← Clutterbug - Real-Life Hacks and Tips to Declutter, Organize and Clean your Home Fast
Clutterbug - Real-Life Hacks and Tips to Declutter, Organize and Clean your Home Fast
Inside The Most Important Psychology Lesson I’ve Ever Learned About Clutter | Clutterbug Episode #334
01:09:28
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- [00:00]
A
If decluttering feels hard, or if you feel like you have been messy forever and you just don't even know where to start, or you have been starting and it just doesn't seem to get better, you could have an emotional wound. It could actually be your roadblock, this emotional gaping wound that looks now like clutter and mess and that makes managing the mess or getting rid of things feel impossible. Today we're going to talk about, about emotional wounds and how it really affects your decluttering process. But before we jump into the interview, I want to motivate you. Let's get up and actually take action. You are not allowed to just listen or watch. I want you to do something that makes your life better. I want you to spend one hour with me and not only improve your mind and learn things and learn some emotional first aid, but make a difference in your home. Today is the day that you can prove to yourself that you actually are an organized person, or at least you are working towards. You are a person who is getting your home under control. You are taking real steps and it doesn't have to be big or scary. And we're going to do it together. And I want you today to focus on decluttering areas that are emotional, that make you feel things. Not just fear of letting go, but deeper than that. And I'm not talking about sentimental, unless you want to go all in with sentimental things. For me, there are spaces in my home that make me feel bad about myself. When I go in there and start decluttering, the first one is bathroom products. Whether it's makeup or anti wrinkle creams, I, I, I have too many. And when I'm in the bathroom and I'm looking through, I immediately start thinking, you're so wasteful. Oh, that was so much money. Or, oh, you're so wrinkled and getting old. And none of these are working. You're gonna look like the Crypt Keeper forever. What's the point? You're, you know, and my brain starts going a mile a minute with all these emotions that have way more, they go way deeper than the actual stuff. But I think it's important we don't avoid that. This is like a broken festering leg and we're turning away and being, it'll just heal itself. You know, I'm just, I don't want to look at it. Today we are looking, we are checking, and we are actually giving ourselves some healing decluttering. Because that's the thing. The next time you go in the bathroom. The next time I go in the bathroom after I've decluttered some products, I'm not going to be bombarded by all the things that make me feel like crap about myself because they'll be gone and I will have dealt with all of those feelings while decluttering. I can forgive myself for spending $120 on that stupid face cream that just makes my eyes sting. And I can say, this isn't. You didn't know it was going to make your eyes sting. And now you're going to have more room and once you get rid of it, your eyes won't sting anymore. I can take that negative thing and I can flip it. So if you are like me and you struggle with bathroom products, get your butt in there, grab a trash bag. None of that is donatable, so you don't even have to stress about where it's going to go. It's going to go in a black trash bag with no guilt and no shame. Because you are amazing and you are working towards really healing yourself and being in control. Another space. Maybe if you're like, I don't even have that many bathroom products. Cass is. Is clothing. Clothing is like a ticking time bomb of emotions because maybe you have clothing from a past life where you worked a corporate job, but you retired or you lost that job and now those clothes are nagging you. Or maybe you've gained weight and you have clothing that is too small that makes you feel over. It makes you feel lazy, and it makes you feel like a failure. And. And letting it go will. It will make all those emotions come up to the surface. But that's a good thing because what it's doing is showing you a wound that was otherwise invisible. And it's allowing you to put a band aid on it by saying, I might not be a size 6 ever again, but that's okay. I can work towards it. For now, I'm going to love the body or try to love the body I have today. And if I lose weight, no, when I lose weight or when I get in shape or when I. I will treat myself to a new shirt, then I'm going to share the old things. So I stopped beating myself up and having them in the closet. It's this sense of empowerment that comes from decluttering, knowing and feeling and looking for those emotions that are underneath. So we're filling trash bags today. We're going to fill a donation bag today. Because you're not just making your house better, you are healing yourself at the same time. Time. Wherever you're feeling like you're listening to this and you're like, maybe I could tackle whatever is popping into your brain. That's what I want you to do. And if you're catching up on laundry, while you're going through and doing it, any of this laundry, can it just leave? Like, instead of folding it and putting it back, are you actually wearing it? Or is this something that you just keep throwing in the dirty laundry because you don't want to put it away? Let it go. Whatever you're doing while you're cleaning the house or you're vacuuming, if you notice something, can it leave today? Can you have the end of this podcast be you with less burdens and less emotional trauma in your home? I believe in you and I am so excited because today's guest is licensed psychologist, Dr. Guy Winch. We actually had him on the podcast before. He is brilliant. He is the leader in talking about emotional health and resilience. He's also the author of several best selling books including Emotional First Aid, how to Fix a Broken Heart, Mind Over Grind, which we talked about in the last podcast. But for me, it's his TED talks and the way that he takes big, you know, psychological kind of heady topics and he makes it feel understandable. He makes you think about things differently. And his TED talks have garnered over 35 million views for a reason. When I watched the one about emotional first aid and he said something as simple as, when a child sees a cut, it's obvious they need to treat that wound and they'll put a band aid on it, right? But we don't even see our emotional wounds, let alone know how to give emotional first aid. And, and that it really made me think like, yes, our physical health is important, but for some reason we kind of disregard our mental health until it becomes this festering, infected, horrible thing. We don'. We, we say to someone who's depressed, we say, oh, just suck it up, you'll be okay. But we would never say to someone with a broken leg, oh, you just walk on it, it'll get better. That's crazy. We give first aid and we should be giving first aid to our emotions as well. So you are going to be so blown away by Dr. Guy Winch, just like I am. And I know you are going to take some real tangible things away from this interview. All right, you feeling pumped? Let's jump into the interview with Dr. Guy Winch. Hello. Welcome back.
- [07:49]
B
Thank you for having me. And it's lovely to be back. And how are you? The last time I Saw you. You were rushing out to fight a fire. Literally.
- [07:58]
A
Yes. And I apologize. I didn't say goodbye. I was like, there's a fire by. In the middle of our podcast.
- [08:05]
B
I know how many things you do and how busy your life is. And then you said, there's a fire. And I thought, fire drill. You see, I didn't realize you were actually rushing out to fight said fire. Then when your producer said that, I'm like, wait, what is she. Is she an astronaut, too? How many things does she do?
