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Episode 348 – Are you ready for tough love when decluttering?

When it comes to decluttering, do you feel as if you can only use a softly softly approach or do you think you are ready for some tough love. In today’s podcast we are going to talk about both and why tough love may just be the answer to you becoming unstuck.
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Transcript of this podcast episode
Speaker 1  00:00
When it comes to decluttering, do you feel as if you can only use a softly, softly approach, or do you think you are ready for some tough love? In today's podcast, we are going to talk about both and why tough love may just be the answer to you becoming unstuck. You

Speaker 2  00:28
back you're listening to the declutter Hall podcast, bringing you tried and tested no nonsense tips and advice from the leading experts in decluttering and organizing your home. Now here are your hosts Ingrid Jansen and Lesley Spellman,

Speaker 1  00:51
hello and welcome listeners. I'm Ingrid and I'm Lesley. If you're new to the declutter hub podcast, you're so welcome. What you'll find is that we try and find a fun factor in the serious business of decluttering, and if you've been here for a while, you know exactly what we mean. So thank you so much for listening. If you'd

Speaker 3  01:10
like to get involved in conversations relating to this podcast, it all takes place in our Facebook group. So come and join our lovely, warm, supportive community to find the Facebook group, go to declutter hub.com, forward slash group to find out more, or you can search for the declutter hub community on Facebook.

Speaker 1  01:30
Well, Lesley, tough love today, and I'm like, am I going to struggle saying tough love? That's actually quite a tongue twister, for some reason for me.

Speaker 3  01:40
Well, we'll see, well, we'll see how you fare with tough love as we're going through it. Yeah, we wanted to talk about this because it's quite interesting, because Tough Love is something that we use, sometimes as terminology that people understand in the decluttering world. So basically, you and I are typically known for having a more gentle approach to decluttering than a tough love approach. But that's not to say at all that we don't employ tough love when we feel it is necessary, and when we feel that the person we are talking to, whether that's one of our one to one clients, or whether that's somebody in our membership, could use a little bit of tough love. And so I think it's something we wanted to talk about, the sort of pros and cons of it. What is it? What impact does it have? What are the benefits of it? But before we got started, before we get started, we thought we would look at the actual dictionary definition of tough love. So Ingrid, exactly.

Speaker 1  02:37
So what we found is that tough love is the act of treating a person sternly or harshly with the intent to help them in the long run, people exhibit and act upon tough love when attempting to address someone else's undesirable behavior. Tough love can be used in many scenarios, such as when parenting, teaching, rehabilitating, self improving, or simply when making a decision, tough love is usually seen as a positive due to its encouragement of growth, boundaries, resilience and independence. Now, as

Speaker 3  03:16
a look at that definition Ingrid, I prefer the latter half of the definition, you know, talking about as positive, it's in growth, boundaries, resilience and independence. I would definitely stand behind that. We definitely don't treat people sternly or harshly, and we're not attempting to undress undesirable behavior. What we're typically in the decluttering world is attempting to do is to, as we said in the intro, to get people a little bit unstuck. And so one of the terms that we use quite often is, if you always do what you've always done, you'll always get what you've always got. And so if people have always been, we're big advocates of being kind to yourself. But if people are continually, Oh, that's too hard for me. I'm not ready for that today. I've not got the time for that today. If you're continually going down that route, sometimes you don't make the progress that you would like. And so sometimes you need a little bit of a kind of reality track, a reality check, a sort of talking to from whatever avenue that might come from to kind of catapult you forward a little bit. And so we want to look at this. We want to reframe this into positive. It's not about being Stern, it's not about being harsh, it's not about telling somebody off. It's about kind of reigniting that spark to look at things in a different way. I think that would be the way that I would say it. What do you think Ingrid,

Speaker 1  04:38
well, I'm kind of laughing very silently myself here because I've been told that I can be quite stern and harsh, but I'm thinking now, is it because maybe I can maybe look quite serious, or because Dutch people are known to be like super direct as you know, we both follow the Instagram account Double Dutch. Uh, which is this guy who kind of puts a spotlight on how Dutch people can react to certain situations. And it's like, you know, a mirror in front of my face thinking I do that, you know? So we are known to be quite direct and come across quite rude sometimes. But I've been abroad for a long time. So I'm really like, I'm keeping everything crossed it, and I think I'm a bit better, but I think I am quite known as quite Stern, I think, but I don't mean to, it's just, I think when I've got my serious facial I

