34: The Problem with Professional Organizing with Professional Organizer Alison Lush

Hello, you sentient balls of Stardust. My name is Casey Davis. I'm your host. Welcome back to struggle care. And today we have Allison Lush back in the studio with us. Allison Lush is a certified professional organizer who specializes in chronic disorganization. And if you hadn't, if you haven't caught Allison's first episode with me, it was a great one. So we started to scroll back and do that one. But we wanted to pop in today to just do a short episode on the problems of professional organizing. So Allison, I just want to like open it up there because you called me and we're like, you know what, let's talk about the problems behind professional organizing. Well, thanks for inviting me back. This is such a pleasure to be here. The thing, one of the primary issues with my industry is that it's not accessible for all that many people. The basic model seems to be approximately three or four hours on site in your home and professional organizers cost more than a cleaning person and less than a psychologist typically. So it is not cheap. I'm not saying it's not worth it. However, many people don't have access to that kind of liquidity. And therefore, it's not accessible for everyone. Many of us have developed alternative services over the last few years in particular since the pandemic because we couldn't even go into people's homes for quite a while. And so I'm really excited about the different ideas that my colleagues and I have come up with in order to reach the public and deliver our services in ways that are more accessible. Yeah, I will say that before I met you, my picture of what a professional organizer is and does was totally different. Like I almost exclusively pictured like the home edit. And by the way, I love that book. I have it on my bedside table. Is anything in my house rainbow organized for more than five minutes at a time? No, but I did try. But like it's a beautiful book and they, I love to hear their ideas on things. But like that was really the picture. Like the picture was like nice ladies that come in and make everything aesthetically pleasing. And like I remember when I moved into this house, so I packed myself, but in previous houses, I've paid to have people pack for me. And typically moving companies will say like, well, whatever we charge per hour, we would we'll charge that for the packing. So they send four people for, you know, $160 an hour and they pack up your house, usually like in a day. So when I moved in, I had this idea of like, okay, well, since I didn't spend money on packers, maybe it would be nice to have someone help me unpack. Because this time I've got two kids and my, my husband was in the middle of a trial. So I was like looking up around the internet, like, you know, are there people that that kind of put these specialties? And there were a bunch of professional organizers in my area that advertised like, I'll come help you unpack so that we like, we're like organizing as we put things away. And I was like, ooh, okay, bet that's expensive, but like that would be worth it. So I checked on her price, just a cool $10,000, which listen, I am not even here to say whether that is or isn't worth her value. I'm just saying I cannot afford her value. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's amazing how it can add up the services because if we work on an hourly basis typically, and it's simply out of the reach of many people doesn't, as you say, it doesn't mean that the person services aren't worth it. But I'm very motivated to deliver our services to as many people as possible. So tell me a little bit more about what you said about how the pandemic sort of created this space where you had to get creative. Oh, the pandemic had a massive impact on our industry. So one of the things that happened, which is actually a huge benefit for our industry is that so many professional organizers learned how to deliver our services virtually as I did. I went to school at the very beginning of the pandemic and got credentialed, learned how to deliver my services virtually. And I've developed a whole business based on that. So now I have clients literally all over the world, which is phenomenal because I can find people who have a specific need for my services. That's one thing. Second of all, because I'm only working one hour at a time, it's far more economical for the client. There's so many advantages. I save travel time. I can work with people anywhere. The client is more in control of the process. The client does more of the work themselves. And therefore it's far more economical, far more economical. And I discovered one thing is that when I'm working with someone virtually, my hands are kind of itchy, like I want to touch the stuff, I want to move the stuff and help them. No, no, no, pick it up and move it over there, whatever. And I can't because I'm in my home. So what I do instead is I focus on transmitting to the person's brain as much education and insight and analysis as possible so that they become empowered to do as much as possible. So my focus has changed from moving the stuff around and developing systems to educating and empowering the individual so that they can do as much as possible. It's a complete game changer. Yeah. So in this process of when you work with someone