For some reason I get so excited when I watch my clients purge all of their useless, unwanted junk.While I usually have a big smile on my face, they are not so enthusiastic about the process.
Here’s how it usually goes: I hold the donation bag open while my helpless victim slowly places the item into it, teeth clinched, furrowed brow, and a low pitch moan coming from the depths of their despair.I, of course, am very confident that they will soon forget about their precious rusty cheese grater simply because they have two more just like it.Besides, its home for the past eight years has been under a pile of plastic bags stuffed in the back corner of the pantry.I promise you, even though it feels like torture to let go of it now, they won’t miss it!
Years ago, when I first started my business I used any type of bag that my client had available.Sometimes the bag was small, sometimes see-through, or sometimes we didn’t use a bag at all and just made a pile of items to donate.I figured it didn’t matter, as long as the stuff was on its way out of the house.
Eventually, I noticed a trend… an hour after making the bold decision to let something go my client would notice the item staring at them in the see-through bag and change their mind.I would then have to take a few minutes to convince them all over again as to why they really didn’t need a third blender.
The donation bag problem would then get worse. After our session, I would instruct my client to take the time in the coming week to drop off the donations at the Goodwill. Boy, was I naive!!! It started to become my worst nightmare… we’re in the middle of cleaning out the bedroom during our next session and I come across the same vintage 1986 brown hairdryer that was banished from the bathroom weeks earlier! My client would then confess to digging through the donation bag right after I left their house. I somehow would maintain composure and gently ask if there was anything else that was salvaged from the donation bag. Surprisingly, most of my clients would usually fess up like a six year old that was just caught with their hand in the cookie jar. I always appreciated their honesty, but felt bad that they would put themselves through the same emotional roller coaster of letting the item go all over again.
Finally I couldn’t take it anymore and came up with a solution for my clients who had a really hard time purging… the BIG BLACK BAG.Gone were the days of thin, small see-through plastic bags. I started to arrive at our organizing sessions equipped with a box of heavy duty black bags with draw strings. Magically, once something was put into the black abyss, it was never to be seen again! It couldn’t peek out of the sides of the bag to longingly seduce my client into keeping it. Better yet, when the bag was full, I would tie it shut! I started to refer to it as the “tie of no return” (my clients weren’t always so amused).
A couple years later I got really smart and started to offer a new “perk”: if it could fit in my car, I would haul it away FOR FREE! My clients totally loved my new service. I loved it because it made our organizing sessions a lot more productive… we weren’t wasting time purging things twice. I’m brilliant!
So, moral of the story: the black bag is your friend. Trust it! If you have a hard time letting things go, don’t torture yourself by making the decision twice. You’ll probably forget that you even owned that cracked picture frame by next week. Do yourself a favor… toss it into the big black void and bid it good riddance once and for all!