Speaker 3  05:34
don't know, I don't think that at all. I don't think people consider it to be stern, but I think that it's like anything. It's like any kind of transformational journey that you're a part of as a kind of facilitator, as a leader, as a coach, as a parent, as a decluttering person. It's about tuning into different things depending on what what people need on any given day. And so, you know, if I think about, you know, it's interesting really, because when we for the clutter fairy, so when people come to us for one to one help, we have a sort of so we summarize. What we do is we kind of summarize people's consultations into and so Katie will share that with me and share that with the clutter fairy that's going to work with them. And so quite often it will come up in there. They want a more tough love approach than a softly, softly approach. But for some people, we still need to gage it on the day, because what somebody considers to be a tough love approach and how they then respond to that on the day is going to be different. And indeed, on different days you might prefer. Some days you might be fired up to take action and to sort of give yourself a little bit of a talking to and go, Why am I being so ridiculous with this? I really need to do this. I need to move this forward. I've been faffing around with this for ages, and I need to start making that visual, visible progress. And so I think, you know, we we want it to be different, depending on different days. And so, yeah, you know, there's not a one size fits all, but we wanted to talk about that. And you know, certainly in the membership, you know, we have a thing when we so we do live Q and A's all the time in the memberships, where we really get down to the nitty gritty, don't we? So? And obviously, some people have been with us quite a while in the membership, some people are quite new. So the people that have been with us for a while, and sometimes, you know, we do give them some tough love because, but sometimes it's, they're being very tough on themselves, and so we kind of pull that back in, don't we say, you know, you're being too hard on yourself. So there's a little bit of it coming the other way around. And then other times, when we feel like it's, we feel like sometimes we need to give people a reality check as well, you know and say, you know, you if you carry on like this, it's not going to happen for you. But all done with the best of intentions, which is what the final part of that summary, that definition was all about. Tough Love is usually seen as positive due to its encouragement of growth, boundaries, resilience and independence. So tough love, in the context of decluttering Ingrid, what do we can do for us? I

Speaker 1  08:07
think, you know, tough love can be super, super beneficial. And I think having this chat so far, Lesley, can I just go back a little bit? Because it really realized it came through to me at the moment, that I thought, we do have a fine balance, don't we? Yeah, when we work with clients, when we work with membership and a membership, we have to exactly what you say, Gage it on the day, and see what is best for this person in this moment. And because we've got so much experience with that, we know kind of we can see how a client is. When we talk to them, we can see, oh, okay, we can really kind of go for it today, push them out of the comfort zone a little bit, have a bit of tough love, or, Oh, they've had a really, really tricky time. We need to do a more softly, softly approach and kind of work their way through it. And I think that's why it can be so beneficial to be in our membership, or have us as a professional organizer, instead of asking a friend to come in because they they just come in on the day they don't see they they don't have all the experience that we have with how tough it can be to declutter and when tough love works and when it doesn't. And then when your best friend said, Well, just chuck it out, where you're like, Oh, that's not helpful. Then that tough love is not working while we have are far more equipped to read the situation, as you may Yeah,