virtually and you're helping them, you would mention that it's more economical. I also feel like it's, I don't want to say unfortunate, but like it's interesting to me that the people who go into celebrity homes and make everything look beautiful and put everything in these like clear plastic containers. And you know, I think one of the Kardashians showed their like pantry that was like bigger than my house and they had a professional organizer come and do that. Like when I got to know you and the kind of things that you do where you really help somebody like I would say that you are very person centered, you know, what do you need in your home? What's functional for you in your home? Don't worry about whether it looks good to other people or whether it works for other people. Let's find things that work with you in your brain, which I think why we clicked really, but what you offer and what someone that does Courtney Kardashian's pantry offers, like they don't exist in the same universe in my head. And yet you're both called professional organizers. That's one of the problems. Yeah, that seems like it right there. It is a total barrier and I'm not, I'm very uncomfortable with the title professional organizer. I have to tell people that's what I do because otherwise I won't get what I do, but I don't feel like a professional organizer. I know it sounds completely grammatically incorrect, but my instinct tells me what I do is I'm a professional unstucker. I help people get unstuck. That's what I feel like my job is. That's my calling. When you said that we live in different universes, I absolutely agree with you and my particular education, I didn't create all this emotion based human centered stuff. I learned it at school. I went to school to become a professional organizer. I'm heavily credentialed along with many of my colleagues. And our work is based on the work of Judith Colberg, who is the founder of the notion of chronic disorganization. And this book, Conquering Chronic Disorganization is available for the public and it's got strategies in here that are emotion based. So although this has been out for quite a long time, this is absolutely an alternative way of delivering services to the public that are useful and person centered. And you know, it's not that I've never seen shows or people out there that work on the emotional basis, but they're only shown in the most extreme cases. So it's always like the hoarding shows where someone comes in to talk about their emotional relationship to their stuff and how they got to the point where the house is unfunctional. And I think those two opposing pictures of like Courtney Kardashian's beautiful pantry and someone who has been hoarding dead animals. And so you have like the average person sitting at home going, well, I can't afford that. And I guess I'm not that bad, but man, I'm experiencing a lot of distress in my home. Mm hmm. Very, very much so you explained it quite well. And I consider that to be sort of a spectrum, the spectrum of like what professional organizing can help people with. And what the majority of us do is we work somewhere in the middle. I work a lot on nuance and functionality. So I'm really concerned about, I don't even really frankly care about the stuff in a person's house. I don't care. I don't care how it's organized. What I care about is how does the person feel? Does the person feel comfortable? Does the person feel in control? Can they find their stuff? Can they put their stuff away? Can they reset their stuff? And when I work with people, as many of my credentialed colleagues do, our focus is not me teaching the client what I think that they should be doing, but teasing out of them and analyzing what's going on inside of their brain, their value system, their needs, their lifestyle in order to make a fit with what we understand about good systems and strategies and making the, we create the bridge between the education and the client. That's what we do and we're doing it really, really well. Well, and it's a totally different skill set too. Like I think that I wasn't aware beforehand that there was this pocket of professional organizers that were not only learning the skills of organization, you know, what kind of containers could go in these type of things and how do you help somebody think through a room. But we're also invested in learning the emotional skills to work with people and to be curious with people around the emotional stuff. And since then I've talked to several people who have invested in those skills professionally or maybe just have them personally or maybe even a couple that, you know, are clinicians and professional organizers. And I wish more people knew that that was out there because you and these other professional organizers, you bring a gentleness and a tenderness and a space of non-judgment that is very different than sort of, and I'm not saying that like someone who would organize Courtney Kardashian's closet wouldn't necessarily have that, but it's not advertised as part of the service. Yeah. So one of the things that I encourage people to do is to identify what their goals are. If your goal is to hire a professional organizer to help you have the rainbow house, then look for a professional organizer who sells that service. They're out there and there's nothing wrong with hiring that organizer if that's what