- [08:27]
A
That's. That's so nice. Yeah, I became a volunteer firefighter. It's been three years. I cannot believe that, to say that. And absolutely just the best thing I've ever done. I'm. I'm so grateful that they let this old lady join the team. And. Yeah, it just feels so good. So thank you. I still have my pager fingers crossed. No interruptions today. So we can talk about emotional first aid, because this blew my mind. You. You coined the term emotional first aid. I had never heard of it. And then I watched your. I watched all of your TED talks, but I watched one TED talk on emotional first aid, and my jaw was on the floor because it seems so obvious, and yet it's something I had never even considered. So can you explain, like, what this means and why you felt like you needed to talk about this?
- [09:29]
B
So what emotional first aid means? You know, like, we all have a first aid kit in our medicine cabinet, in the bathroom, wherever it is, so that when we get a cut, a scrape, an ache, a pain, we can treat it. You know, we don't rush to the doctor. When we have a scrape, we just. We know to clean it, to put disinfectant on it, to bandage it. When we have a sprain, we'll put a wrap around it. If we get a cold, we know, we'll have chicken soup and, you know, drink warm fluids, et cetera. The thing is that we get emotional injuries all the time as well, and as adults, far more than we get the physical ones, unless we're, you know, firefighters and so. But we don't have a sense of that we actually got injured in a certain way, that there's a certain treatment that we can give it. And my idea with emotional first aid is, like, there should be awareness of the fact that there are scientifically proven techniques and tools we can use ourselves. We don't need to rush to the therapist. We can just assess ourselves whether we're injured, whether it requires something or not, and then apply the right treatment to it just so that it doesn't become infected, so it soothes the pain so it gets better more quickly. And no one had written about that and no one was doing that. And so I started talking about like, hey, we have this for physical wounds. Why don't we have it for emotional wounds?
- [10:59]
A
Yeah, it was so brilliant. You, you started your TED Talk talking about a five year old who was brushing their teeth and they brought over the st. And it's just something we teach children very young. You take care of your teeth, you take care of your body and they cut themselves. We put a band aid on you said the fi. Even the five year old knew to cover the wound. But we don't ever think about emotional wounds and we certainly don't think about treatment. Why do you think we have this, like, blind spot?
- [11:27]
B
The historical context is that when there are times of hardship, of war, then the last thing in our cue is our feelings. Because, you know, during World War II, you know, asking a soldier, well, how do you feel about being bombed right now? It's not going to be useful. You just have to kind of get on. So it's only when there are times of, you know, enough peace, where your basic needs are taken care of, that we can start to actually ask that it's relevant to ask how are we actually feeling about something that's a more recent development. And we still have, you know, the great generation boomers, many people who grew up in the, you know, stiff upper lip and, you know, stay calm and carry on and, you know, and, you know, don't complain and, you know, there are many people who still feel this way. Men often still feel this way, that it's not masculine to voice an emotional complaint. Now, I'm not saying you have to complain about these things loudly. I'm just saying that you have to be aware of when they're actually happening. The equivalent of a cut and a scrape is rejection, for example. Right? Those are the cuts and scrapes of daily life. They always sting. And sometimes we have a small cut, you don't need to do much about it. You get a small rejection, it'll sting, but it'll get over. Sometimes it's bleeding a lot. You do need to bandage it. And sometimes it can be really bad and get infected and, you know that you need professional help. We don't have the triage capability when it comes to emotional wounds. We don't. We can't tell the difference. We don't. There's just sophistication is lagging so many decades behind Our sophistication when it comes to physical wounds.
- [13:15]
A
You're so right. I love that you talk about rejection because that's something I'm very familiar with. And there is like a lasting, lingering damage that comes with like a huge rejection or repeated small rejections that shapes the way you see the whole world. And I'd love to talk more about that. But you say also there are seven wounds. Is that correct? Like seven common.
- [13:40]
B
I, in, in the book that I wrote called Emotional First Aid, I spoke about seven. Just because it's a book, not an encyclopedia. You know, I, I just had to make choices. So, so there were seven that I, that I spoke about. There were loneliness, rejection, failure, guilt, rumination, loss, and low self esteem. I could write seven more. You know, like, there are many kinds of emotional wounds. We all sustain. I just chose those A, because they're very common and B, because they're actually scientifically proven techniques and tools that we can use to address them. So I just thought it was, it was useful to talk about those.
- [14:17]
A
Yeah, What I'd really like to talk about, especially for my listeners, is failure. Because I, I mean, you're a doctor. I love how you, you have a little card that says not a real doctor, you' a real doctor, Dr. Lynch. So funny. But failure is this so interesting to me because I work with so many people to help them declutter and organize. And what's really fascinating to me is the roadblock of I can't and this helplessness that sometimes they feel that is literally paralyzing. Even though the solution is sometimes just putting trash in the trash, it feels impossible. And when you really start talking, it comes from past failure. It is a wound, and it's a gaping wound that is stopping them from living their best life and reaching their potential. Is it coming from fear of failing again? Or is it literally the pain of failure that is paralyzing? Like what? Or is it a lot of different things? Can we talk about failure?
- [15:24]
B
Yeah. Now, failure, I think, is a really interesting one just because we all experience it all the time. You know, we fail at everything until we succeed at it. As kids, you know, we fail is our default failure until we, you know, master whatever the thing is. And as adults, it happens to us all the time. And the wound can be small or can be gaping. There are many people, I say this in their TED talk, who tried something really important to them once, and a single failure pivoted them off that life path, essentially. And wow, what a shame. Our response to failure is extremely psychological. And it comes in many ways. And so you ask, like, why is it that people will, you know, feel so paralyzed? Why is it that they give up? So there are many different things that happen. Number one, it stings. It hurts. It's very. It's painful, it's disappointing, it's upsetting. It's demoralizing, all of those things. The main problem with failure. Well, the main problems is, are that a. It makes us feel very helpless. We feel like, oh, I failed, period. Not, I failed. Here's the context for that. I failed, period. And if I failed, period, what's the point of trying again? We generalize the failure to mean far more than it actually means. And we personalize it in ways that make us feel absolutely paralyzed. When I applied to graduate schools in the US My accent betrays that I'm not from here. When I applied to graduate schools, I applied the first year. I didn't get in anywhere. I didn't even get an interview, which is the next step to being accepted. And so at first I was like, oh, everyone. I was telling people I got rejected from graduate schools. And then I realized, wait, wait, that's not true. I didn't get rejected. My application got rejected. The forms I've sent in were inadequate. The information I gave them wasn't sufficient. It wasn't me. It was my application. My application. I can improve my application. I can do something about me. I can't even. That quick shift was enough to free me up. And then I started to figure out what I need to do differently. I applied again and got in. It's that personalizing, the generalizing and the feeling of helplessness that makes us paralyzed.