Speaker 3  09:32
exactly. And I think you're right. I think you know. And you could argue that a friend knows people better than we do. You know for sure. Of course they do, because they've known you for decades sometimes, but I think it's about understanding that nuance of you know, how emotions respond to clutter, and how people respond emotionally to clutter. I mean, yeah, and so I think it's that and sort of understanding when someone's behavior or someone's decision making is not. Projecting them forward towards their goals. And that's what this is about. It's it's all about, you know, one of the things that that we do as professional organizers when we're working with people is we try and understand straight away what people's big picture goal is. So where do you want to get to, and how, how long do you want it to take? How far do you want to go? You know, what's your big picture goal for your home, and then based on the decisions that you're making along the way. You know, we're never there to say, well, you're never going to get there because you're not making the right decisions. But we are there to say, if you continue making the decisions in the way that you are at the moment, you've got two choices. You're either going to sort of stay stuck in the moment, or you can start to change the way you're making decisions a little bit be a little bit more, not extreme, but a little bit more kind of, I don't know, measured with your with your decisions, go a little bit deeper, you know, try and push yourself a little bit more at your comfort zone, and you might get there a little bit soon, and you might achieve your goals. It's about that realism about where your decision making is taking you. And I think that's what we do in the membership as well. You know, if we see somebody, because we see people repeatedly, it albeit online, we see patterns of behavior. We read what people are doing in the forum. People explain a lot about their individual situations and individual circumstances, so we get a real sense of where people are, and we see that people are going backwards, that they have done a great job sometimes, and are not patting themselves on the back enough. And so sometimes tough love does kick in, doesn't it? Do you know, to me, and we will do tough love sometimes on the podcast, because we're talking to the whole rather than to an individual. So you know, even with your children or somebody else, you know people stage interventions about people who've got addiction and all those kind of things, you should know how far you can go with that before it becomes detrimental and negative. And that's the that's where it's difficult. But in a decluttering context, what we wanted to talk about, really, and I think the, one of the main things is, you know, this idea of goal setting, and you have to continually keep reevaluating where you are and whether you're going to get there with the way that you're tackling decluttering today. So tough love will remind you why you're decluttering. You need to, yeah, you know, look at the positive side of that, to create the space, to reduce the stress, to simplify your life, not to just keep moving things from one place to another. So that's what it's all about it, I think it allows you to keep focused on your goals, or to keep resetting and reminding you of those goals, doesn't it? Yeah,

Speaker 1  12:35
I think so. I think it's really important that you've got that firmly in your mind. And I think, you know, writing that down, putting it on your fridge, having it on your pin boards, putting it in your phone, and just go, why am I doing this? And if the going gets stuff, the tough get going to go back and go, Okay, I am not, you know, I'm not doing this. I need to get, you know, I need to be tough on myself, because I see where I want to go,

Speaker 3  13:02
absolutely, absolutely. And I think, you know, if you can, if you can, sort of work with tough love, you know, if you are working with somebody, if you've got somebody in your family who can help you, so if you reach that, obviously tough love, normally, you've got self inflicted tough love where you kind of and it can't be that tough, because it's coming from inside of you, isn't it, so it's normally with an external person. But I think if you push yourself out of your comfort zone, so let's call it that if you're working independently, then it's only by seeing the results of what you do that you can realize that it was actually okay. So to actually make that tough decision that went against the grain of what you would normally do has left you with a feeling that actually, I wasn't sure about making that decision to decode that item, but a week later, I've not missed it. And actually I prefer not having it, because it gives me simplicity, more space, more time, whatever that might be. And so I think it builds your confidence in the in the decisions that you're making, and which is all part of the decluttering journey, right? Yeah,

Speaker 1  14:06
I think it's all about, you know, learning to trust your own gut feeling and building your decluttering muscle along the way. The more. That's why it's so important to start with easier items and in easier rooms, because, you know, if a spice is, let's just say, four years out of date, that's that is probably a much easier decision to make than am I going to wear this top that I bought, that I paid 100 pounds for, and I've worn only once. I mean, those are completely different decisions, and I think when you start smaller in easier rooms with easier items, you build up that confidence over time, and then when, when you go to the harder areas, you can trust yourself to make the right decisions. But you can only do that when you've been practicing this and you've been, you know, and indeed, not just all the time. Go, oh, well, I can't make a decision on this now. And and leave this all in this just in case, uh, situation, you're not going to move forward. You're going to have to say sometimes yourself, okay, come on. I'm ready for this. I trust myself. I know I can do this. I'm going to let it go. I'm going to keep it but not this in between, in between states, because that is really what, moneys the water a lot. And,

