both privileged and inspired when I get to spend time regularly with someone who always has a positive outlook.
Toni: What does that do for you and your goal setting?
Rachel: What I think it does is it helps me put things in perspective. It helps me reframe issues. If I’m getting bothered by small, trivial things, it helps me reframe and put little things where they belong, which is off to the side, and not let them hang around my neck for too long. It also gives me a better appreciation for the kinds of daily gifts that we have.
We had a good, dear friend who grew up with us who was a retired English teacher. Later in her life, she was diagnosed with bone cancer. She was told she only had a few months to live. Thankfully, she lived about 10 more years. I remember after her diagnosis she said, “My only concession to cancer is that if I start a book I don’t like, I’m not going to feel obligated to finish reading it.” I thought that was fantastic.
Toni: So there are times you can be inspired to not finish a goal if it’s not working out for you, right?
Rachel: Exactly. She decided that there was no point in sticking with something that wasn’t fulfilling for her just because she had started it, so she just set it aside and moved on to the next thing.
Toni: That’s great. Who in Berks County inspires you?
Rachel: I don’t have a specific name to name, but I am happy to say that I have met many kinds of people that I bet you know as well.
The first kind of person who inspires me are volunteers. These are people who show up regularly, who share their professional gifts or their personal talents often to amazing degrees and lengths for the sake of the people around them and for the sake of our community. They might be volunteering on boards. They might show up at Habitat for Humanity. They might cook a meal for Opportunity House. These are all things that no one has to do, but hundreds of people do freely for the sake of making life better for all of the people around us. Those efforts lift us all up.
Toni: Wow. There’s another group of people?
Rachel: Yes. I’m happy to say that my clients inspire me, because what they’re able to do is take a bit of courage, tackle a project that may have seemed overwhelming for a while, extend their trust, and to give it a try. It feels so great when they’ve made that extension of trust, and to see them so happy with how things turned out. I helped someone in a workplace office a couple of weeks ago, and she said she was so delighted when she was done, because she now knew what she had and where to find it, and she loved her room again.
Toni: That is great.
Rachel: That feels terrific that I can be a partner in that journey, but knowing that that person had a vital role to play as well. To me, the reward and the inspiration comes in the partnership. It’s not all about me. It’s all about what we can do together.
Toni: They inspire you because they’ve accomplished something important to them.
Rachel: Very much so.
Toni: Right. What would you like your legacy to be?
Rachel: I hope my legacy will be what my son put on an art project in grade school. He wrote on a big cutout flower, “My Mom – nice, friendly, reads books and bakes cookies.” I think if I can fulfill those four things, I’ll have done a good job with my life.
Toni: Are you doing them currently?
Rachel: I am.
Toni: So you’re living your legacy.
Rachel: I hope so.
Toni: Thank you, Rachel Gambone, for being part of the Get Inspired! Project. Good luck with your blog and hopefully everybody will be able to read it and learn a little bit from you. Thank you very much.
Rachel: My pleasure.
