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

Episode Date: July 13, 2026

Hey Clutterbugs! Struggling with clutter and feeling stuck? Your messy home might not be about laziness—it could be an emotional wound that needs healing. In this episode, I sit down with psychologist Dr. Guy Winch to explore how failure, rejection, guilt, and loss create invisible barriers that make decluttering feel impossible. Dr. Guy Winch, bestselling author of Emotional First Aid and one of the most-watched TED speakers of all time, joins me to discuss why we treat physical cuts and scrapes immediately but ignore our emotional wounds until they become infected, festering problems. We dive deep into the psychology behind why some people feel paralyzed by clutter, why getting rid of a chipped mug can trigger overwhelming guilt, and how past failures convince us we'll never be organized. This episode is perfect for anyone who feels like they've been fighting clutter their whole life, who beats themselves up for being wasteful, or who can't seem to take action because past failures have left them feeling helpless. It's time to stop ignoring your emotional wounds and start practicing emotional hygiene. Just like brushing your teeth, but for your mental health! Guy's Ted Talk: https://www.ted.com/talks/guy_winch_why_we_all_need_to_practice_emotional_first_aid Guy's Website (where you can find links to his books!): https://www.guywinch.com/ My last podcast with Dr. Guy Winch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z8RXM0I3ELk Want to get organized? Learn 6-Step The Clutterbug Method: https://clutterbug.thinkific.com/courses/Clutterbug-Method You can find more Clutterbug content here: Main YouTube Channel: @Clutterbug Website: http://www.clutterbug.me TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@clutterbug_me Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/clutterbug_me/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Clutterbug.Me/ #clutterbug #podcast #Decluttering #Organizing #Home #LifeHacks #OrganizedHome #DeclutterWithMe #Tidying #Relationships #Mel Robbins Podcast #Psychology #Emotional Well Being #Therapy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 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 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 going to look like the cryptkeeper forever. What's the point? 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 a 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 decuttering, I can forgive myself for spending $120 on that stupid face cream that just makes my eyes sting. And I can say, you didn't know what's 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 donateable. 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 cast, 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 letting it go 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 six 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 will treat myself to a new shirt then. I'm going to share the old thing so it's stop 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. 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 Wynch. 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 bestselling 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 simply, 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 that 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't, 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 Wynch, 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 Wynch. Hello, welcome back. 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. Yes, and I apologize. I didn't even take a bye. I was just like, there's a fire, bye, in the middle of our podcast. 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. are 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? 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 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 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 your 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? So one 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, but 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, etc.

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, 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? Yeah, it was so brilliant. You started your TED Talk talking about a five-year-old who was brushing their teeth and they brought over the stool. Again, 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 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 blind spot? 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, oh, 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 piece 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,

and 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 um 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 our sophistication is that's so many decades behind our sophistication when it comes to physical wounds. 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. I, 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 just had to make choices. So there were seven that I spoke about. There were loneliness, rejection, failure, guilt, rumination, loss, and loss of 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 useful to talk about those.

Yeah, what I'd really like to talk about, especially for my listeners, is failure, because, I mean, you're a doctor. I love how you have a little card that says, not a real doctor. You're a real doctor. Doctor, Lynch. So funny. But failure is this so interesting to me because I work with so many people to help them declutter. 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? 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 that 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.

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, 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 sending 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. 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 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

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 us, or is first aid for a fresh wound like it would be if we cut ourselves? 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 that 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 waitlisted. 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 heart 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. 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. And also, that's the other thing. 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 poll voting, 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, 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 overgeneralize and we take it as a much bigger statement than it actually is. 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 therapist. 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, 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 piece of crap that never helps you. Look for three ways he does help for seven days. And I was like, I'm not going to 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 I'm like, is he helping more? Because it was so bizarre, doctor. And that was my first time really understanding the power of thought. Or 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 when we're 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 that what you're thinking? Yes, exactly right. Our perceptions get altered by these emotional wounds. It's one of the things that 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, we're 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. it. 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, that's, that's, I'm ancient, but in other wounds, you know, that I've 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 brought into the I can't theory of, you know, I've never succeeded in 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, 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 skill, 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. 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, to explore without beating yourself up. You have to be able to look at, yeah, I didn't go to the gym and 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 from, 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. 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 guess what, 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 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 doctor 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 and 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 cluttered,

I'm a hoarder. Whatever the thing is, stop using those terms. They're inaccurate. There's 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, you know, 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, I'm disorganized, implies you cannot. Yeah. 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 Novakane. 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 wound. And hearing your Ted tuck, 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, 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 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's your backstory? What's your medical history? Have you had surgeries? Do you have allergies? This is things we do for like the physical body. But could we do something? sort of full body mind check?