Speaker 3  15:22
you know, and even the tough love might be something as simple as saying, I need to do an hour today, you know, it might be, you know, it might be, I am going to go through today without having any kind of, maybe box. I'm going to have either yeses or I'm going to have nos. And being a little bit tougher with yourself, with those boundaries, and sort of, you know, when you've broken it down, said, This is my goal for today, in terms of time, in terms of what I want, where I want to get to. So it might be that. And what that then does is it, it tough love is about taking those excuses out. You know, we tell ourselves stories all the time, don't we Ingrid, and we have these roadblocks because we've been tuned into doing this all of our life, and sometimes we need to go, enough's enough. I want that. I want the outcome more than I want the stuff. And to get there, I need to be harder on myself. And so, but what we don't want to do is we don't want to set you backwards. We don't want you to make a decision that you don't feel you're in control of. And so this is it's a real fine line, isn't it? It's a real fine line, you know, it's very dependent on the day, on the person, how you're feeling, where you are in your decluttering journey. But it's important to recognize, I think, when you're being too soft on yourself, I think, and when you need to go that little bit tougher. So it's all quite deep, really, isn't it, Ingrid, but now let's go to a break. Let's come back and talk about the benefits of using a tough love approach. Hi everyone.

Speaker 1  16:51
Welcome back after your little break. We are talking about tough love and now let's talk about some of the benefits that using a tough love approach can have Lesley, yeah, I mean,

Speaker 3  17:05
all of the things that we spoke about before you know, setting yourself boundaries, moving out of your comfort zone. I think basically what we're looking for in any decluttering journey, for it to be a measured, successful decluttering journey, is getting yourself to a stage where you feel fully in control of the decisions that you're making on any given day, and so you can make that decision that you're not ready to let go of that item, and that you will circle back to it later in the decluttering process. That's a decision, and you feel in control of it as soon as you make a decision that you feel has gone too far, that you're nervous about or anything like that. Then sometimes what happens is that you can feel resentful. That's when you start to go, actually, I really regret getting rid of that. And then you start to reconsume, reacquire all of those kind of things. It can be quite dangerous if you make any decisions that are not within your your control. So it's about that fine balance, isn't it, between pushing yourself out your comfort zone but not feeling out of control. And that's exactly why sometimes you know you were talking before about somebody helping you. We've heard a million examples of this Ingrid, where somebody else has got a completely different goal for your house than you have, and so somebody very well meaning like we are not trying to deny that, you know the benefits that can come from somebody reaching out to help you with your clutter, but sometimes, not always, it can be super detrimental, because you then feel out of control, because somebody wants to work at a different pace that you want to work at. Somebody want, you know, somebody does something. You know, let's hope this doesn't happen behind your back and think that they're making the right decisions, chucking stuff away when you're not looking you know, all of those kind of things only serve to to move you backwards all of the time. And so this tough love, you need to gage where you are, but sometimes it's just about that wake up one day, and this can be anything where you're going through any kind of transformational journey. When you go, I fast around all week with this and today, I need to get serious, isn't it? It's about that's, that's the kind of tough love. When you're doing self talk, you need to go for positive self talk, which is, like, enough's enough. If I'm ever going to make progress, I need to do something that's out of my comfort zone, and I need to go for it this week, and I need to see how I get on today. Yeah, not me, and see how it goes.

Speaker 1  19:33
Yeah. It's so interesting that you say the Lesley, because we also give tough love in that we say to a lot of our membership, and membership, especially the newer members, right? They come into our membership, they're like, oh my gosh, this is amazing. You've got, like, courses and live sessions and all the things, and I love it, but I've got this room that's really bad, and I'm going to do that first. And we always like, give tough love and say, I know you want to do that, but don't. Do that, you need to start at the beginning. And they're like, but I've just literally done my kitchen and my bathroom and a linen combat. I really, really, really want to start with the clothes. And we're like, we know, but please listen to us many members, then go back to the big go to the beginning. And they're like, well, England has the opportunity, though, what they're talking about. And they do go back and what we see nine out of 10 times. Oh, wow. I thought I had done my kitchen and my bathroom, but now I've gone back. I've listened to your courses. I've listened to your advice. I've actually done it cupboard by cupboard, area by area, and I've actually have such a done such a great job. I did a lot of things I wasn't even didn't even consider last time to let go. But Your advice is sinking in so and they see the successes that they're building up, and then always they say, now I feel far more ready to do the next kind of lot in the membership, because I've, I've, I feel my decluttering muscle building up, and it's that tough love that we give. I know we sometimes we're like, just go to the beginning and the members like, Yeah, but I don't want to go to the beginning, like we know, but you have to, because we know that this approach will help you. And