- [18:01]
A
Yeah. I witnessed my daughter, my middle daughter, Abby. She applied to a bunch of universities. Her whole life, she's been like this, like, energized. Happy, outgoing, just beautiful soul. The rejection letters when she applied for school started coming in, and she. Obviously, she was sad, but everything changed about her. You could see almost a wound in her soul. It was crazy. Like, she was sleeping all day. She was saying, oh, I'm stupid, and what's the point? And she stopped doing her hair and makeup. Like, it affected. She didn't want to go out with friends. And I. I wit. I saw in this moment, this gaping hole inside of her. And I think we applied some emotional first aid. I don't know if it was that, but just like I showed her examples of other people who had failed the exact same way and how they found other solutions. And slowly she kind of built herself back up and kind of put a band aid on that wound. But I think if we had left it gaping, that could have changed the trajectory of her entire life, honestly. And eventually she was taken off the wait list and she got into the school that she wanted and it all ended well. But it doesn't always, always end well. Imagine if she had just talked herself out of trying, which I saw she was teetering right there. And so many of us fall over the edge into despair, into, well, I suck and I'm stupid and I can't do this anyways. And what is the point if we have a wound that's been there a long time, doctor, is it still, can we heal it? And is this something we can provide first aid for? Or is first aid for a fresh wound like it would be if we cut ourselves?
- [19:47]
B
Well, obviously it's more impactful if you do it with a fresh wound because then it doesn't get infected, it doesn't get those years. Because what happens is that when you again with your daughter, you had the thing there where you said she started to feel, and this is very common, especially for young people, she started to feel generally inadequate, generally withdrawing, like literally. It was the same thing I had just said her application was wait listed. Her application, not her as a person. They didn't know her as a person. They knew the information she gave them. That's it. And it's all very specific information when you're applying to colleges, no matter how bleeding hot your essay might be, it's all very, very, very specific. So it's just that it's a narrow thing. It's also very much in context of how many people applied from her school. And they're only going to take this many from her school. So if she was that, you know, like six person rather than the fifth, all of that. And. But we don't apply that thinking. And then it can really generalize now, when it's been sitting there for a while, what it does is it makes you feel bad about yourself, it affects your self esteem, and then you begin to, and then it alters your perceptions. You begin to look for proof of your inadequacy, you begin to look for proof of your inability. And so it predisposes you to keep failing because one thing you didn't do, which is vital is figure out what the failure was about, what you could do better next time, why you missed, you know, and also that's the other thing. Sometimes when you see I'm going to use pole vaulting, when people do poll here's why when people do. It's not random. When people do pole pole vaulting, they sometimes show a slow motion from the side, and you can see that they actually had the height, but it just a sliver of skin touched the bar and the bar fell. They failed. We consider those failures sometimes the same as if we crashed into the thing or didn't go up at all. In other words, the fact that we missed by this much doesn't register. It feels like it's impossible. And sometimes it's this much or this much. We don't know until we do some kind of due diligence and look into what happened. But if we don't, we general overgeneralize and we take it much as a much bigger statement than it actually is.
- [22:09]
A
I want to tell you a quick story, because this is the first time I discovered how powerful your brain is, like, just changing your thought. I saw a lot of therapists, and I had this new therapist, and I'm like, fix me, fix me. And I'm sitting there complaining about my husband in this therapy appointment, hoping that she's like, you're right, he's terrible. You should leave him. Because I'm like, he never helps, and I got to do everything and blah, blah. And she said, I want you to just do an exercise for seven days. I want you to every day look for three reasons that that's not true and write them down three ways that he's not, you know, a giant piso crap that never helps you look for three ways he does help for seven days. And I was like, I'm not gonna find anything, but sure. And I was very much like, this is stupid. I went home and I looked, and I was like, I guess he put his dishes in the dishwasher. And I've shared this story before, and, you know, the next day I'm like, I'm looking. I guess he did this, and I wrote it down. By the end of this, literally seven days, all I saw was all the ways he was so helpful. And nothing had changed, except I forced my perception to change. And then, like, I'm like, is he helping more? Because it was so bizarre. Dr. And that was my first time really understanding the power of thought. Or I. I don't even know how to describe it, how when we look for things to reinforce our thought patterns, it truly changes everything about what we see in the world. And I assume we can do this same tactic. Not one more like, man, I hate my husband. I want to divorce him. But with our own wounds, like Failure or rejection or loneliness. Because maybe our brains are perceiving things that aren't true. Is. Is that what you're thinking?
- [24:10]
B
Exactly right. Our perceptions get altered by these emotional wounds. It's one of the happens. Our perceptions narrow and unfortunately they focus on things to affirm our bad feelings in that moment. So we're looking for more, you know, for more confirmation that we can't succeed, that we're not smart enough, that our partner is not good enough, that you know, our not attractive enough, that people don't respond well to us. And then it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy because we're so focused on proving to ourselves that we're inadequate. We're certainly not. That's not going to be a great motivator. That's not going to allow us to bring forth our actual capacities and capabilities. So then it starts to feed on itself. Now you asked about wounds of failure that are ancient, that are, I mean ancient, that are historical. That's cool. I'm ancient. But in other wounds, you know, that have been there for years or decades, say now, yes, you can do something about them, but what you have to do is more general because at that point they've affected you in a more general way. You have bought into the I can't theory of, you know, I've never succeeded at dieting, so I can't diet. I've never been able to work out regularly, so I can't work out. I can never get into that habit, whatever. The thing is, I've never been able to do this, ergo I cannot do it and therefore I'm, you know, then the statement I, because I'm lazy, because I'm stupid, because I'm not smart enough, because I'm not good enough, not attractive enough, not adequate, whatever the skilled, talented, creative, whatever the thing might be. So we have to start with those assumptions and we have those big statements about ourselves. We have to do one thing and it's a simple thing. Replace the exclamation point with a question mark. That's it. I'm not saying argue against it. I'm not saying, yes, I am the most creative person in the world. Haven't been able to sell a painting in 30 years, but I know I'm talented. That's going to be very, that's a hard lift. That's going to be hard to convince ourselves of. But the question mark about maybe I am talented in some ways that I haven't been able to fully express or that people haven't been able to fully recognize. Let me figure out what those are. Maybe the kind of working out that I've been trying to do doesn't work for me. And I need to find a different kind of sport or athletic pursuit that actually speaks to me more. Maybe it's not the diets that are the problem. It's that I live in a household of people that don't support me and there's constantly bad and tempting food around me. Maybe it's the context that's been like, whatever. The thing is, we need to just have the question so we can create some doubt for exploration. Because it has to start with an exploration. And I'll say one more thing about the exploration. The tricky part about it is you have to be able to explore without beating yourself up. You have to be able to look at, yeah, I didn't go to the gym when I said I would. I didn't go running with my partner when I thought I should. I didn't do without saying, because I'm lazy, because I'm useless, because I can't do anything like that, because it's just not for me. Without beating yourself, it's the beating yourself up that makes it so unpleasant and it's so unnecessary. You know, you have to approach it without that negative self talk just as facts because you're trying to understand a situation as objectively as possible. When you're beating yourself up, you can't be objective. Yeah.
