Finding mutual support is one of the great things in blogging. I am very happy to nominate She Cleans Up for One Lovely Blog Award. By opening up her own experience, and sharing the trials and tribulations of coping with complex family behaviour, She Cleans Up is helping others learn coping strategies, and even sometimes have a chuckle about the thorny issue of hoarding. Keep it up, She Cleans Up! I’ve already put you on my blogroll for others to stop by and see how things are progressing.
Hi Poppy,
It’s full of too much stuff. Sometimes I dread walking in the front door when I get home from work because I know the house will be so disheveled that it gets me down. It’s mostly not my stuff, but the belongings of the other members of the family – my husband and my teenage kids. It’s like they can’t throw anything out, and get angry and upset if they catch me throwing things out. These items are not treasures by any means: my daughter has saved every stuffed animal she ever owned, and has this gigantic pile of stuffed animals taking up a whole corner of her bedroom. The rest of the room is similarly filled with piles of crap up to the eyeballs. Another daughter, now almost twenty years old, insists on keeping a whole series of tutus that would fit a six-year-old that she wore in her childhood ballet classes. Her room is also up to the eyeballs in other unsorted belongings. My husband is no better; he has kept every piece of anything that his mother ever gave him –
Tchotchkes from hell!
complete junky tchotchkes purchased in souvenir stores. In our house, every space, including the garage, is packed with junk, most of it unloved, worthless crap. Nothing is organized. Everything is a mess. It’s depressing. It makes me physically and emotionally ill. No one seems happy, and tempers are frequently frayed. Sometimes I fantasize about moving away so I can have my own restful, ordered space.
Sign me,
The objects you selected to illustrate your problem reveal your own analysis of it: a six-year-old’s tutus, a child’s stuffed animals, and silly gifts from your husband’s elderly mother. These childish objects have an active, visible presence in your family’s life, suggesting they offer some kind of reassurance from a fondly remembered past, when each person’s role was more child-like. You have also endorsed this trait by allowing the (then) six-year-old to hang onto these objects, now for many years it seems.
No one knows why people hoard things. Your problem is composed of a host of emotional elements that are difficult to define or act upon. Instead of trying to analyze that whole ball of hairy wax, focus on your goal: peace of mind. You have already identified what conflicts with that goal: an overabundance of objects and a lack of organization. Let’s address each of these separately.
Consumer culture glorifies the new and novel, and it values accumulation of multiples, even if they’re shoddily made or mass produced. We buy a lot of stuff, and then we feel guilty discarding it because ‘there’s nothing wrong with it.” You may have unwittingly encouraged these ‘preservation’ characteristics of your family, and they may actually see positive traits in their hoarding, such as frugality, recycling, preserving memories, etc.
A friend who had to downsize from a large house after a divorce adopted the following tactic successfully: She bought her two kids one large plastic storage container each. Into this one container she said, they could take with them only their most favourite treasures from their rooms. Anything they could squeeze into the storage container they could keep. All the rest would be donated or thrown out. She also bought a similar container for herself, and together they spent an afternoon working together on building the new life that awaited them. Your husband’s tchotchkes warrant similar treatment: in the New World Order you are installing, he must care for these precious objects appropriately – in a newly purchased curio cabinet. Anything that fits into this cabinet he can keep, and the rest he must let go.
The situation you describe is not just one of accumulation, but one of disorganization. The definition of clutter is a mass of objects with no homes. Help the homeless! Get organized!
Organization does not come naturally to everyone. A disorganized person needs to have everything in view because their mental filing systems are so haphazard that if they put anything away, they will likely lose it.
So, find homes for everything. Start with one item that they are constantly losing, but need every day, as in, “Always leave your glasses in the cupboard by the piano.” “Your running shoes live in that shoebox by the back door.” Another good place to start is shared items. Disorganized people are made crazy by other people moving things. Collaborate in identifying ‘homes’ for shared items, and insist that everyone always store them there.
If you get any push back, my friendly advice is to haul out the big guns. Tell them the truth: that you are literally sick from the condition of the house. Describe the mysterious physical ailments that you are certainly experiencing: Difficulty breathing? Sleeplessness? Heart palpitations? Do you literally have pains in your neck? Never underestimate how literal your body will be in trying to teach you about an unbearable situation.