Speaker 3  21:21
I think you know Ingrid as well, you know just talking about the membership and talking about things like Q and A questions, which is really where we get to delve deep into people's personal situations. So we love it when our members share a lot. Often we get questions. So people will submit quite long questions, quite a lot of detail in them. And what we see really often, like at least one or two questions out of the 10 that we cover in every Q and A, that people are answering their own questions, and all they want is that reinforcement from us to say it's okay to do that you're going down the right path. So it's just making that final mental leap. And it's the same when we're working one to one in people's homes as well. There's something very empowering about having somebody next to you that can say it's okay to do that. And so that tough love is, you know, sometimes you need to reach out to other people. So if you can get help from somebody else, for example, it might be just that that you need, like, almost like a body doubling sort of situation where you've got somebody working alongside you who just gives you that final push to do what you know is the right thing to do. And so it's such a fine line, and it's so difficult to talk about it, because it's just so nuanced, isn't it, Ingrid in terms of what it looks like on the day. But I think that if you can get over and if you can be a little bit tougher with yourself, you know you're going to see the emotional attachment that you've got to things, why you've been keeping things. If you work through those emotions, if you push yourself out and go, You know what, I know I'm keeping I know that I've got all of the all of those things, and I'm keeping them out of guilt. Once you go, it's okay to be tough on myself and go, You know what? Just because my daughter gave that to me as a birthday present last year, it is hard, but I'm going to do the right thing, and I'm going to let go of it, and then once you've done that, once, it makes it easier to do it a second time. So it reduces that emotional attachment to things along the way. It teaches you to prioritize what's important to you by this goal setting scenario that we're talking about. You're working towards your goals, and you're going to do whatever it takes to get you there. You know, you don't want to be doing decluttering a you know? I mean, yes, you will be decluttering for the rest of your life, but you don't want to be doing this big push on decluttering continually. It continually dragging you down. You down. You want to kind of get over the hump almost, if that makes sense. So I think, you know, I think it's great to be able to to move. I'm getting quite kind of passionate in this podcast, I think about it, but it is really hard to know when you're there, right? Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1  23:55
I think so too. And I think, I think what we see is really that people who are tougher with themselves. And we've got one of our members in our membership, who's, you know, been with us for a while, and she's been dabbling with the road map in and out. And beginning of this year, like, right? I'm going to now do the road map. I'm going to commit, I'm going to do it step by step. And she is just flying, flying, flying. And I and I saw on a success session this morning, and she was like, I'm going to do this, this and this. And she's got, like, I've got several things. And in the past, she would just kind of move stuff around a little bit in her kitchen cupboard and go, Oh, but I want it all. And now she's like, I'm following Ingrid Lesley's advice. I'm taking everything out. I'm looking at it, I'm being realistic with myself. I'm looking at the current me, what fits in my life, and what I'm going to use, and I'm not going to feel guilty because my mom, my sister and whoever all gave it to me, or my old job, or what works for me in my current life. And I think us being softly, softly. The End, occasionally a tough love approach on her. She's now being tougher on herself, and she's reaping the benefits of that. And it's amazing to see. And you could just see her, I don't know if you can see I just, I don't know happier. I can't, I can't explain it, but we're

Speaker 3  25:18
happy because we've seen it. We've seen it. She's fully committed to a kind of Ingrid and Lesley process, the declassical process, yeah. But she's not quite got to a stage where she was ready to be that little bit tougher on herself and move out of her comfort zone and follow the process. Yeah. And now that she is, she's absolutely flying. And

Speaker 1  25:38
what you see and what you see there, Lesley, she is now accelerating that process. She is doing things more methodically. She's doing things quicker. She I mean, she still takes her time to ponder and but she's not feeling like she's going backwards all the time. You can see that she's like doing it step by step, less churning stuff around, more like, what do I want? And it's fantastic.

