[1:06] Hello and welcome, Lesley It's great to have you here. Welcome to the Smart ADHD podcast. How are you doing?
[1:11] Lesley: I'm good. Thank you for having me. This is exciting.
[1:14] Ian: It is very exciting. And it's funny because we've just actually recorded, or you've just recorded me going on to your podcast which is all about decluttering. Tell us a little bit about your podcast. And I want to know a little bit more about your journey, but tell us about your podcast.
[1:28] Lesley: Yeah. So the declutter hub podcast is what it says on the tin, really. So we talk about decluttering and organizing your home. We've had the podcast for over six years now. So we're 300 and. I don't know 330 podcast episodes in and people seem to resonate with what we talk about because we come to decluttering from an emotional standpoint.
[1:46] So the interview that I just did with Ian was fantastic all about his ADHD journey and how that's impacted him. But really, yes, we talk about getting rid of clutter, but we do believe that chucking stuff in a bin bag is almost a by product of decluttering. And what we're interested in it in is more your emotional connection to clutter and how that can hinder you.
[2:06] So there's me and Ingrid, so it's two of us. I'm much more emotionally based. She's much more practically based and we don't take ourselves too seriously. We take the kind of decluttering side of it seriously, but we like to have a bit of a laugh within the podcast as well. It was all good fun.
[2:22] Ian: Yeah, that sounds great. Definitely check out the podcast and the details will be in the show notes. And I love the way you approach things differently in a way. So people with ADHD tend to be very highly emotional. There are neurological reasons for that. So approaching things from an emotional point of view is important, I think, but also I think approaching it in From a more kind of process point of view, so that I think it's almost like a two pronged attack in a way certainly has helped me.
[2:48] That's been my experience in working with a professional declutterer and organizing things. So how do you get into this? Because, did you wake up one morning and think, Oh, Yeah, I want to be a professional declutter. I want to run my own business. I want to have a podcast on all this.
[3:03] How did that all happen?
[3:05] Lesley: Do you know what? It's a really interesting story actually because the house that I'm sitting in today. I got this house about 15 years ago. It was a derelict property. So it's like a Victorian terrace and it had been lived in and I knew the history of the house, although it was empty when I got the house, it had been lived in by somebody with hoarding behaviors.
[3:21] And so hoarding disorder really now probably undiagnosed I would imagine, but there's no doubt that's what it was. We're talking about 11 cars in the drive. He couldn't walk up the stairs. He had a ladder through the. well To go upstairs because there was so much stuff. So obviously quite a severe case of hoarding disorder.
[3:37] And, obviously we did this transformation on the house, which was great. And the neighbors, it had been an eyesore in the community, classic sort of TV stuff. And people used to stop me at the end of the drive going, Oh, it's amazing what you've done with the place, and terrible guy that used to live here.
[3:52] It was a Scourge on the community and blah, blah, blah. And, big problems and just very harsh and judgmental and completely lacking in any kind of sympathy. And it just hit quite deep. This is way before I'd thought about decluttering as a business. And I just didn't like it. I didn't like that feeling that people were being judged because of something that they were clearly struggling with.
[4:14] And so that's where the seed was sown. Yes, we do work with people with hoarding behaviors. I've got a business in the Northwest called the Clutter Ferry that I've run for the last 15 years since then. But mostly we do standard decluttering if there is such a thing, but definitely from an emotional perspective.
[4:30] Ian: That's amazing story. And decluttering is often a problem for those of us with ADHD and that's certainly been my experience.
[4:37] I remember growing up my mum was always telling me to tidy my room and I wanted to tidy my room, but it was just always difficult to do there wasn't that motivation to do and I trying to do that. And I've always gone through these stages of going from either just leaving it there, festering away to then going down a rabbit hole, hyper focus, just spending a whole day and probably not even eating any lunch and just getting on with it and then throwing away stuff and then leaving it probably another for a six months.
[5:09] So it tended to be the extremes. So thinking about. You've obviously worked with a lot of people with ADHD and you've got your own experience in the family with ADHD. So what's your, being in your experience with working with people with ADHD what makes it difficult and what are the kind of the strategies to actually help?
[5:29] Lesley: first of all, it, all, any decluttering journey, whatever it is, and whoever you are. Starts with kindness to yourself at the beginning to understand that some people struggle with this. And so, you know, you talked about yourself as a young boy that in and saying, classic kind of mum, dad shouts, tidy your room.
