This post is part of the KonMari Series in which I document my journey to becoming a certified KonMari organizing consultant. Start from the beginning here and/or see all posts of the series here.
Today, I’m writing about how I prepared for my first clients, practice hours and the practice reports.
Preparation
After returning home from the seminar, I was eager to get started on my practice hours immediately. I’m a naturally organized person and meticulous planner, and my head was still full of all the information received during the seminar. Thus, before scheduling my first consulting session, I had some (thought) “organizing” to do.
I sat down and reviewed the seminar material and the notes I took. I extracted the information I deemed most important for me and created the following:
- Consultation Interview 1st Session
- Client session procedure protocol
- Things to consider & sample questions for each category
After that, I felt at least somewhat prepared to tackle my first KonMari Consulting lesson as a trainee.
Practice Hours
Before I even attended the seminar, I had spoken to a few people about my new passion and career path. One of my friends was willing to embark on a KonMari decluttering and organizing journey with my help and guidance after my attending the seminar. She was thinking about moving out of her home (a 2-bedroom apartment she shared with a roommate) soon. Therefore, she thought about paring down her belongings and overall getting more organized before her impending move. So I scheduled my first 5-hour lesson with her on July 28th.
I ended up working with her on an almost weekly basis. It took us about 7 sessions to completely finish her home. This surprised both of us as she “only” had one room for herself and shared bath, living room and kitchen with her roommate. However, I discovered that you can’t predict how long someone’s KonMari journey will take just from the allocated space someone has. No, it’s dependent on so many more factors, such as:
- How much stuff one actually possesses
- How big and crowded the space is you’re working in (smaller, more crowded spaces make it more difficult to sort certain categories and thus take more time)
- Speed of joy checking
- Amount of homework client is able and willing to take on
One of my friend’s co-workers ended up being my 2nd client. She has a similar living situation and I started working with her on August 12th.
Practice Reports
A practice report needed to be submitted for each tidying session. After completion of the seminar, I was given access to the consultant portal on the KonMari website. The reports were to be submitted through that portal. The main guidelines were the following:
- Conduct at least 10 practice sessions with a minimum of 3 hours per session (ideally 5 hours)
- Work with at least 2 clients
- Finish all 5 categories with one client
- Categories must be tackled and submitted in the correct order
A report consisted of some general information about the client’s home/living situation as well as 5 longer questions that were to be answered in a limited amount of words. The questions were the same for every report.
Things To Consider
Before conducting the first (or any of the 10) consulting sessions, it’s important to read through the questions you need to answer in the report. By doing that, you can make sure to get everything you need out of your sessions. That is, you can ask your clients all the questions you need in order to have adequate material for your reports.
Also, I found it helpful to immediately sit down after finishing a practice session (often on my subway ride home) and write down everything important that happened during the session. This helped me in creating my report right after that. I usually wrote and submitted the report on the same day as I had the very session.
Since the reports need to be submitted online, I think it’s advisable to create some sort of a back-up of the answers you provide to the questions. I wrote out and saved all my replies in Google Docs for every report before submitting. You have the opportunity to view the reports again after submitting. However, you’re unable to edit them. It seems you can only delete reports, which I never did, and then re-submit again.
If you plan on submitting your practice reports as quickly as you can (as I did), I’d suggest you select the two clients you’re using for your practice reports very carefully – well, at least the one client you plan on finishing her whole home with. Make sure it’s someone with a smaller space and manageable amount of belongings so that you don’t have to write more reports than necessary.
If you’re doing the sessions for free, make sure to have your clients write reviews for you. Also, consider bartering for other skills you might need in establishing your business.
Patience
It was mentioned in the guidelines that the KonMari team would only look at the reports once all 10 of them were submitted. After I submitted my 10th and last report on Oct, 8th, I emailed the team a few days later to let them know that I was finished (I wasn’t sure if they would be alerted by the system automatically, but I just wanted to be on the safe side). I received a reply back stating that the waiting time to get feedback on my reports would be approximately 4 weeks but could also be longer.
I already knew (from my conversations with already Certified KonMari Consultants) that the waiting time would be a few weeks. So it didn’t come as a surprise to me. I also knew that I would likely get follow-up questions regarding certain parts of my reports. Or I could even be asked for re-submission or additional practice sessions.
Stay tuned for the next part in this series to find out about the feedback I received and the next step in my KonMari Consultant journey – the online assessment exam.
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