If you ‘come clean’ you may find that your family have been feeling the same way, and are relieved they can finally shed all that old baggage.
Effective business communication keeps everyone happy and business rolling along.
Joel Babbit, the CEO of Mother Nature Network hates long meetings. He told Corner Office: ” the higher up you go in a corporation… the shorter the meetings…You meet with the vice president, that’s an hour. You meet with the chief financial officer, that’s half an hour. You meet with the CEO, it’s 10 minutes…same thing with returning phone calls: assistant vice president takes four days; vice president takes two days; the CFO in one day; the CEO calls you back in 10 minutes…that’s how he got where he is.” Want to get somewhere? Don’t waste people’s time. Same goes for emails or phone calls – get to the point without being short or insulting. Being straightforward and succinct shows respect for your colleague’s time, and indicates that you have things to do yourself.
Return someone’s call after you’ve reviewed the file, not as you’re scrolling through your database looking for their record. Nobody wants to wait on the phone while you get yourself organized. Implement consistent systems for storing information. You know the difference between long-term memory and short-term memory? Don’t try to keep all the facts in your head. File them in a location where they can retrieved instantly. And clean your desktop, both physically and virtually.
The worst kind of managers are information hogs. They read somewhere that ‘information is power’ and they decide to keep it all to themselves. They think ‘share’ is a financial word. Don’t be one of them. Say things, don’t insinuate them. Don’t ask your colleagues to play ‘whack a mole’ when they need a direct answer. When writing an email, make the subject line and message meaningful, not mysterious. If you’re responding to something time-sensitive, put your answer in the subject line, if at all possible. For instance, here’s a message from a colleague:
Subject: Jack
Message: Has Jack left? Do you have a cell number for him? I need to catch him before he gets on the plane.
Your reply? Subject line: Jack’s gone. 212-878-9900.
No further message required.
Same goes for long email strings on the same subject. Change the subject line to reflect the content of your response. Nobody wants to hunt through through a series of replies all with the same subject line looking for THE message they need.
Courtesy is always appreciated. This especially goes for faceless communications such as email. Email is the enemy of the short-fused. Trying to be brief and efficient can brew impulsive and seemingly rude emails, or incomplete messages that convey the wrong impression. Re-read what you write before sending it. Fill in the address line last, so you don’t fire off ill-considered or abrasive commands. Include a greeting and a sign-off, even if it’s just an initial.
If Jack’s facing a deadline, he doesn’t need communications that say things like, “Time’s a wasting” or “We need this soon.” When do you need it exactly? Today by 11? Next week? The same goes for dates – always include the Day of the Week, as in, Tuesday, June 5th. People can respond to specific requests, but are frustrated by vague demands.
Business communication doesn’t have to be stiff, but consider your interlocutor in all your communications – some people appreciate emoticons (I do : ^ ) !! and some people don’t. Your IT department will probably hate you if you clog up the bandwidth with lots of clip art doodads and pictures in your email. But working life needs colour, too, so if your colleagues are attuned to it, customize or send the Daily Dilbert. If they are not, it’s best to follow the approved template and keep your communications crisp and (your organization’s version of) buttoned down.
Families have changed, but parents still want to raise powerful kids.
When you become a parent, you’re given an opportunity to change the world, so make yourself a promise: you will raise your child to be a courageous, compassionate, imaginative, tolerant, and disciplined person by being one yourself.
…but don’t embellish them with your own worries or concerns.
…but don’t ‘overwrite’ your kid’s work, or do his homework for him. He learns by trying to do things that are hard for him.
The world can be a violent place.Resolve to cultivate the discipline of a martial artist, whose capacity for violent response is always balanced with self-discipline.
Only a coward humiliates another person. Being courageous requires empathy and compassion. I watched a conversation between a father and a four-year-old in a diner. As the girl told the rest of the family seated with them that she liked honey, the father said she didn’t like honey. “Yes, I do, ” she said. “I tasted it once and I liked it.” He hardly let her finish, because he was angrily shouting, “YOU are a CHILD, and children DON’T KNOW!” His outburst was illogical and rude. Certainly she knew whether honey tasted good or not, and he just came across as stupid and overbearing. It’s hard to see how his daughter would ever respect his opinion about anything. By trying to humiliate her, he ended up humiliating himself.