- [27:44]
A
Oh my gosh, this is making so much sense. And I know my listeners right now, so as they're listening to us, they are taking action in their home. They're putting away laundry or they're cleaning or they're decluttering. And a lot of my followers have felt messy their entire life because. Because guess what? They've. They have been messy. They've struggled with their home, and it's felt like they're just beating their head against the wall and never making progress. And I think the reason they're coming back and listening is because the whole clutterbug philosophy is you're not messy. You organize different. Maybe there's nothing wrong with you. You just need a different solution. And I think that's the question mark you're talking about. It's. It's. Instead of people, instead of blaming themselves, there's this sliver of hope of like, maybe I could try again and get a different outcome. And this is crazy. I don't think it really has anything to do with me or the clutterbug philosophy. I think it's all about them dusting themselves off and looking to like, well, what does work instead of always focusing on what doesn't and can I try something new? So for my listeners right now who are feeling like they are home failures that they cannot keep up on the day to day, do you have a little some words of wisdom for them? Dr.
- [29:07]
B
I do. First of all, look messy, disorganized. If you are messy and disorganized, it's very paralyzing. It is who you are. What can you do about that? The problem is that when you're looking around, your eye is going to go to the area that's messy, the area that's disorganized, the area that's cluttered. And see, see, I'm messy. But right next to that area might be an area that's a little bit more organized. In the other room, there's that one cabinet that you always keep quite orderly. And so the generalized category, that's the generalization, I'm messy is never true and never useful. It's just not make it accurate. You have to make it accurate but more specific. I have trouble organizing this area. I have trouble organizing the attic. I have trouble keeping my clothes in order. I have trouble staying on top of laundry. Those are very specific statements which are true, period. But they don't mean that you are a thing. They mean that you have trouble staying on top of your laundry. That's all it means. And there might be laundry, there might be a long list, but it's that item specific list of what it means. So when you hear yourself say in your head, I'm messy, I'm disorganized, I'm a clutterbug, I'm a hoarder, whatever. The thing is, stop using those terms, they're inaccurate. There's almost always and you can almost always and let's go with your assignment that your therapist gave you, find one thing in your apartment, in your surroundings that contradicts that. Find one. If there is one, it can be a small one. That statement is no longer true. It's already an exaggeration and overstatement. You will find the one thing that you are on top of that you do get organized about that isn't messy, that is more organized, that's less cluttered. And be like, okay, that's not a sentence for me. It's not an accurate descriptor. I need to abolish that from my head and keep it specific. If you look at something that makes you dismayed, say I need to get on top of that. I need to get better about that, but keep it super, super specific. I need to get better about that is a very accurate statement. You do. It is not adequate right now. Whatever your standard is, you do need to get better about it. But I need to get better about that is a hopeful statement. Is an optimistic statement. It's an empowering statement. It implies you could. The I'm messy and disorganized implies you cannot. Yeah.
- [31:45]
A
When I was listening to your TED Talk, what I found really interesting was my brain started going about wounds and how obvious it is when you see a cut or you feel the pain. And then I recently watched this movie about this. It was called Novocaine. Don't watch it. It's not good. But there was a guy who was born with this disorder where he couldn't feel pain. And so he would do these daily checks of himself. Right. To make sure he didn't have a W. And hearing your TED Talk, I started thinking like, we are kind of. We can't see our emotional pain or wounds. And maybe we need to check ourselves. I know this sounds weird, but stay with me. But maybe it's more like, I don't know. Do you journal or do you say, like, yeah, do I. Am I struggling with loneliness? Am I struggling with failure? Have I had rejection? Like, can we as assess. Kind of like when I go to a fire call and it's a medical call, I do the check marks to, like, do you feel pain? And do you have. And I, like, what. What's your backstory? What's your medical history? Have you had surgeries? Are you. Do you have allergies? This is things we do for, like, the physical body. But could we do some sort of full body mind check? And what would that look like? I'm putting a lot of pressure on you.
- [33:03]
B
No.
- [33:03]
A
Are you picking up what I'm putting down?
- [33:04]
B
Yeah. No, no. This is. These are very, very good and reasonable questions. I mean, and this is important, first of all, because we don't do the check. We don't ask ourselves that. We kind of just keep going and call ourselves names and believe the bad things about ourselves without actually pausing to assess it for accuracy to start, you know, so. So we don't do that. We should. We should. You know, every time you say something negative about yourself. About yourself, every time you say something fatalistic about yourself, any sentence that begins with I can't, I never. Any kind of negative projection into the future should be questioned because unless you're physiologically unable, like, I will never be a professional basketball player, I can say that with so much confidence because I
- [33:50]
A
want to say never physiologically.
- [33:52]
B
Well, but no physiologically and in so many other ways, it's just not possible. But there are very few things in that category. Most things I can do, whether I want to, whether I want to invest, the effort, the preparation, the training, you know, to do them is another question. But whether I could is entirely up to my dedication, effort, persistence, all of those are in my control. Even if I haven't displayed them in the past, I could potentially in the future. So you have to start thinking about those things as I could do those things. And anything that makes you feel like you can't is a wound by definition. It's a wound in your perception, it's a wound in your self esteem, it's a wound in your self definition, it's a wound in your motivation and it's a wound in your thinking because you're not actually identifying. What were the obstacles here? What are the obstacles that are preventing me from getting to where I need to go in the specific thing as possible? Let's just use, you know, you mentioned laundry or. I did, one of us did. And so let's just use that as an example. Just because it's something people need to do on a regular basis. Right? You're not on top of your laundry. What in the method, what in the system doesn't work? How does it get away from you? Is it setting the intention? Is it deciding when it will be? Most people have a laundry day. You know, this is the best dating excuse women have ever invented. No, no, no, I can't meet on Sunday, it's laundry day. You know, like, you know, like what is it? Is it that the machines are taken in your, in your, in, you know, in your building? Is it that you people didn't bring you the dirty stuff or that you where list all the obstacles? What are the things that are preventing you even if they're slight? And you're like, is it that you're busy on the couch and you just don't feel like getting up? What are the things that stand in your way once you have a list of obstacles and make it exhaustive and there are no bad ones, there are no silly ones, there are no small ones. They can be.