[5:47] And that young child has got no idea what that means. Like, how do you do that? How do you break it down into a system . How do you even understand what tidy in your room means? It's just this arbitrary concept that has never been taught to a lot of people. So even if people have not got ADHD, you know, children are never really taught.
[6:05] We just expect people to understand that process and things like that. But if you are somebody who is neurodivergent, it's a little bit different because you feel as if you're, You can't get this right and everybody else can. You feel like you're the only person and that it's the norm to be able to tidy your room.
[6:21] And so first of all, I do think validation and understanding what ADHD and how that represents is such a big part of it, is, just get into that stage where you go. Okay, this is not me. This is it is you actually, this is the way my brain works. It's not a problem.
[6:36] I just need to find a way to work with that. And also being around a community of other people where people are going, Oh yeah, I feel like that. I feel like that. It's very powerful to find other people who feel the same way and experience the same issues. And so, You know, I think that, we need that kindness to ourselves.
[6:54] We need that understanding. We need that validation, but we very much need to think about a process that's going to work for us with our brains. Really important. It's not a one size fits all when it comes to organization.
[7:05] Ian: I think that's so true. I wanted to go into that a little bit more about being the being kind to yourself thing, because, we, you talked about people being judged by people in the community for being disorganized or hoarding things. And yes, I think we can be judged by other people.
[7:25] But often the person that judges us the most is ourselves, and that's always been my experience. I've just been beating myself up thinking I'm so lazy, I just can't do it, compare myself with others. And there's not been that kind of compassion or that understanding that, okay, there are neurological differences between the way my brain works and non ADHD brains.
[7:47] That's not an excuse to then just say, okay I'm just going to live in a mess all the time. That's not what it's about, but there's, but it starts with that kind of understanding and that compassion and then working out what the strategies are. Would you agree with that? Has that been your experience?
[8:01] Lesley: Absolutely. I mean, People typically want to change. They don't want to live the way they are because that's causing them problems with depression or anxiety or affecting their mental health. And we have a saying that we use all the time that is out there as well in, in other areas.
[8:14] If you always do what you've always done, you'll always get what you've always got. And we don't want to get that anymore. We don't want to get that disorganization, that feeling of procrastinating all the time. And, feeling completely out of control. We want to make strides to fix that. And we need to find a way.
[8:30] So as we mentioned, first step is kindness. And then it's understanding how that manifests for a lot of people. And then it's like, how can I then work around that? So important to just take it one step at a time. We can't go from all to nothing overnight. We have to go through a phased approach of learning about ourselves.
[8:48] And our homes and our stuff and working through the emotional connection that we have to clutter. Because even though we've got ADHD, we still have the same emotions as other people have as well. So we have a, an additional thing that we need to worry about with the organizational side of things and the kind of chaotic side of things that often manifest, but we still feel guilt, we still feel aspirational. We feel still feel overly sentimental. So even people that are neurotypical still have emotions that they need to work through, but it's just that a little bit more complicated when you've got any kind of neurodivergent condition.
[9:21] Ian: For someone with ADHD what makes that more complicated if you're working with a client and you might not even know they have ADHD, but you might very quickly realize they probably do have ADHD. Like what, what would be the different approach, like what's going on emotionally or what's different with the ADHD brain that makes clutter or decluttering more difficult?
[9:42] Lesley: the procrastination plays at, you know, you talk about a couple of things, procrastination, hyperfocus are two of the big ones really. And so it's about understanding our own behaviors and so understanding why we're procrastinating. And the reason for that is probably because The goals that we are setting ourselves are too ambitious.
[9:59] And so, hyperfocus side of ADHD means that we go we're going to sort this out this weekend. And we'll get, and typically a person with ADHD, we'll do a kind of 10, 11 hour to the stage of burnout and then never come back again for another six months. And we need to find a way to incorporate mini goals into our day to day life so that decluttering and organizing becomes part of the everyday rather than this kind of huge, right?
[10:25] It's like a spring clean almost. We need to do it every day, a little bit every day and build that up. We need to build up non negotiables into our life. It has to become non negotiable that I unload and unload the dishwasher every day. If that makes sense for you and your family, it has to become non negotiable.
[10:41] I'm taking care of my laundry and doing that every week. Boring as it sounds, the ADHD brain doesn't really like boring things. It likes exciting things. It likes the next thing. And we need to incorporate the boring and the non negotiable into our life. But most importantly, we have to break it down.