And what would that look like? I'm putting a lot of pressure on you. Are you picking up what I'm putting down? Yeah, no, no. 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 we don't do that. We should. We should, you know, every time you say something, negative 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. I want to say never say never, but. 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 I've 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, you know, in your building? Is it that you, people didn't bring you the dirty stuff or that you're, well, list all the obstacles. What are the things that are preventing you? Even if there's 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, they're no small ones. they can be my youth. Can I hate being laundry be on the list? Like I just don't like it. Yes. 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 the, you know, the why. Once you do all of that, you now have a list of 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 list. 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. That's so good. Okay. What do you tell my listeners, I'm just, this is something I've noticed 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 in this like, it starts out like I get knocked down in the mud. And then eventually I'm like, well, someone tripped me and no one's helping me up. And so that can be

hard to identify when we're checking ourselves for wounds 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 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?

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 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, I'm 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 in a search and destroy mission for every shred of self-esteem we have left. You know, it's like

literally kicking, it's 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, and 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 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 everyone else.

Well, it was them and it was the context and it was in a 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, 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 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. 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've always been of the school of like positive affirmations and fake it to you make it and repeat it over and over. And I do think that's helpful in some ways. 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. 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 of, 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 too, if it's too, if it's too, count. 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 a 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 that 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.

That makes so much sense. I'm thinking about my own journey from 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. And it didn't feel like there, you got to 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 hope or questioning and then digging in deeper. So good. Just one thing I want to say about the recovering disorderly person is that it also orientes you towards the fact that you need to keep your eye on it. Because if 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.

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, ooh, 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. I had to eat dinner in a separate room from my family because I annoyed them so much. Look at it. See, 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 wanted to. a trophy and 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. So I guess trying for me something new and failing, I'm like, well, 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've 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? Yes. First of all, 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, you know, 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. If 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, highly likely, you go into the next one. There's the next one. Okay, that one's an over-death, 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 reward engagement. But secondly, you know, like, 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. You kind of, it's easier to just go from one thing to the next without dwelling too much on any one, you know, wound, you know, as it were. So, so that is something I think that 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 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'm I must need more therapy sometimes. 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 I'm just making that distinction. Like, there's certain things that are healed, but they'll still hurt when we touch them. Yeah, so good.

Okay. So I think what I hear you saying is maybe my listeners need to practice sucking a little bit more. 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 past 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. 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, 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? So let's start with loss. I mean, you're absolutely right. When people lose someone they love, they lose a pet, they lose a career or a job that they, you know, felt strongly about, it's very natural to hold on to a ton of memento's 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, you know, in unhealthy ways,

I've seen, you know, 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 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. 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 object, 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, you know, 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 want 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. any word that you're going to forget later. Every two minutes, I'd 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, in 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, have your birthday or just text to 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 persons are 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, 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. 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? Self-forgiveness. In other words,

what can you do for the memory? 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'll 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. 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 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. 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 the big deal. Everything's going to end up in a landfill one day anyways. And 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 you help overcome this? Well, 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, you know, the, the, you know, the, we've had up to here with the mugs. Thank you. And, you know, no, we don't need that lovely t-shirt that's got holes in it. We're good. And then you're like, well, now it's just landfill or it's just wastefulness, et cetera. I believe that you need to tether. Again, this is all about 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. 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, you know, 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. 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. 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, 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 in 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 future decay, to keep them clean so they last longer. But 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 it, I'm like, yes, we should be doing that. But I'm like, 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. Okay. Step by steps. 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, my 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 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, you look at it. successful person. 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, 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 a hopeful and to empower yourself again to find, you know, their alternatives. Here are the obstacles. Now I just need to figure out how to get around them, et cetera, et cetera. 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. Yes. My website is guywinch.com, G-Y-W-I-N-C-H.com. You can follow me on social media,

Instagram at Guy Wynch, LinkedIn, at Guy Wynch, etc. And there are links to where you can get my book. Emotional First Aid is in an audiobook, in e-book. 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 Overgrind. How to Break Free When Work, Hijacks Your Life, which you can think of as emotional first aid for the workplace. 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 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 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.

Thank you for having me. I have to take a second to thank today's podcast sponsor, Carraway. I switched to Carraway 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 got to be a grown up and get some non-toxic cookware. But it did more than just that. It makes 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 with 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 careawayhome.com slash clutterbug 10, and you can take an additional 10% off using the code Clutterbug 10 on your next purchase. This deal is exclusive just for our listeners, so go to carawayhome.com slash clutterbug 10 or use the code Clutterbug 10 at checkout. I love speaking with Guy. Honestly, he makes me think of everything.

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 or 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 me, right? But really dig 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.