- [35:48]
A
Can I hate being laundry be on the list? Like I just don't like it.
- [35:53]
B
Yes, I hate it, but it's not sufficient. Why? Usually it's boring, it hurts my back, it's laborious, I hate folding or I hate this or I hate, like you need to specify what you know, the why. Once you do all of that, you now have a list of options, obstacles. Right? I hate it because it hurts my back. It's boring, it's tedious. You know, it just gets dirty a week later. What's the point? You know, all of the lists of. Now you have a list of obstacles. Now it's a task of problem solving, obstacle by obstacle. How could you get around it? What have you tried, what didn't work, what might work in the future? What new method can you have to get around that? Specific. That's problem solving it in a very minute way. But that's the approach. When you start thinking like that, you just start. You haven't solved it yet. You haven't even maybe finished all the lists. But endeavoring to create the list of obstacles, to break it down and understand it alone, will give you a sense of hope, will give you a sense of empowerment, will give you a sense of control, because you're tackling it. You're trying to figure it out. It's the opposite of paralysis.
- [37:02]
A
That's so good. Okay, what do you tell my listeners? I'm just. This is something I've noticed in my. In myself, and now I notice it in other people. Sometimes when we have a wound, like, say, failure or rejection, I always start, whenever I have one of these things is like blaming myself. Blaming myself. But I do think eventually I get to the point where I'm really sick of blaming myself, and I start making myself feel better by putting the blame on other people. So I get. Get in this. Like, it starts out like I get knocked down in the mud. And then eventually I'm like, well, it is. Someone tripped me, and no one's helping me up. And. And so that can be hard to identify when we're checking ourselves for wounds. If we're. If we're, like, projecting that it's someone else's fault. The house is a mess because my husband doesn't help and my kids are disasters. I can't clean my kitchen because my mom never taught me how, and it's her fault. And that can be hard to. Hard to break free from. I feel like when we start doing that, it can also be hard to identify that that's an emotional wound that we have because we're now putting it on other people. So it's like we're not checking ourselves because we're like, well, I have nothing wrong with me. Everybody else is kind of the problem. Do you think that that's something that someone needs to have awareness for. And what is the emotional first aid if we catch ourselves doing that?
- [38:25]
B
Okay, so the first part is the self blame, right? I mean, you say you go to self blame and then you try and shrug it off by it by looking at external factors. The self blame, to the extent that you're just figuring out what you could have done better or what the issue might have been on your end is fine. The self blame, when it comes with a finger wagging, why did you do this? Oh, so stupid of you to do that. Then it's not fine. Then you're actually deepening the wound. That's what we do. Like when we get rejected, we start thinking of all our inadequacies At a time where our self esteem is hurting, we decide to go on a search and destroy mission for every shred of self esteem we have left. You know, it's like literally kicking. We're joining fight club, we're kicking ourselves when we're down. It makes absolutely no sense. Especially like in the romantic context. We're feeling bad about ourselves and people start, well, I'm too short, I'm not attractive enough, my eyes aren't this, I wish that I wasn't successful enough, I didn't make enough money. Like, how is that possibly helping you right now? Your self esteem is in the dumps. You need to revive it, not do the opposite. Now due diligence and accountability is important. It's actually important to think about. You know what, let me look at the text there. I texted three times and they didn't respond once. That might be a little bit much. I might need to hold back a little bit more next time and not pursue so hard or wait for a response like figuring out what you can, how you can strategize better or do better, that part's fine. But not calling yourself an idiot, not wagging a finger, not why do you always do this? It's not about why you always do this. How do you avoid doing it in the future? So that's the first part. If you are only so that some people will spend all their time on the self blame, other people will skip it entirely and just look at, at everyone else. Well, it was them and it was the context and it was the situation, it was the weather, all of that, that's not good either because then you are not learning anything from what went wrong that you might be able to do better next time. There is always a balance of things you can do. And again, it's not what you did wrong, it's what you can do better next time. There's always what can I do better next time? What I don't have control over. Because that was them. Do you know what I mean? Like, you know, I, one of the things I just wrote about was that, you know, somebody can have like a three hour date and then get ghosted. And they're like, and people always say to me like, I guess I wasn't good enough, I wasn't interesting enough, I wasn't attractive enough. I'm like, it was a three hour date. You were all those things. Clearly that was them, not you. Because no one stays on a three hour date if they're not interested. They were. Whatever happened thereafter had nothing to do with you. It was about them. And you can make that distinction clearly because it was a three hour date. In other words, like, you know, you want to sometimes go to. It's them, not me, but you want to have a balance of it because there's nothing you can do about that. You don't know what happened, whether there was an emergency, whether that you can do, you can control what you can control about you. So that balance is important. But again, you're looking for what I can do better. You're looking for obstacles to overcome. You're looking to things you can improve. You're not looking to blame.
- [41:50]
A
I love this. So you're basically just, yeah, you're checking yourself like a doctor and then making a list to question it. I love that. That takes so much pressure. I, I've always been of the school, like positive affirmations and fake it till you make it and repeat it over and over. And I do think that's helpful in some. But when you truly believe something about yourself that's negative, like I'm messy or I'm always going to struggle with my weight, just chanting some positive stuff in the mirror is not enough. It really isn't.
- [42:25]
B
It actually, it's not just that it's not enough. In many situations it will make you feel worse. The thing about affirmations is if they fall outside our basic fundamental beliefs, if they're too opposed to what we actually believe the research is, they will make us feel worse. When you just got rejected from a date and you fundamentally, not just in the moment, fundamentally don't believe you're attractive, looking in the mirror and saying I'm beautiful and I'm going to find love is going to make you really upset because your unconscious mind is literally going to say to you, no, you're not. So you need to be. So that's the positive affirmation. It's tough if it's too counter to how you feel. You need to adjust it. It's not that you don't look in mirror and say something affirming you can, but it needs to fall within what you can believe. It needs to be like, I have beautiful eyes and if I keep looking, I'll find someone who appreciates them. Believable. I'm a stunner. Maybe not. I'm the smartest person in the room and I'm going to become billionaire before I'm 40. Maybe not when you just got fired for the third time, you know, but I can figure out what goes wrong and fix it so I can be successful later on. Is so you want to affirm in ways that are reasonable, that are motivating, that are hopeful but not exaggerated, not too far removed from what your beliefs are and what your beliefs are and what you're currently feeling.