Children are not equipped to counter your sarcasm. It embeds itself in their well-being like a thorn. If a child’s performance at a task could be improved, it’s up to you to provide assistance, not build your own ego with personal criticism. Teach in small steps which can be accomplished with pride. Never overwhelm a child with overly complex tasks and then ridicule their attempt.
You can often anticipate challenging situations in a child’s life, such as the first day of school, first swimming lesson, or attending a formal event such as a wedding. Without painting horror stories or worst case scenarios that create worry, you can help the child imagine themselves encountering new challenges, and consider how they will respond or what they will do if they need direction.
They used to say, “You can take the measure of a man by the size of the things that make him mad.” Role models are not everything, but your children watch you and listen to everything you say. If you respond with fear or anger to situations, your child comes to learn helplessness and outrage. If you exhibit courage, you teach your child that we all have inner reserves of strength to meet the unexpected.
Talking things over helps solve most problems.
Photo by: anitapatterson Morgue File
I’ve Got a Problem Blog is here for you. Add your story to the Comment string on any post and Let’s Talk Things Over, or send an email to:
Poppy (underscore) Fox (at) rocketmail (dot) com
Competition for seating can be fierce at the friendship picnic.
I had been working with a woman who became a close friend for about a year. Years before, she had divorced the guy she married in high school, and had been single since. She had a great career and a couple of teenage kids living with her part time. Her ex-husband was a decent dad, but otherwise, they had nothing to do with each other. I had just broken up with a long-time boyfriend at the time, too, and so I guess we had plenty to commiserate about, but we also shared a lot of interests. I knew she had been lonely, and she felt humiliated by a guy she dated for a short while at work, who didn’t treat her very well. Then she met a guy online who lived a couple hours away, who began courting her pretty seriously – long late night phone calls, visits, flowers. She told me about all these attentions, but never introduced him to me. She began spending more and more time with him, and eventually quit her job and moved to his town to live with him. Happy ending, correct? My problem is, I considered her a really good friend, and enjoyed her friendship, but since she met Mr. Right there’s been no contact. She never calls me. I have never met her new man, and when I got her new number from someone and left a message for her, she never returned my call. I was included in one mass email she sent to everyone she knew here talking about how she’d “met the love of her life”. It’s hard for me to believe that she’d cut me off so completely – I thought we were the best of friends. I never felt angry about it, just sort of shocked and hurt, and I miss her company. I don’t know why she treated me this way, and I don’t know if there’s any way to rekindle the friendship. I just feel,
By your own admission, your friend has already seen the seamy side of love enough times to know that people are fallible, and not always constant – even when they promise to be till death does them in! That goes for best friends, too. How many songs are there about “my best friend’s girlfriend”? What you’re experiencing, dear, is the time-honoured strategy of dicing up competition before it gets on the field. Consider yourself from her point of view: similar interests and freshly unattached. Alarm bells were going off in her head the minute you started grousing about your boyfriend, I’m sure. She met a new guy, and clearly, she did not want you waltzing into view to upstage her.
If it helps at all, you’re not alone in being dumped by a friend in favour of a new love interest. Friends routinely ditch friends for lovers. Research at the University of Oxford shows that on average, people shed one friend and one family member when they start a new romantic relationship. Lovers take up a lot of room, and somebody has to make it. Looks like it was you in this case. Sending out a mass email about it all does seem a little extreme, I admit. Sounds like she had a few axes to grind with that cake mail list, but forgive her decision to board another ship and sail away. Ah, that beautiful bubble of newly minted love, when the whole rest of the world disappears from view. Remember that?
Take heart and be happy for her. It sounds like she was looking for an old-fashioned type after a recent stinging humiliation, and who can blame her? Flowers and late night phone calls sound pretty good, don’t they? No wonder she was determined to hang onto the ‘love of her life’ once she found him. She did the musical chairs analysis, Dumped, and I’m sorry, she got her ass in the seat before you did.
My problem is I’ve lost the last ten years! I don’t know where they went. Can you help?
Signed,
Stumped
Barring chronic illness or an overdose of really drawn out higher education, you probably left the last ten years in the usual place: preparing to do things you never ended up doing. You may have heard a vague sucking sound in the distance on some days when the air was just right and you were attuned to the universe – that was the sound of a slow leak in what you meant to accomplish.
