The Catholic Company Review: Simplify Your Life

Simplify Your Life by Woodeene Koenig-Bricker

Awhile back, I stumbled onto the Catholic Company's Reviewer program from a friend's blog. Anyone who has read this blog very much knows that I struggle with keeping things simple, so I chose this book hoping that it would help me simplify my life.

On the cover, the book says "30 Minute Read." Now for some reason, when I chose it to review, I was under the impression that it was a longer book composed of 30-minute lessons/chapters. However, the entire book is a 30-minute read. Initially, I was disappointed because I wanted something with more meat, but as I reread the book, I discovered that everything I needed to know really was there in a quick 30 minute read. How simple!

The book is divided into chapters consisting of different areas in which we can bring simplicity to our lives.

The first chapter encourages the reader to "envision what a simple life would look like for you" by imagining the "perfect" day. She says not to limit yourself by what you think is possible, but to allow yourself to listen to the master of imagination, the creator Himself. This was hard for me, because my mind kept saying "that's not realistic." But I think there really is something to really deciding what is important to you in your day.

The second chapter talks about simplifying the objects in our lives. In my opinion, this is one of the biggest ways to simplify our lives. Our possessions really do possess us if we let them. The author encourages you to ask yourself "Do I love this? Does this make me smile? or Would I regret it if I lost it" with each item in your house. It definitely lit a fire in me to go through our house once again and get rid of things that we really don't need/use.

Chapter 3 talked about simplifying relationships. Relationships are something that were scarcely on my radar screen when I thought about simplifying life, but really, they are something that can complicate life significantly. When I put this chapter into practice in my life, I ended up going through my friends on Facebook and paring down my list fairly significantly. Staying abreast of everyone that I've ever known's lives really was sucking up a lot of my time and energy.

The fourth chapter encouraged the reader to simplify "more stuff" which the author described as "the factors that are so big we don't consciously think about the on a regular basis." Things like: big ticket items in our homes, media/entertainment/communication, routines, and commitments. One statistic that the author shared was particularly thought provoking. "The average American consumes 34 gigabytes and 100,000 words over the course of about 12 hours every day." That is a LOT of information to consume. I have definitely made efforts to make sure that the information that I am consuming is worthwhile and important to me since reading that little fact!

The rest of the book focuses on simplifying your life from the inside out, by giving ideas for handling stress and by encouraging the reader to live a life of gratitude. She talked about looking for something each day for which to be thankful. I think I'd like to incorporate that into our dinner conversation somehow. It would be good for all of us.

One chapter which I didn't feel really made sense in the book was a chapter on the environment and taking care of it by recycling/reducing/reusing. Although I truly believe that those things are very important, the chapter just didn't seem like it belonged in this particular book. It was one of those "one of these things is not like the other..." things. It just didn't make sense for me in this book.

Overall, I was grateful for the suggestions in the book, and I think the author did a nice job highlighting the main areas in which we can simplify our lives.

This review was written as part of The Catholic Company product reviewer program. I have not received any payment for this review, but I did receive a free copy of the book Simplify Your Life. Learn more about joining the reviewer program here.