your needs are. But there are a whole raft of other organizing specialties available. And for a person who just wants to figure out where the heck to put their keys so they can find them, there are organizers who specialize in that kind of functionality. I actually created a series of TikToks, 15 videos that I put into a package and put on my learning website called How Choosing a Professional Organizer. And it's a public service announcement. It's just available for free to the public. And there's like 15 tiny little videos explaining it's sort of like an insider's view of the industry, helping people identify what is important to them and how helping them choose an organizer who would be a good fit for them. Awesome. All right. Let's take a quick break to hear from some sponsors. Then when we come back, I want to hear about this new model that you have been creating to try and fill some of these gaps. In my house, I am super serious about my sleep. I have to have it at the perfect temperature. I have to have my fan going and I need to have the right sheets. What do you do to sleep better? Do you have it a bit earlier? Do you silence your phone? Well, I use Bolin Branch as a part of my sleep hygiene routine. I can seriously feel the difference when I have quality sheets. I feel like I'm living in a five star hotel. If you want to discover quality sleep and what it really feels like to have the softest, most luxurious sheets from Bolin Branch, then you need to run now to their website. You'll feel the difference immediately because their quality is unlike anything else. Each sheet is slow made for an unmatched softness with 100% traceable organic cotton that feels unbelievably soft for years to come. And the best part, it is softer after every wash. So sleep better at night with Bolin Branch sheets. Get 15% off your first order when you use promo code struggle at bolinbranch.com. That's Bolin Branch B-O-L-L-A-N-D branch.com. Promo code struggle. Exclusion supply, seaside for details. In my house, I am super serious about my sleep. I have to have it at the perfect temperature. I have to have my fan going and I need to have the right sheets. What do you do to sleep better? Do you have it a bit earlier? Do you silence your phone? Well, I use Bolin Branch as a part of my sleep hygiene routine. I can seriously feel the difference when I have quality sheets. I feel like I'm living in a 5 star hotel. If you want to discover quality sleep and what it really feels like to have the softest, most luxurious sheets from Bolin Branch, then you need to run now to their website. You'll feel the difference immediately because their quality is unlike anything else. Each sheet is slow made for an unmatched softness with 100% traceable organic cotton that feels unbelievably soft for years to come. And the best part, it is softer after every wash. So sleep better at night with Bolin Branch sheets. Get 15% off your first order when you use promo code struggle at Bolin Branch.com. That's Bolin Branch B-O-L-L-A-N-D branch.com. Promo code struggle. Exclusion supply, seaside for details. Okay, welcome back. Als, tell us some of these gap fillers, these new creative services that you are coming up with to help people and make this kind of help more accessible. Well, I did a little bit of research. I asked around some of my colleagues, what are you doing that's creative? Because I'm only one person. I've got some ideas, but I'm really proud of my own services. But there are other organizers doing completely different things out there that I'm very, very excited about. So for example, I have one colleague, Hazel Thornton, who just published a book called Go With the Flow, the Cletter Flow Chart Workbook. This is available online. Anybody can buy it and print it themselves. And it's phenomenal. It's a self-help tool all based on flow charts. It's extraordinarily clever. And Hazel has like a whole career of professional organizing behind her to back it up because she knows how people think and what the issues are. And it's fun. It's an easy book to read and to pick up and to use. My colleague Vicki Delacula created this alternate personality. Well, she's like a mascot called Ophelia. And Ophelia has a book and she has a Facebook page and Ophelia travels all over the world. And she is inspiring and she helps families understand and little kids understand organizing challenges. And it's just a completely different angle to take, to deliver. And Vicki is heavily credentialed. And it's just a different way of building a bridge between our education and understanding and the public. And that's what I'm very excited about. I have another colleague, Lynn Polton, who created a game called Declutter Go. It's six cubes. They're all beautifully made and colored. And you got it today. You did. Well, I'm glad you found yours because mine's propping up my tablet. Okay. So I'll, and we'll post this little clip where we're talking because we are on camera. Okay. Here I have it. So let me hold it up to the camera. So it's a box, right? You get the box. You open it up. And there's these six die. And they're kind of foam. I haven't really looked into how to play it. What's the thing here? What do we do? Well, you roll the dice. There's simple instructions. You roll the dice and it kind of, it prompts you. It says like spend this much time in this area and this