Speaker 3  26:07
It is absolutely, and I think, you know, just, just sort of going back to talking about ourselves, which you shouldn't be doing, really, but I think that, you know, it was quite funny too, wasn't it? We only really picked up on it about and we kind of know, but I think it was, I think it was when the book came out, right Ingrid, and we're getting a lot of reviews and things like that, and people saying, it's kind it's empathetic, it's gentle, it's, you know, and so Ingrid, and I think that we're quite sort of, you know, obviously Ingrid thinks that she's stern and harsh, or whatever the definition was, and we know that we're not that. And we know that in order to get the most out of people, we need to be empathetic and kind. That's, you know, because if because people who have clutter and have had clutter all their lives, come from a place of where people have been unkind and harsh and ungentle all the time, and so we need to reverse that in the first instance and go, come into a community where people will be kind and will understand and won't judge you for where you've been. And then slowly but surely, like the lady that we were talking about before, people will start to build up and build up, and then all of a sudden, there's no requirement for us to be to give tough love to this person, because they've done it for themselves. But, you know, but sometimes, as I saying, it's more on mass. The tough love doesn't come out very often. And we it's funny in our Q and A's, we, every now and again, they'll be like the mean decluttering ladies are in town, you know. Every now and again, we'll sort of get to a stage where it's like, enough's enough. Now we need to move this forward. And it's no when it's normally when we feel that people are sort of stuck in their own head a little bit and stopping their own progress from getting forward. So just to sort of reiterate that we're not like tough love harsh people all the time. That's like a more of a kind of unusual one, isn't it Ingrid, but I think it does have its place as a strategy within decluttering for some people at certain times, because I think it can, it can accelerate the process. It can create that lasting change that you want. It feels very empowering to take back control of what you're doing as well, and to take back control of your home,

Speaker 1  28:13
I know, and that's, in the end, what we want. You know, with everything that we do, whether it's here on the podcast, in our membership, in our in our lovely Facebook group, all of the things are there so you can take control of your decluttering and your home and and create more space and more energy and more, you know, enjoyment in life, and that's, I think, the most crucial thing, And why we occasionally use tough love. But I think it's it can be really helpful. And I hope that this podcast has made you think like, am I being tough on myself, or do I always take the softly, softly approach, or do I actually need to speak to myself and have a, have a talking to myself to go, come on. No, I know you want to sit on the sofa after dinner and watch TV, but I'm not going to like that dirty kitchen. Tomorrow morning, when I come in, I want to make myself breakfast and a cup of tea. Let's go after dinner. Don't sit down. We're going to spend that 15 minutes tidying it all up, emptying the bins, wiping the kitchen counters, wiping the the stove, for the hope and just give myself that you know, and that stuff in the beginning that you have to be, you know, strong and go. But the people who do it and say to themselves, and they say to themselves, I'm going to do my future self a favor here. And the people who consistently start to do this, these daily habits that we talk about a lot here on the podcast, see the difference? Because they start to feel better when they do sit down. They're like, yes, go me. I did it. I was really tough for myself, but I did it. I'm feeling really proud of myself now. So you can give yourself a pat on the back in the morning. You're pleased with yourself. And then. The one time that you don't do it, you're like, I know now I do this every day. I should have spoke to myself last night to do it and not just go I'm tired. I can't be bothered because you are bothered. And a calm, tidy and clean house gives so many positives. And that's the thing. It's all these habits and things that can really change how how you feel in your home, and we want you to feel a happy and content person, and that's why we're on a mission, aren't we? Lesley, just keep talking about declaring and organizing until, until we can't do no more,

Speaker 3  30:44
until we're like, yeah, tough love on ourselves. Enough now we're 97 maybe to sit and have a cup of tea and watch TV on the sofa. Yeah, continually be talking about decluttering all the time. So yeah. Anyway, there we go. Yeah, love,

Speaker 1  30:58
come on. So come on, listeners, tough love. Give us some examples when you have had to use tough love, maybe in your own situation. We would love to hear from you. Leave us a comment on on the on the podcast, on the website, share, share your stories. Yeah, because we're interested, we're really interested into to know more about how you feel about this. So thanks so much for listening. We will see you again next Friday with a brand new podcast. Thank you.

Speaker 2  31:32
Thanks so much for listening to the declutter hook podcast. Don't forget to subscribe to us in your podcast player so you don't miss an episode and we'll see you next week
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