- [43:56]
A
That makes so much sense. I'm thinking about my own journey from like. Like being so messy and really struggling. I didn't just say, I'm now a clean and tidy person. I started calling myself a recovering super slob. It was like, I'm still admitting that I am a super slob, but I was recovering. Like, I was working towards being better. And that was just like this little crack in the door that gave me permission to try. And if I failed, it was like, it's okay because I'm recovering, you know, and it didn't feel like there, you gotta give up because you'll never be that person. It felt like I was allowing myself to be on a journey. And maybe that's exactly. I think what you're saying is people just need to have that little sliver, that little crack of. Of hope or questioning and then digging in deeper. So good.
- [44:47]
B
Just. Just one thing I want to say about the recovering disorderly person is that it also orients you towards the fact that you need to keep your eye on it. Because if you, you know, like, you're recovering, like, you'll never be fundamentally that organized person. It's something you need to keep working on. So it keeps some guardrails there.
- [45:08]
A
That's so good. People say to me a lot, they're like, oh, you just go for things and you're not afraid to fail. And you're just like, oh, what if you get rejected? You don't seem to care. Which is true. But I always think it's like, well, I've been rejected and failed so much. Like I've Been exposed to it my entire childhood. I had undiagnosed adhd. I was called annoying even by my own parents. It was like, go away. You're so annoying. You have to. I had to eat dinner in a separate room from my family because I annoyed them so much. Look at Z. Stop it. The point is. And then in school, you know, I'm not physical at all. It was always the last pick for every team, and I struggled to make friends. And one year in school, I had to sit in the hall the entire year because the teacher just said I was so annoying. I've never won a trophy, an award. I have one trophy I've recently won, and I'm pretty proud of it. It's up there behind me if you're watching the video. But so I guess trying for me something new and failing. I'm like, well, I pro. I'm. I'm probably going to fail anyways. So I've realized it's not actually that bad. So I go for things and I. Obviously there's a wound because I got a little emotional there talking about rejection, but I'm wondering if I've just hacked it because I failed so, so much or if there's something else going on and I want to know only so I can help my listeners who are listening to this kind of get that dust themselves off and maybe get up and try again kind of. I don't know how else to like, I don't know where that comes from. So I can't help people get it for themselves. Do you have ideas?
- [46:57]
B
Yes. First of all, when. When you are doing things at scale, it's helpful. For example, sometimes people have to make a cold call to ask for. You know, you're trying to collect money for a cause. Making one phone call to ask is horribly difficult. When you sit with a list of 15 phone numbers that you're going to call, the first one's a little difficult, but by the third one, you're just going on to the next one. It's much less painful. When you're submitting your poem to a competition and you're submitting it to the competition, it's going to hurt when it doesn't get accepted. But if you submit it to 30 competitions, to 50 competitions, which is what, by the way, poets do and screenwriters do and short story writers do, they submit. Artists in general, multiple, multiple, multiple things. Because when one says no, which is highly, highly, highly likely, you go on to the next one. There's the next one. There's an okay, that One's no, but there are 20 others that I'm waiting for. It makes it less painful if you're trying to date and you're swiping on one person on an app. A, it's not how apps work. You should be swiping on many because they really, they reward engagement. But secondly, it's a numbers game. The more the better because then each one stings less. So. Yes. So first of all, having a lot of experience with it can help manage it. You develop ways of thinking about it that are less personal. It's easier to just go from one thing to the next without dwelling too much on any one wound, you know, as it were. So that is something, I think that is useful. I do want to say something about the fact that you got just a smidge emotional. It doesn't mean the wound is there still. I mean, actually it doesn't mean the wound isn't healed. There are things we go through in life that are painful and the best we can do, and we all have them, and the best we can do is to heal it enough so that it's not, not interrupting us in our daily life. It's not rearing its head often. But when we go through very painful things, if you're going to actually go back, think about it and press on that spot. It's going to ache because you know it's healed, but it's going to ache. And so it does. People always say, oh, I'm talking about this, I must need more therapy. Sometimes it's, oh, I must need more therapy because it's still making me upset. I'm like, it's making you upset because it was horrifically upsetting because it really left a mark. You've done the work, you've done the healing. By tomorrow, you won't think about it. That's the healing. But in the moment, if you're going to go back and think about it, it's going to make you emotional. So. So I'm just making that distinction. Like there's certain things that are healed, but they'll still hurt when we touch them.
- [49:42]
A
Yeah. So good. Okay, so I, I think what I hear you saying is maybe my listeners need to practice sucking a little bit more.
- [49:51]
B
They need to do it all at once. In other words, like if you're spacing it out, it doesn't work. One thing I wish people would stop doing is grading themselves on a pass fail basis. Because unless you're perfect, you fail. And that's incorrect and useless. So always look at this part Went well. This part I could do better at. How could I do better? What do I need to figure out to do better? That's one thing. But it's never succeed fail. It's always a continuum and specifics along the way.
- [50:22]
A
Yeah, you're so right. Can we talk about two of the other of your seven that you discuss? Specifically loss. So you've lost someone or you've lost things you've had devastating loss and then guilt. I know that these are two things that. That most people really do struggle with. And when I'm speaking with people who are living in a really messy house and struggling, loss is a big one. Whether they've had a divorce and half of their things were taken, or someone decluttered, or they had a fire, or they had a flood, or they've lost a loved one, it makes something in their brain, like, hold on so tight to everything, including physical things, including things they don't even like, necessarily because of this wound. Is there something really practical, something like a first aid that people can do to help heal these wounds?