[10:58] That's the biggest problem that we see with people with ADHD is the goals are way too ambitious and people are spending way too long on it and then burning out.
[11:08] Ian: Yeah, you're speaking about me definitely there. And I think there's this perfectionism that comes into it because I look at my house and I just think it needs to be perfect. I have these unrealistic expectations of myself. And and this is not helped by social media because you look at social media and you realize that everyone's house is perfect, they've got all this, these amazing rooms because people only ever share the bits of the house that are spick and span but then you think the only way I can declutter is if I zap, like zap it all in, in two days solid.
[11:40] And and that is obviously not the way to do it. So the idea of doing it little bits every day to my brain, that sounds incredibly painful. It sounds almost impossible. I feel, and obviously things have changed because I've been working with a professional organizer, but I think I always thought the only way I can tackle this is if I do it all at once.
[12:01] The idea of doing it in little bits doesn't or didn't work with my brain. So how do you get, how do you make that transition from thinking it's all, it's all or nothing to little bits? How does that work?
[12:14] Lesley: works because you've just got to work on it and try and incorporate it in your day to day life. But the reason why it's so important is that we need controlled decisions. And so whenever you are. Hyper focusing or spending long periods of time, you will start to make the wrong decisions and then you will have regrets.
[12:32] And then that psychologically impacts you going forwards. And so we, so I guess we need to understand that, we are going to make a few mistakes along the way, but it's all about looking at each individual item and it's validity to you at that moment in time, your emotional connection to it.
[12:49] Understanding why this has been so hard for you to let go of in the past, for example, working towards a big picture goal, which is simplification. I want less stuff, less stuff means less stress and all of those kind of great benefits that come alongside decluttering. But it's just, it's just, you've got to check.
[13:06] You've got to just change the way you do it. One of the biggest things that we have in our world, because we feel very strongly about this stuff. And this is the way that we teach. And honestly, one of the hardest things is when we, we do these big challenges where we get thousands of people coming in, free challenges and things, and people want to do the same thing that they've always done.
[13:23] They want to, I'm doing a challenge this week, I want to come in, I want to declutter my whole house in a week, and we're like, slow it down. Slow it down and you can do it so much more thoroughly and really understand your emotional connection and what it is that's causing your problems. You can look at the organization and really think it through, I know that you've worked with a professional organizer and, you will have done that yes, you will have made progress, but you will have done that very thoughtfully to get you to a place where it's sustainable, where it leads to long term mindset change.
[13:52] No decluttering is not A one off thing it's what we want is for the stuff not to come in the first place For everything to have a play, you know a kind of place for everything and everything in its place Those are the kind of frameworks that we're trying to You know, create the foundations of, and it can be hard if we go for focusing on the stuff that most people are focusing first and foremost on get less stuff.
[14:14] And we go, forget about the stuff for now. Let's try and work through it just step by step. But I know what you mean that it is hard. If that's what you've always done, because you feel that's the only way that you can ever make progress.
[14:25] Ian: There is hope. There's absolutely hope because working with a professional organizer has been a game changer. And just for transparency it's one of your professional organizers, Lesley has been a game changer. But in this episode, and we'll, so in the next episode, but you're going to come back, I want to talk a little bit more about that.
[14:43] That process about finding a professional declutterer, but this is something that you can also do on your own. It's just harder. What I would say, and I would love to know what you think about this. I think, when it comes to this, I do think we need help with those of us with ADHD.
[14:58] Now, it doesn't necessarily need to be a professional declutterer. organize a professional declutterer, but I think getting sometimes we can be too close to our situation. And I'll give you an example. My sister in law is amazing at this. She'll come into when she visits us, she'll come into her kitchen.
[15:13] She said, why don't you just move the kettle and like the air fryer a little bit. Just change that. And we think, yeah, why didn't we think about that? That's like a complete game changer. It's completely It makes so much more sense and we've just moved things slightly. And so sometimes you can be so close to your system your house and your office or whatever it is that you don't really see what needs what could be done, which is interesting because with ADHD, we often tend to be divergent thinkers, but.
[15:42] I think if you're so close to the stuff, and then the second thing is what you've already touched on, Lesley is breaking it down. I don't find that easy. And so against getting somebody else to help you could use AI chat, GPT might help with this, but breaking it down. So if I say to myself today, I'm going to tidy my office. That's the assumption that is one task. And actually that is a massive task, which is probably going to take three or four days. It's probably got like a thousand subtasks. Why don't I just focus on moving those papers and maybe just maybe even the top three papers and shredding some and just filing some of the others.