A person’s fictional signature is often a clue to their own analysis of their problem. In your case, your chosen name “Stumped” might easily have been something like “50, not 40” or “Assistant to the Dean” or “Vice-president”. Are you feeling cut off from attaining a long-treasured top spot in your profession? Or have you spent too much time training for something instead of stepping into the ring / onto the stage / or into the light? Are you afraid to be seen trying?
Ten years is nothing. Don’t waste another year looking for them. In a recent (July 2012) New York Times article, psychologist Elaine Fox, who studies the positive effects of optimism, says “What really makes the difference is action…If you sit back passively, you won’t get the job you want.” She means that in the sense of fashioning the life you want. “The important thing is having a sense of control over your life, your destiny.” The Optimist’s plan of action can be summed up as “Fake It Until You Make It” or “Do it, then Learn How.”
To recoup the ten years you kissed away waiting for somebody to notice how terrific you are and hire/promote/ or marry you, screw your courage to the sticking place, my friend, and ‘fake it until you make it’. Make a list of things you want to do, start at number 1 and go for it. Buy the plane ticket, or make the call, or pack your bag. Like that 70s song, there must be 50 ways to get off the shelf.
If you continue to always stand for election merely as the bridesmaid, honey, face it, you’re never going to be the bride. At this point in your life, you probably have the money to go buy yourself the ring and the dress, and pay for the big party, so stop waiting around for someone else to propose, and sprout some new branches out of that stump.
I’ve always believed in having fun at work. In a pressurized workplace, no one actually wants to be told to lighten up, but making someone laugh can take the steam out of an explosive environment. Keeping a sense of humour when under pressure often generates the best solution (sometimes in surprisingly creative ways!) and cultivates a camaraderie among staff that will endure past this week’s deadline.
Successful CEOs know the importance of fun. I’m a big fan of the New York Times column, Corner Office, which interviews successful CEOS about their leadership styles and corporate culture. In looking over my faves recently, I noticed that several, including powerhouses such as Kyle Zimmer of First Book and Angie Hicks of Angie’s List, cited the importance of “fun” and being “playful” in working with people and brainstorming solutions. Hicks’s career advice goes so far as to say, “If you’re not having fun at your job, you should quit.”
Linus Torvalds’s penguin avatar, Tux, doesn’t take work seriously.
Linus Torvalds, a principal writer of Linux, an operating system he simply gave away for free, says he has no interest in saving the world, or even making operating systems free for everyone. He simply didn’t think running a corporate structure to sell Linux looked like fun. In a presentation recorded by the Computer History Museum in 2001, he said, “People think I’m this do-gooder, and they need to understand I did it because it was fun.” Torvalds’s personal emblem, Tux, is a cartoon penguin, the kind of anti-suit.
Counter culture billionaire Richard Branson has more of a social conscience than Torvalds does. He says he now spends 70% of his time investing in solutions to poverty and environmental issues around the world. A self-made tycoon who went “from selling records from the boot of a car to space travel, the most ridiculous extreme….” he says about his latest business ventures, “All I can promise is that they’ll be fun.” The irrepressible Branson, whose dyslexia kept him from standard educational successes, has a broad genuine smile that rarely leaves his face. We can be sure that he – and other successful CEOS – will keep making money and having fun doing it.
My family has a problem, and I’d like your opinion of a solution I proposed to the school. My son is in Grade 2 in a Toronto public school. There is a large family in the school with a child in virtually every grade from SK to Grade 5. Each year these kids come back to school after the summer holiday with head lice and spread it around the whole school. I sympathize with the parents to some degree – I know that if one kid gets lice at camp or something, they can quickly spread it to everyone in the family – but the whole school ends up getting these pests, and having to treat their kids! It’s awful, and I think it singles out this family in the worst way because everybody blames them. I proposed to the school that they make these kids stay home from school until it’s cleared up, but they said they couldn’t/wouldn’t do that. I think at least that way Public Health or even some parents from the school could help this family clear this up. What do you think?
Signed,
I can sympathize with your kid’s plight. What used to be an ‘old wives’ tale’ from the past – head lice – is now a daily problem in city schools. But the fact is, big families don’t create head lice, or any other ‘pests’, and kids shouldn’t have to miss school because they caught a few bugs. Public health departments (and the City of Toronto) advocate for the usual chemical shampoos, but considering that head lice typically plague young children (ages 3 – 10, I believe, mostly) I think pouring pesticides on your kid’s head should be a last resort.