- [51:23]
B
So let's start with loss. I mean, you're absolutely right. When people lose someone, they lose someone they love, they lose a pet, they lose a career or a job that they felt strongly about. It's very natural to hold on to a ton of mementos, reminders, things associated with that, because you feel like these are my tethers to that memory, to the person, to the situation, to the history, and sometimes in unhealthy ways. I've seen pet owners who still have the bowl out a year later and no one's eating, you know, from it. And, you know, like, people who hoard a bit or who can collect things. Feel like I've invested in this collection. It's a part of me. Like, giving up some of it makes me feel like I'm giving up a part of me. You know, there's a fear about, what if I might need it? What if I then don't have it? So, you know, the idea of loss making us want to hold on more tightly to things, to objects, is absolutely there. You need to process loss. The best way to process loss is to come to some kind of way of thinking about it that fits into the narrative, the story of your life, but that doesn't paralyze you. Like, what did you learn from that person that you can take with you? What did you gain from that experience that you can enrich yourself with going forward? Even what growth can you take away from the loss? There's something we call post traumatic growth. Not just post traumatic, you know, trauma or loss, but growth. You can grow from being through loss and understanding that it's a part of life and through getting through it. Not gracefully necessarily, not even that well, but getting through it. It taught you, like, I can get through those things. And I need to know that about myself, that as much as it was terrible or sucked, I did get through it. I am moving on and to feel empowered by that. So you need to address loss in that way. Guilt, I'm going to talk about because I think it's the most cluttery of our emotions. Guilt. When you're guilty about something, it's a snooze alarm in your head. It goes off all the time. Example, it's your mother's birthday. You forgot to call. You're in a meeting at work, you're going to be in meetings all day and you're worried that you're going to forget later. Every two minutes I have to call my mother. Oh, God, I didn't call her. Oh, she's going to be so upset. Why did I forget? It's going to be so hard to focus. It takes away so much attention. Guilt is considered a pro social emotion. Its role is to help protect our relationships. It alerts us to when we have done harm or might be doing harm to another person emotionally, physically, or damaging our relationship in some way. It's a useful mechanism. It stops us from doing certain things. It helps us correct, apologize for, and repair problems with relationships when they are there in moderation. So that reminder in your head, that clutter in your head, the way you get rid of it is by figuring out, do I need to do something? Yeah, well, it's easy when you just have to call your mom between the meetings to say happy birthday. Or just text and say, I've been meetings all day, I'll call you later to hear how your day was. That's easy. It's when guilt becomes unrelenting, when it's not, when you haven't resolved it, when you feel bad about something that you've done, but you don't actually manage it in some way, or the person's no longer with us so you can't even fix it. Or, you know, like, it's when guilt is nagging at you that nag, nag, nag, nag. That's when it becomes really, really damaging. It's when you feel guilty about stuff that you've done or not done to yourself even. And the solution to guilt is always to garner Forgiveness, it's from the other person or it's from yourself. You have to be able to forgive yourself to stop the alarm going off in your head. There are studies that show that when we feel guilty, we assess our physical weight to be heavier than it actually is. That heaviness we feel with guilt gets translated so that we literally feel heavier. We have to lighten the load when we feel guilty.
- [56:12]
A
So we can do this by. If the person is passed and we feel guilty, we can do this just by forgiving ourselves. Like, what does this actually look like?
- [56:21]
B
Self forgiveness. In other words, what can you do for their memory? What can you. What terms can you set out that feel reasonable to you? Like, if I do this, I'll forgive myself. It'll always. Again, like the thing I said about the wound. It'll always hurt a little bit when I think about it, but I can move on from it nagging at me, from it sitting on my shoulders, from weighing me down too much because there's no utility in that anymore. And that's when the person's not there. But if the person is there, can you do something to mend the rupture? Now, they might not want to. It might be on them. They might be stubborn, difficult, vindictive, whatever, resentful. So it might not work. But what can you lay out? What best effort can you make that you'll be like, okay, if I do that, then it's on them. If they say no, because that's a great way to apologize. That's. That would be very nice of me to do that. If they then say, no, I don't have to feel guilty, then it's like, okay, no. Now it's them. Like, you want to lay out the terms, reason with yourself, negotiate with yourself that will allow you to move forward?
- [57:23]
A
I'm going to share what a lot of people tell me they feel guilty about, which I find strange, and maybe you have ways to help them. When we talk about decluttering specifically, a lot of people feel a lot of guilt and shame about being wasteful. So they don't want to throw things out because it feels like they're hurting the environment or they're taking away from someone else who could use it. Even when just donating, they're like, well, what if they. There's this guilt from. Not from wasting, I guess, or from not, like, using an object perfectly or disposing of it perfectly. And it can be paralyzing. I do this test quite often, and it just happened accidentally once during a live and now When I'm working with people, I'll say, can you take that chipped mug out of the donation box and just put it in the garbage? And that feels paralyzing. And when we really talk about it, it's guilt about making a mistake, guilt of being wasteful, and the shame of doing something wrong that can literally, it's magnified to this huge thing. It's not like you're doing a. It's really, in the grand scheme of things, not a big deal. Everything's going to end up in a landfill one day anyways. And the thrift stores are overrun with mugs and they throw most of them out. And yet that guilt of wastefulness or making a mistake or whatever it is feels huge. And even if they've done it, they think about it after they ruminate with that guilt of the mistake, the perceived mistake, what's going on and how can, can you help overcome this?
- [59:01]
B
What I suggest to people in those situations, it's very, very common when you're trying to declutter, you're either giving things away or throwing them away. You're trying to give them away. Sometimes it's really difficult to give. It's much. Whatever. Like you said, mugs. Well, the gift jobs are like, I mean, the, the, you know, the, the like we've had up to here with the mugs. Thank you. And you know, no, we don't need that, that lovely T shirt that's got holes in it. We're good. And then you're like, well, now I'm just. It's just landfill or it's just wastefulness, et cetera. I believe that you need to tether again, this is all about the self negotiation, right? This is between you and you. Tether the throwing out stuff, the part that if you donate, hope for the best. If you have to throw stuff out and it's making you feel guilty, tether it with resolutions about purchasing in the future, about your future acquiring. Because I know very few people who throw out mugs who don't still buy mugs. I know very few people who donate clothing that still don't buy clothing. So make a deal with yourself. I will. You know, if I'm feeling guilty about this being wasteful, here's how I'm going to preserve, reuse, you know, reapply. Here's what I can. I'm going to decide that I'm going to only get this amount of clothing this year. I'm going to get it from places that maybe even secondhand, or if I need new Things for work. I will only get stuff I'm for sure going to wear on a very regular basis. I negotiate with what you'll be doing in the future. If you know, like, I will do better in the future. It'll make it a little easier to discard those things in the present.