is your goal. And so it's just basically gamifying decluttering. So you go off and you reset that area or you do whatever the dice are prompting you to do. And another thing that Lynn added onto that, which I think is just phenomenal, she created Declutter Go game nights. So she sells a package where people can come and they sign up for like six weeks or eight weeks, I think, and they show up all together and they play the game together like live. Like somebody rolls the dice. They all run off and do 10 minutes of decluttering or something and they all come back and it's like a party. It's so much fun. That's double and take into a whole other level. Yeah. Okay. So the first dice that you're supposed to roll is the revive dice. It says before you get roll and get energized, whatever you need, whenever you need a quick pick me up, take another roll to revive yourself. So this is amazing because this is like where we're talking about like skills other than the organizing because basically whenever you need a break or you're feeling fatigued or you're feeling overwhelmed, you can't stop and you roll this dice. And this is going to tell you, okay, turn on some music or like change the aroma, get some fresh air, go get a snack, hydrate. Like I love that idea. And then there's one you can roll that has a number for either the how many minutes or maybe how many items you're going to do. There's one that you roll to tell you what area to start in. There's one to roll just for paper. People ask me all the time what to do with paper, right? There's one that is an action. So whether you're going to discard something, put something away, recycle it, all that kind of stuff. And then I love this. The last one is reward. So you can roll the dice and give yourself a reward. This is so cool. This is the stuff that really gets me excited like ways that we can make things creative and engaging for people in an area where I think in the past we haven't put a big spotlight on like how can we make these things more accessible and fun. Why should it be boring and hard work? It should be fun. Lynn along with myself and many of my colleagues are like I said, again, heavily credentialed. But what we're doing is we're bringing that big education and experience to the non judgmental interaction between the humans and their stuff and their space. We're toning down the stress, toning down the expectations, focusing on the human to make it a completely, it's a completely different game. It's a completely different goal. Another colleague I have created something called organizing boot camp, Juliet Landau Pope. She does virtual organizing and she sells a package where you sign up and you get five days in a row, 15 minutes a day and you jump on and you do your 15 minutes boot camp every day of the week and it's just like a little quick check in. Another colleague, John DeBede and Diane Quintana, they created a set of cards and the cards have prompts on them of 10 minute tasks that you can do to declutter your home. I don't think that it's created specifically for neuro divergent folks, but it would totally work for people who don't know where to start and they could just give themselves more time than the 10 minutes if that's what they needed. But it's a simple way to engage and overcome overwhelm. There's another one that I absolutely want to mention is Susan Gardner wrote a book a number of years ago called the focus project. It's available on Amazon. Make sure that you look for her as the author because there's a different focus project that's not hers. And it says, if your possessions interfere with your quality of life, the focus project is a way to look at them through a different lens. And it's a workbook that's based on taking photographs of your belongings in order to interact with your belongings differently and analyze them and experience them in a different way. It helps. And again, she's got the same training that we do certified professional organizer. And chronic disorganization, better husband is a photographer. And so the two of them, they melded their experience together. It's a very beautiful book. I absolutely recommend that if it inspires people that they have a look at it. And that's something I wanted to comment on if I may, is that these are strategies. These are tools. These are approaches. There's no one that's better than any other. What is important for an individual is to look for something that feels comfortable, that feels inspiring, that if you're looking for education, look for an educational thing, if you're looking for fun, look for a fun thing, it's for the individual to find a good fit with what's being offered out there. So talk to me more about, you know, when you mention some of these ones that are like checking in every day or a group game, I think that's also a missing piece that I've seen is like, you'll have someone that says, well, I don't necessarily need someone to teach me or maybe I do want a little bit. But like, my issue isn't just that I don't know. Because even if you taught me what I didn't know, I'm stuck at actually doing it. And unless you can afford to have someone come up every day for hours and hours and do it for you or with you, there's not a lot of services that I know of that are offering that kind of community building accountability, even kind of abilities, you know, like we don't