Instead, follow these easy steps to non-toxic head lice removal:
You’ll need:
When your child is ready to go to bed at night, soak the kid’s head in oil and rub it into the scalp.Wrap the oily head in plastic wrap and cover it with the shower cap (this keeps the oily mess in place while they sleep). Let the kid sleep in this ‘beauty treatment’ and when they wake up to go to school, shampoo the oil out of their hair (probably take two lathers!). The KEY TO THIS TREATMENT is the second step: You MUST do the oil treatment once more 7 to 10 days later – the oil smothers any living critters, but will not kill all the eggs. They will continue to hatch, but won`t be reproductive for several days, so MAKE SURE you do the oil treatment once more a week later to catch any survivors.
The families in my neighourhood suffered through head lice together, and this treatment is completely non-toxic and really works. If your child is old enough, they can do it themselves whenever they suspect they’ve been in contact with anyone itchy or scratchy!
Enough said! Thank you for writing with this sticky problem.
…who expects his staff to work an average nine-to-five day, but always arrives late and leaves most days by 4:30. There is always an excuse about why he has to leave early, if he says anything at all. Long lunches are de rigueur with him, but he sends out “Where are you????” emails if staff aren’t promptly back at their post after a meeting or an outside lunch. It’s humiliating to have someone constantly upbraiding grown adults, many of whom have more experience than this guy. We work in a big organization, but the exec he reports to is retiring soon and doesn’t seem to care about my boss’s comings and goings. What’s the best way to communicate to this person how discouraging it is to have a supervisor slacking off like this and flouting rules he insists others follow?
Yours truly,
On a certain level, working for someone else means doing it their way. Your boss tells you what to do, and you do it, and then you get paid for it. It’s called working for a living, and virtually all of us, including Queen Elizabeth II, have to just suck it up, put on the name tag, and show up for work. That’s business at its most ape-scratching, primitive level.
Some points in your letter, though, suggest that there are other levels at work. You mention that some of the staff have “more experience”. This suggests to me that the slacker manager may be quite a bit younger than some of you. Are older, more seasoned employees are having trouble “answering” to someone younger than they are?
If that’s the case, you might as well get over it. As we age, we are constantly placed in a widening pool of people who are younger than we are, and technology being as accelerated as it it is these days, a younger manager – or someone just “out of school”, may actually have MORE experience working in an evolving tech and communications environment. Older staff may have a lot to learn from younger managers, even if their new bosses haven’t been on the job very long. If you think that’s the case in your workplace, try to take a healthier attitude toward respecting your boss’s expertise, and be willing to ask for help or mentoring. Certainly, you will have a healthy reservoir of acquired skills yourself, which you can reciprocally share. One of them may be interpersonal skills such as communicating respectfully via email. Apparently, your boss needs some pointers. I suggest you solicit some generic guidelines from your Communications department, if you have one, that can be distributed to managers about “Effective Email Communications”. Your boss needs to know that firing off demanding, petulant emails is a sure way to aggravate the staff you’re trying to get to cooperate.
THAT BEING SAID, it’s hard to believe that your company is still in business with such ‘retiring’ management (meant in both senses of the word). Employees derive inspiration from management that is energized and honest, and recognizes effort and merit. People are discouraged and frustrated by favouritism or cavalier management – the result is lower productivity and sinking morale. If you’re sure that your boss isn’t dealing with a health issue or a family issue that requires special accommodation from the 9 to 5 schedule, you might take a long hard look at why you’re choosing to continue working for an organization that is clearly going to send itself down the tubes eventually. Keeping unproductive and troublesome managers in place, and providing no recourse for their performance evaluation is a recipe for stagnation. If you think the future of your organization looks a lot like its present, you should brush off your networking skills, and make the most of all that time your boss is “off site” by looking for another job.
Hello there! I'm Poppy Fox, your no nonsense personal advisor. I believe that each one of us is the author of our own biography. With a little friendly advice, we can solve any problem. I've given advice to people from all walks of life - from bikers to bankers. My goal is to empower you to take action, and help you write the story of your life the way you want it. Got a problem? Comment here after any post, or send me an email at Poppy(underscore)Fox (at) rocketmail (dot) com
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