- [60:42]
A
Yeah, and it is true because the, and also like the pain of, oh, that was uncomfortable. It stops me at the store, you know, because I've decluttered. I'm like, oh, I don't want to feel that again. And I am like, the act of decluttering is making you a more conscientious shopper in the future. And you're really considering about what you're bringing in just because you've experienced the pain of letting go. So that's a really good way to think about it, realizing like, yes, okay, okay, this feels uncomfortable and I feel guilty. But doing this is going to make sure I never in the future continue to bring things in that I don't use and love. That's so, so good. Okay, I would love you to leave our listeners with maybe a few tips or even one tip about emotional hygiene because I love when you talk about the fact that we brush our teeth to protect them from, from future decay, to keep them clean so they last longer. But we don't, we do this twice a day at least. But we don't do emotional hygiene. And honestly, I don't even know what that would look like. But I think it is important. Like just hearing you talk about, I'm like, yes, we should be doing that, but I don't know what that looks like, doctor. So could you give us some? Just like paint a picture for us. I need a picture. I need steps. I like. Okay, step by steps.
- [62:06]
B
Emotional hygiene is about practicing emotional first aid. That's how you do it. You do regular check ins with yourself about how you're feeling. If you're feeling bad or down or whatever, first of all, you try to identify what the feeling is specifically. Like name those feelings specifically. It's not like, how are you feeling? Too many times I get meh, meh by definition is not a feeling. Neither is blah, neither is bad because it doesn't tell me anything about what the kind of bad that is. So be more descriptive in what you're. I'm feeling disempowered. I'm feeling hopeless. I'm feeling, you know, like, like my morale is low. I'm feeling demotivated. I'm feeling listless, like, whatever. Try and use words to describe how you're feeling, and then ask yourself, do I need to do something about this feeling? Because our feelings aren't bad, even the uncomfortable ones. Maybe I just need to sit with them. Is there an action that's required? And if so, what might it be? That's emotional hygiene. You're actually looking at your emotional experiences. When you know you've been injured, when you've experienced a failure, a loss, when you're feeling lonely, when you're feeling, when you've had a rejection, when you're feeling guilty, like, then you know, when you're ruminating about things, then that you actually have to say, like, okay, is there something I can shrug off? It doesn't have to shrug off right now, but if it's still bothering me tomorrow, then that's a problem. Like, when I was, I used to write for many, many years before I got published. 14 years of writing nothing. So again, failure at scale. Very, very useful. Anyway, that aside, you know, look at any successful person. There are a lot of failures along the way. That's always the case. But when I was doing that, given what it was, I would assign myself time to feel upset. Oh, you know what? That wasn't an important agent. So half an hour for you, lady, and then I'm not feeling upset anymore. Ooh, that was a really important competition. I'm going to spend at least three hours. The rest of the evening, I get to feel like crap tomorrow. I need to snap out of it. I literally would be like, you know, you get to have the feelings, but let's not wallow. Let's not get lost in them. So, like, you know, be on top of it. And then when you need to get out of it, that's when you start applying emotional first aid tools and techniques to move forward, you know, to look at what you can do better next time, to become more hopeful and to empower yourself again to find, you know, there are alternatives. Here are the obstacles. Now I just need to figure out how to get around them, et cetera, et cetera.
- [64:47]
A
Yeah. So good. And they can read your book, Emotional First Aid. Actually, how can my followers follow you and get more information? I know they're going to want to, like, run. Just fix all our problems, doctor. Fix all our problems.
- [65:02]
B
Yes. My website is guy winch.com g y w I n c h dot com. You can follow me on social media, Instagram at Guy Winch, LinkedIn, Guy Winch, etc. And there are links to where you, you can get my book. Emotional First Aid is in Audiobook, in ebook and in paperback and it's in something like 30 languages. So yes, all kinds of languages. So you should be able to get it and feel free to enjoy. And my most recent book is called Mind over how to break free when work hijacks your life, which you can think of as emotional first aid for the workplace.
- [65:42]
A
And it was so good. We actually talked about the book in our last interview. That was so rudely interrupted and I apologize. So I didn't give to give that book a shout out. But let me tell you, everyone who watched that podcast was just enamored with you. Of course they were. And found you so incredibly helpful. So I will put the link if you missed that podcast, I'm going to put the link to that in the description as well. Absolutely incredible. It's always a pleasure. Thank you. Thank you so much. I'm feeling like I'm going to start doing the check like I'm born with I can't feel pain thing but for my brain. And I'm going to try to encourage my children too because it's something. You're right. Even little kids, we teach them how to put a band aid on, but we never teach our children or ourselves how to do emotional first aid. So absolutely brilliant. Thank you so much.
- [66:36]
B
Thank you for having me.
- [66:37]
A
I have to take a second to thank today's podcast sponsor, Caraway. I switched to Caraway cookware a few years ago and honestly it's changing the way I make dinner. When I first found out that if you use Teflon pans and there's scratches it creates like microplastics in all of your food, I was like I gotta be a grown up and get some non toxic cookware. But it did more than just that. It makes me me feel like maybe I am a little bit of Betty Crocker because I can fry meat and then put it directly in to like finish the cooking in the oven without switching pans. They're so easy to clean, they're gorgeous, they feel heavy duty. And right now you can save up to $230 on the 12 piece cookware set versus buying the pieces individually. Right now visit carawayhome.com clutterbug10 and you can take an additional 10% off off using the code clutterbug10 on your next purchase. This deal is exclusive just for our listeners, so go to carawayhome.com clutterbug10 or use the code clutterbug10 at checkout. I love speaking with Guy. Honestly, he makes me think of everything just a little bit differently. And my favorite takeaway today was when he said instead of saying I am messy, period, or I am messy, exclamation mark. Can we add a question mark? So how am I messy? Why am I messy? In which areas am I messy? And are there areas where I'm actually tidy or are there areas where I'm working towards getting better? It's a reframe of the same thing without you're not chanting in the mirror. I am an organized and clean person. The fact that he said that that can cause more damage is something I did not realize it was so eye opening. But he's right. We can't lie to ourselves. We have to be honest. So we can leave room for change. Right. So we can leave room to take a little step forward in the direction we want to go. Absolutely. So good. I hope you got things done. I hope you identified some wounds that maybe you have even grabbing a piece of paper. And let's do a check in of our emotions. Let's write down how we're feeling. And not just bad or meh. Right. But really dig into deep. I'm going to do this because I have been feeling some emotions lately and I think it's time that I really identify what those are and where they're coming from and what I can do to provide a little emotional first aid on them. Thank you so, so much and I'll see you guys next time.