mean like hard line, but like the body doubling and things like that. And I know that you've been working on some things that offer that to people at a more accessible rate. Absolutely. And it's like it's becoming the cornerstone of my business actually because it is much more accessible for people even than the virtual organizing. So there's two branches of it that I've developed. One is what I call accountability groups because my clients kept telling me like I need to have some kind of a regular check in and I'm crap at checking in with my clients. I hate phoning them up or emailing them and saying, hey, how you doing? Because it feels patronizing to me. I hate doing that. So I created a system where people can register and it's maximum six people. It's one hour on zoom and each person gets 10 minutes, unmuted with me and it's like coaching one on one. So it's what have you been doing for the last week? How did you feel about that? And I try to extract with my coaching skills, extract what they learned insights. Did you get stuck anywhere and what did you do and what can we celebrate? And then looking forward to the upcoming week, what's on their radar? What would they like to achieve? And then they come back week to week for a whole month. And people are saying like they're getting so much more accomplished. Then I was so that's one branch. That's the accountability groups. But then there's this, I had this client a couple of weeks ago and she was saying she had this huge backlog of reports to do for work. And she just couldn't make herself do it. It was so hard. And she tried to use focus mate, but she found it too distracting. And she's like a focus mate veteran, but she couldn't do it for this particular task. And I really wanted to help her. And I said, look, Sunday morning, I'm going to be at my computer for like six hours or something. How about if I do body doubling with you? Because that's part of my training. It's part of my credentialing is that I'm trained to do body doubling. So we started doing it and she started playing through the reports. And then it was going so well. And I was getting more done. So I said to her, okay, I'd like to consider developing this as a service, as a standalone service. And so she and she helped me talk through it and figure it out. So now it's on my website as a standalone service. And I proposed it to another one of my clients who is also feeling stuck trying to get herself to do the things she knew how to do, which is such a classic ADHD thing. I know what I have to do. I just can't get myself to do it. And she said to me, I would want the body doubling, but I would absolutely need verbal processing afterwards. So we created a model for her that's a pomodoro and then 15 minutes of debrief, verbal debrief because she ends up with a pile of stuff and she says, then I get stuck and I don't know what to do with the pile of stuff. So we examined the pile of stuff and I helped her figure out what to do with the pile of stuff. And then she did another pomodoro, which is 25 minutes of focused attention on a task. And so that's another new service that I'm offering. So basically using virtual, using the client needs, bringing, I'm building a bridge between the education I got for my CD, the Institute for Challenging Disorganization. I'm building a bridge between that education and the clients. And I am so motivated to help clients develop what is it they need? And as long as it works out to be reasonably, you know, within my business model, I'm all over it. I think it's terribly exciting. One of the things that I love and listening to you talk about this is that I can see so many people for whom this is a good fit. And I don't know why, but one sort of demographic that came into my head that didn't, when we were talking about this at first, is like, I know so many people who their main struggle with cleaning or tidying or doing care tasks is that they didn't ever have a caregiver to teach them, whether there was no caregiver present at all or whether there was an overly critical one or a very aloof one. They never had like a warm caregiver to actually walk them through the process of learning something like, I'll never forget like when my daughter was three and she had taken all of the diapers out of the diaper box, just one by one and spread them all over the place. And so I discovered it and I kind of got frustrated with her and I said, you know, you need to put all of those back, put them back, put them all back. And she went, I can't. And I'm thinking, yes, you can. You literally physically can. Like, what did you, did your arms break since you took them all out? She and I kind of went back and forth and back and forth and I finally was like, yes, you can. And she just burst out and tears and went, I can't. There's too many. I can't hold all of them at once. And it was like a light bulb went off when I realized that when I said pick them all up, she thought I literally meant pick them all up at one time and it never would have occurred to me that that's what she was going through. And then like a light bulb, I went, oh my God, she's not unwilling. She's overwhelmed. And I'm so thankful that I had a moment to see that, to have clarity around that because, you know, kids can't express in clear terms what's going on. They're doing the best they can to express what's going