[16:22] Does that all make sense? Is that a good way of looking at it?
[16:24] Lesley: Yeah, absolutely. I think it's really important to, but I think it's also so important to chronicle your progress. And because the thing that's going to motivate us for us, our first things first, we need a big picture goal, what we call a big picture goal, right? So we need to go. Why? Why do I want to tidy my office?
[16:40] What is that? What benefit is that going to be to me? We know, but often it's not just because I want to tidy the office. Office is a bad example of it, but if it's a, if it's a dumping ground of a spare bedroom, it's like I want my friend's kids to come over for a sleepover and that's been closed to me, or I want, to have my Grandkids over to stay or whatever.
[16:57] So you need a really big, good, big, solid, big picture goal. That's going to drive you forwards to what, motivate you forwards to your actual, destination almost, and then you need to break it down, but each of these little components, whether it's a draw, take pictures. About it, chronically, as you're going through and then you can see that progress because if you are breaking it down, sometimes it can be hard to see that progress and because it's so gradual, you don't see it happening, but actually, if you look back, you go, actually, I did do loads of stuff and I feel very controlled.
[17:27] You talked there about the your sister in law coming in and looking at The kettle and stuff. That's because you're spending time or you could spend time going down to granular detail on that kind of thing and really create something that works. Whereas if you declutter your whole kitchen in a day, all you want to do is get rid of stuff and tidy the cupboards up as they are in situ.
[17:46] Whereas if you take a step back and go, okay. I've done all, I've done my food first, then I've done my non food, now I'm going to do the kitchen table, now I'm going to do my countertops, and I'm really going to spend some time thinking about how this could work better for me. You can only do that if you allow yourself a little bit of space to breathe, and so you definitely need to.
[18:05] To break it down into those, we're like a broken record when it comes to that, because we know that it works. And it's also very important Ian, and to start with rooms that are least emotional first, because our minds, and particularly an ADHD mind, It will automatically take us to the difficult places.
[18:22] It will take us to the book collections. It will take us to the photographs, kids artworks. In your instance, in your case, it will take you to the wires and tech. It will take you to things that you really don't want to let go of, but you know that you need to tackle them. Forget about those things and deal with the multiple cans of beans that you've got, or the spices that are out a day for six months.
[18:45] Go for the easy stuff first and then build up what we call your decluttering muscle until you start to be able to make better decisions. And you can get to a stage where you go, you know what? I am ready to tackle those photographs because now I've got a process in place. And I know what this is going to represent to me in terms of the emotions that it's going to bring up.
[19:02] Ian: Yes. I think that's so important because I exactly that. I always tend to go to the photographs and the books, but then you get kind of decision paralysis because you can't get beyond that. So focusing on something that's like much simpler in the house. So let's, for example let's use a kitchen as a good example.
[19:20] I don't know whether that's the best example, but I'm just thinking that's probably a part of your house that we you're in a lot of the time. And so actually decluttering that would be a good place to start probably. Can you take us through the process of maybe just getting started just with a, just imagine a typical home through just so that we've got some kind of process in our minds.
[19:43] Obviously the process will be different depending on us and the situation, but just to give us an idea of a good place to start and a good process there.
[19:52] Lesley: It's really interesting, actually, to start with the kitchen. Cause we have a roadmap. So we've devised a kind of roadmap on which rooms are best to be done first. And the kitchen is first on the roadmap because. The decisions that you make in a kitchen are much less emotional. Not to say that there are not emotions based in a kitchen because there are but they're less emotional than other places in your house.
[20:11] And the other reason is logistically it can be broken down really easily because everything is already in principle, in categories or more or less in categories. So you can do. Your mugs and your plates, you can do your non food, you can break it right down cupboard by cupboard and start to go through these things.
[20:28] So basically, that's the first thing is formulating a plan. What am I going to do first? We always recommend starting with food first because there are big wins often with food. And so you can start to see that progress because there will undoubtedly be things that are out of date. There will be stuff that you can make a decision on.
[20:43] Actually, I'm going to send that to the food bank if it's still in, in date. And so you can see those big wins and it feels so much nicer when you open those cupboards and everything seems a little bit more orderly. So cupboard by cupboard, take everything out, clean it down, make some decisions. What is it about this thing?
