34: The Problem with Professional Organizing with Professional Organizer Alison Lush
Can you afford the services of a professional organizer? Most people can’t, and that’s one of the big problems with the industry. Many professional organizers have come up with alternative ideas that allow them to reach more people with their services. Join us to learn more!
I’m happy to welcome back to the show Alison Lush, a Certified Professional Organizer who specializes in chronic disorganization. Alison last joined me for Episode 5 about Gentle Organizing. Today’s discussion is about the problems with professional organizing and how the industry is evolving to be accessible to more people. The good news is that there are different levels of help available more than ever before for organizing and decluttering your spaces!
Show Highlights:
Why a main problem with the professional organizing industry is that the services are not accessible for most people
How the pandemic massively impacted professional organizers in beneficial ways that are far more economical for clients
How Alison’s focus has changed to educating and empowering the individual to get unstuck
Why there is a spectrum of disorganization in which most people exist somewhere in the middle
Highlights of new gap-filling services that some innovative professional organizers are offering (See Resources and Links)
Why Accountability Groups and Body Doubling have become the cornerstone of Alison’s work with clients
Why the biggest question for professional organizers to ask regarding the client is, “What do they need?”
The difference between being unwilling and being overwhelmed in organizing and decluttering
Alison’s advice about finding a professional organizer
Resources and Links:
Connect with Alison: Website and TikTok
JUDITH KOLBERG
Conquering Chronic Disorganization book – emotion-based decluttering and organizing strategies
https://www.judithkolberg.com/
HAZEL THORNTON
Go With the Flow!: The clutter flow chart workbook https://www.org4life.com/
SUSAN GARDNER
The Focus Project “If your possessions interfere with your quality of life, The Focus Project is a way to look at them through a different lens.” Frame, Value, Edit. Exercises that promote looking at your belongings from a different angle. Reflection, partnering, creativity are encouraged, along with curiosity about the root causes of clutter. – Self-directed
LYNNE POULTON
Declutter GO! by Lynne Poulton - Once you start, you’re on a roll. Declutter GO! GAME NIGHTS – Group body doubling – weekly guided activities, prompts – group body doubling or autonomous -
JONDA BEATTIE AND DIANE QUINTANA
Release-Repurpose-Reorganize CARDS
https://releaserepurpose.com/?fbclid=IwAR3UkkdN6FdroVrQ260VV17XqvA2MnuMl5Hf9DHfzdMD_OaiYLz8tFbyYag - Self-directed – focused areas – systematic
VICKIE DELLAQUILA
Ophelia the Organizer – Follow her adventures and hear her organizing advice
https://www.opheliatheorganizer.com/
JULIET LANDAU-POPE
Organizing Bootcamp (5x15 minute sessions over weekdays) https://jlpcoach.com/
Connect with KC: TikTok, Instagram, and Website
Get KC’s book, How to Keep House While Drowning
We love the sponsors that make this show possible! You can always find all the special deals and codes for all our current sponsors on our website: www.strugglecare.com/promo-codes
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KC Davis 0:05
Hello, you sent to you balls of stardust. My name is KC Davis. I'm your host. Welcome back to Struggle Care. And today we have Allison Lush back in the studio with us, Alison 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 be sure and 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 Alison, 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,
Alison Lush 0:43
thanks for inviting me back. This is such a pleasure to be here. The sink, 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.
KC Davis 1:34
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 I 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 will charge that for the packing. So they send for 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 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's kind of what they specialize. 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, oh, okay, but 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.
Alison Lush 3:17
Hmm, yeah, yeah, it's amazing how it can add up the services because it 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.
KC Davis 3:38
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
Alison Lush 3:46
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 lurk 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 this stuff and help 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.
KC Davis 5:13
Yeah. So in this process of when you work with someone virtually, and you're helping them, you would mentioned like it's more economical. I also feel like, it's, I don't wanna 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 committee that like, when I got to know you, and the kinds 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 and 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 and your brand, which I think why we clicked really but what you offer. And what someone that does Courtney Kardashians pantry offers, like, they don't exist in the same universe in my head. And yet, you're both called professional organizers.
Alison Lush 6:23
That's one of the problems. It seems like they're. 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 they 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 unstuck or 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 Kohlberg, 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.
KC Davis 7:31
And you know, it's not that I've never seen shows or people out there that work on like 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 like, 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, Kourtney Kardashian is beautiful pantry, and someone who has been hoarding that 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.
Alison Lush 8:13
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 credential 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.
KC Davis 9:17
Well, and it's a totally different skill set to 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 on 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, 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 Coronae Kardashians closet wouldn't necessarily have that. But it's not advertised as part of the service.
Alison Lush 10:18
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've put into a package and put on my learning website called How to 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.
KC Davis 11:18
Awesome. All right, let's take a quick break to hear from some sponsors. And 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. Okay, welcome back, Alison, tell us some of these gap fillers, these like new creative services that you are coming up with to help people and make this kind of help more accessible?
Alison Lush 11:38
Well, I did a little bit of research asked around some of my colleagues, what are you doing this creative because I'm only one person, I've got some ideas, but and 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 clutter 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 flowcharts. 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 Dilek Willick 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 in the public. And that's what I'm very excited about. I have another colleague Lynn Fulton, 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.
KC Davis 13:07
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. Somebody holds it up to the camera. Ooh, so it's a box, right? You get the box, you open it up, and there's the six die, and they're kind of foam. I haven't really looked into how to play it. What did the thing here? What do we do what you
Alison Lush 13:24
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 Lynne 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 doubly taken to a whole other
KC Davis 14:07
level. Okay, so the first dice that you're supposed to roll is the Revive dice. It says before you get rolling, 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 we were 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 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 two 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 bill. 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
Alison Lush 15:20
and fun? Why should it be boring and hard work, it should be fun. Lin, along with myself, and many of my colleagues are like I said it 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 in 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 bootcamp, Juliet Landau posts, 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 that your 15 minutes boot camp every day of the week. And it's just like a little quick check in another colleague, John Beatty and Diane Quintana, they created a game 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 neurodivergent, 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 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 so Certified Professional Organizer in chronic disorganization, but her 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.
KC Davis 17:42
So talk to me more about you know, when you mentioned 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 capabilities, you know, like we don't mean like Hardline, 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.
Alison Lush 18:28
Absolutely. That's like it's becoming the cornerstone of my business, actually, because it is much more accessible for people even then 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 its 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 tried 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 the 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 than I was. So that's one branch. That's the accountability groups. But then there's this. I had this club 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 plowing through the reports and then It was getting 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 was 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, not 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.
KC Davis 21:19
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. The 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, back and forth. And I finally was like, yes, you can and she just burst out in tears. And 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 and 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, we're putting 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's 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 and part of information and then bouncing that that's like a huge group of people I feel like could benefit from this.
Alison Lush 23:46
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, I mean, 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, among so many other things but that's it really significant contribution really?
KC Davis 25:02
Well, this is such a cool, it's almost like things that you are doing that are kind of disrupting the industry in a very good way. Do you have any other things that you want to share with us? Well,
Alison Lush 25:13
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 from give a continuing education, very much. So. Yes, yes. So when that little public service announcement course that I give, I talk about all those things, so people can, you know, get an insider's view of all the things you might want to consider if you're hiring a professional organizer?
KC Davis 25:50
Yeah, it's one of those things that, you know, there, it's hard. There are certain, as I'm trying to say this with, 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 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,
Unknown Speaker 26:26
it happens every day.
KC Davis 26:29
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. So 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. 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.
Alison Lush 27:27
Thank you so much for having me here.
KC Davis 27:29
Okay, bye.