on. And thank God I got curious with her and asked her about it. And I just, it made me think like how many of us, you know, were put in a room with a trash bag and told, clean it up or I'm throwing it away. But just do it. It's not that hard. And I feel like you're kind of the perfect person. That sometimes what people need is just like a tender figure to walk them through it like they are not stupid. Like this is not something you are born knowing how to do. And then checking in, not just this one time in part of information and then bouncing, but that's like a huge group of people I feel like could benefit from this. Absolutely. And my accountability groups are very much focused on creating a task list of specific next steps and breaking it down and taking the notes and then giving the notes to the people. That's one of the things that I am really proud that is part of my accountability groups. But I have to tell you that the methodology that you created and that you shared has gone such a far way to helping these folks because we're serving very much the same clientele, overlapping, not identical, but very much overlapping. And I can't tell you how many people come to me and they say I was feeling overwhelmed, but I used Casey's method. I went around and picked up just the trash. I went around and just picked up the dirty laundry. And that's something that I've never heard put that way in all of the studies that I've done professionally. That's a different way of simplifying, taking away the overwhelm, giving a person a tool that they can fit in their hand and they can go with. And that has been a game changer for a lot of people. It's been a very significant contribution to the knowledge that we have about how to help people who are overwhelmed with clutter. So congratulations and thank you for that. I've been along so many other things, but that's a really significant contribution, really. Well, this is such a cool, it's almost like things that you are doing that are disrupting the industry in a very good way. Do you have any other things that you want to share with us? Well, I would encourage the public to look for credentialed organizers, people who belong to professional associations. I'm sure that people who don't belong to professional associations might be doing a fantastic job, but there's no checks and balances system. They're all by themselves. I believe that the people who are in a community have more opportunity to hear the better ideas and have their things checked out. And so I just think it's safe for the public. And get the continuing education. Very much so. Yes. Yes. So in that little public service announcement course that I give, I talk about all those things so people can get an insider's view of all the things that you might want to consider if you're a professional organizer. Yeah. It's one of those things that, you know, it's hard. There are certain, I'm trying to say this, you know, honesty and honor, there are certain professions that are really important, but because there seems to be a lot of people getting into that, like there's not a lot of entry barrier, right? Like you can't wake up tomorrow and say, I'm a psychologist. Correct. You have to do all these things quite legally. But there are like, you could wake up tomorrow and say, I'm a professional organizer now. You could wake up tomorrow and go, I'm a nutritionist now. I'm a personal trainer now. It happens every day. And they're not. And it's like, those are like needed people and expertise and services, but it's a difficult industry to navigate because you could get someone that has been doing this their whole life that knows it really well, that does all these things. Or you could get a super nice lady whose parents, whose kids just went to college and now she decided she wants to do something else and she's always loved organizing. And now she's a professional organizer. You know what I mean? And like maybe she's great. Maybe she's not, but it's like, you don't want to spend the money to find out. So that's really helpful to know that there are organizations out there that are offering membership that are offering training that are offering at least some degree of credibility to people. So that's wonderful. Well, Alison, thank you for stopping by. And I really appreciate these sort of extra tips and extra ways of looking at things. And I hope it inspires everyone listening to not be afraid to reach out for help and to know that there are levels of help out there more accessible than hiring a nice lady for $10,000 to unpack your house for you. Thank you so much for having me here. Okay, bye. If you like this show, there's a decent chance you'll also enjoy the Shameless Mom Academy. Hi, I'm Sarah Dean, the founder and host of the Shameless Mom Academy. The Shameless Mom Academy is a podcast for moms that centers moms more than it centers your kids. I'm not going to teach you how to make baby food or how to make your three year old or 13 year old stop having tantrums. Instead, I'm going to bring you back to yourself. For the last 20 years, I've been helping moms through growth and transformation. Inside the Shameless Mom Academy, I help you identify who you are and who you are becoming. Look, motherhood is hard. It brought me to my knees many times and sometimes still does. 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