[20:59] Why am I actually keeping this spice? If it's, people get hung up on things like. I'm not bothered about spices that are two years out a day. I can still use them, but why are they still there? If they've been there for two years, cause you're clearly not using them on a regular basis. And so it's more, it's not really just about the day.
[21:15] It's about why is it still there? And so just look at each individual item and make a decision and ask, what is it about this thing? That's making me keep it irrationally. If that's the case, or how can I. Store it so that it's going to make it easy for me to retain it. You know, We're looking at visibility.
[21:32] We're looking at accessibility, all so important when it comes to ADHD, right? Visibility, we need to be able to see it. We need to be able to access it. So that might involve putting things into boxes. It might be involved labels. What is it about this cupboard that means everything's rammed to the back. I can't get to it.
[21:45] And so that spice has been there for two years and I've got another one at the front that I bought last week because I didn't know that I had it, those are the kinds of things with food that we're really looking at. So do it thoroughly, take everything out, clean it down, make decisions, put it back, think about containerization.
[22:00] And then just go step by step through your kitchen, then when you get to the end of your kitchen, think, is this the best placement of everything? The example that you gave there about the kettle Would it be better for me to have teas and coffees over my kettle when it's right on the other side of the kitchen?
[22:16] Things like that. Do I want everything out on my work surface? Because I feel like I need that often. People keep things on the work surface because they fear losing them. And actually they could go away to make things that little bit simpler. This I could talk for hours and hours on a kitchen, but that's basically what you're looking for really in a kitchen is that visibility, accessibility, and labeling.
[22:34] Ian: I love that. And one thing that I found that working with my declutter, she, she comes prepared with lots of things. Like cleaning wipes different types of bags, for example for recycling and stuff like that. So what are the kinds of things before we start? I think in my mind, it's probably a good idea just to make sure there's, you have a few things ready to go.
[22:53] That's going to make that job easier. What would you, what would be the kind of top items that you think? We could do with before we actually start on one aspect, say of our kitchen or another part of the house.
[23:04] Lesley: Yeah, so the kitchen is definitely like cleaning stuff, cleaning is a big part of a kitchen as well. So it's good to have that stuff with you and not get started and then have to go and find it or look for it or whatever. I think it's really important to have, we're big advocates as you say, that Bev will have brought different colors of bin bags.
[23:21] Because, these are readily available at supermarkets. It's useful to know what's going in the trash, what's being recycled. If the kitchen's a bad example, you can't really take that to charity. If things are going to the charity shop, have those in different things because it allows you to feel in control.
[23:36] Because if you put everything into a black bin liner, you're like, Oh, which black bin liner is for the rubbish? And which black bin liner is going to mat? Do you know what I mean? So you really got to think that through. So have different color bin bags. A label maker is fantastic, particularly. For people with ADHD, you know, those labels are absolute gold dust.
[23:53] And so you don't necessarily need to have labels on the outside of your kitchen. You know, A lot of us still want that kind of that nice, aesthetically pleasing kitchen, put them on the inside of cupboards, put them on the inside, on the shelf edges, put them on in containers, you containerization is critical in a kitchen, but it doesn't need to be something where you're going out and buying loads of fancy stuff.
[24:13] Look at what you have already. Look at the tupperware that you've got. People. I've got a lot of stuff. Typically, they've also got a lot of storage stuff hanging around as well. So look at what you have and then worry about the storage much later down the line. But it's useful to have those kinds of things in a kitchen before you get started.
[24:30] Ian: That's wonderful. We are out of time on this episode. There's actually so many other things I was wanting to ask you, but we'll put those into the next episode. So we're going to next episode, we'll talk about whether you need to hire a professional declutter and what you do about that. A few more of your kind of personal insights into that.
[24:45] And then we're going to look a little bit more into. It's not just physical decluttering we can do, we can also do digital decluttering as well. Thank you so much, Lesley How can people find out more about you and connect with you?
[24:55] Lesley: Yeah. In the Northwest, I have my business, the clutter fairy where we help people one to one and then we have the declutter hub, which is our podcast and membership. So search declutter hub and you will find us there.
[25:08] Ian: Awesome. Thanks, Lesley And thank you so much for watching or plugging us into your ears. I always get that mixed up, but you know what I mean. and until next time, I encourage you to be smart with your ADHD. Toodaloo!
[25:19]
