Stuffology – The evolution of traditional decluttering with Nicole Kincaid E69
November 22, 2022
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In this episode, I interview my dear friend Nicole Kincaid about her zone of genius: Stuffology. You will find out what Stuffology is, and why it is different to traditional decluttering. You get so many tips and tricks that you can apply directly to your own living space.
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Get to know Nicole Kincaid and Stuffology
Nicole loves organizing, tidying and “putting things right”. This odd propensity is her sacred ground. The challenge of sorting things out – junk drawers, thoughts, cupboards, digital information, garages, belief systems, anything that can be unraveled and untangled – fascinates her to no end. Nicole thrives on connecting with humans and their spaces. She calls her unique spin on traditional organizing: “Stuffology”.
Connect with Nicole Kincaid and Stuffology
Website: nicolekincaid.com
Instagram: @nicolekincaidenergy
Facebook: Nicole Kincaid
FREE GIFT: How to dominate your clutter by NOT DOING these seven things!
Course: Stuffology 101: Your 5 week Organizing & Decluttering Journey
Can you share with us your story and the path that brought you to help people with Stuffology?
So I’ve always said that organizing is in my DNA. I just have always been that way. Ever since I’ve been a little kid, I have liked to have things a certain way and I’m the kind of person who anytime I go into a new room or a new environment, I’m always looking for how it could be like.
I moved around a lot as a child and I went to 13 elementary schools and four junior high schools, and then I moved in with my father and things started to settle down.
“Making my world safe.”
The interesting thing was, that all the moving around gave me this way of making my world safe. Not the moving around, but the unpacking and putting my bedroom in order. It was like there was this really chaotic environment that I lived in, but I would just spend all of this time making sure that my bedroom was perfect. I would unpack with very great detail. And that just made me feel like things were gonna be okay, you know?
“My 19-year-old me knew that I could help her…”
And then when I was 19 years old, my mom sent me over to her best friend’s house who was going through a really difficult divorce. And this woman had been bedridden for a couple of months and was going through pretty serious depression.
She found out that she also had to sell her home. So she had lived in the home for many years and had raised her kids there. And my mom told me: “You need to go over and help her because she just can’t do that on her own.”
So I went over and you know, I knew that I could help her. I knew that I had these mad skills or organization and whatnot. But what came up for me when I started to work with her was just how much other support she needed. In the way of being truly listened to and witnessed.
She’s going through 20-plus years of memories, belongings, and all of this visual representation of this life that she was dismantling.
I don’t know how I knew this as a 19-year-old, but there was a lot of time when I was just quiet with her and just letting her have her moments of processing what she needed to go through in order to make this monumental shift in her life. And that is how I started off doing this work for other people.
How did you go then on that journey with Stuffology as your calling?
It wasn’t a straight line, right? I was always like I know how to do that, but it’s not like I’m gonna make a living out of it. I went on to college and then I would do it as a part-time job, but I also had regular part-time jobs.
The rebirth of this work:
But what really was the rebirth of this work was about 20 years ago. I got really, really sick and I didn’t know what was going on. And I went to all the doctors and I got all the blood work done. I got the scans and I went to all kinds of doctors. There wasn’t any container that fit my symptoms in Western medicine.
I had this moment where the doctor told me what she thought it was. This was months and months later and we’ve been going on trying to figure it out. Right? She set me down and said, I think what’s going on is that you’re depressed.
And I had this out-of-body experience, you know, where I was watching myself having this conversation that was going on between me and this doctor.
“I knew that I had to sort it out.”
And what I said to myself was, you’re not depressed. She just doesn’t know. And that’s okay. Like I was really resolved. But I also knew that I had to sort it out.
I had to figure it out. I had to go find out why I didn’t have any energy. That was really the nature of my illness. I didn’t have any energy.
I live in Seattle, Washington in the United States. I ended up going to this post-grad program here at Naturopathic University in my area, and they were offering a program called Spirituality, Health and Medicine.
And that is when I started learning about energy. And I was like: Wow. And so I started healing. I started getting better and I was really aware of why I was getting better.
But then I had to go back out and work and I always remembered that I liked doing that work with people. In traditional terms, it’s called clutter clearing and organizing. Right. I liked doing it, but I remember, that I had always felt really depleted after I worked with people. I end up saying “My God, it was so heavy.”
Approach decluttering from more of an energetic point of view:
So I started working with people. This work is called Clutter Clearing Organizing traditionally. But I was really compelled about what would happen if I approached it from more of an energetic point of view. Really listen to people about what was going on in their own environments and what they said about what they have. I did more of a journey with them and then wrapped that up all into the container of me really knowing that I had the skill set to be able to navigate them.
And that’s how that all got started. So then I changed the name to Stuffology because I didn’t want people just to think I was gonna come over and do it for them. Do you know what I mean?
I needed to come up with a different language for it and I did. And that’s what I’ve been working on pretty much ever since.
So how is Stuffology different from traditional organizing/decluttering?
I am fully aware that I have this defined skillset around how to organize and declutter. The new buzzword for decluttering, which I really love, is actually called editing. And I actually love that word: home editing. But I do it very differently because I don’t work without the clients there.
I know that seems like an odd thing. There are a lot of professional organizers that will go in and just whoosh. I don’t do that. So when I go in together with people, we have a conversation because I want to know why they have what they have.
When I’m successful at my job working with a client, I feel like, it’s because they have come up with all of the answers themselves. I give them the information that they needed to get the space in order. I’m leaving at the end of the day.
It doesn’t help for me to set up your environment according to what I think you should do. That doesn’t make any sense. We figure out together: What you do, like how are you in your space.
“Everybody’s so different.”
This whole kaleidoscope of different personalities and how we prefer things in our environment. We don’t actually give ourselves permission to have that. We think that the person that designed that system at the department store, that’s how you’re supposed to organize.
So we don’t allow ourselves to investigate how we want our environment to look. And that is very much what my conversation looks like with clients. Really telling them, that this is not going to work for them because they don’t even like to operate that way. It doesn’t make sense for who they are.
We’ve got to find systems that work for who they are so that when I leave these systems keep. Does that make sense? Like they don’t fall apart as soon as I am out of the door.
Bringing My Personality into my home.
What you do is remove a lot of the aggravation and resistance and frustration and irritation when you set up your environment, your home space or whatever space to reflect you. And when you don’t set it up that way, you do get irritated in your own spaces like your very own home.
Don’t we want that to be so comfy? That’s one of the questions I ask people: How do you want your home to feel? What experience you wanna have here? Some people want it to be like a little sanctuary and some people want it to feel really productive.
But it’s really important that people give themselves permission to have things they want to have.
“You don’t have to get rid of anything you don’t wanna get rid of.”
Like, I always tell my clients, you don’t have to get rid of anything you don’t wanna get rid of. And they’re like: What? What do you mean?
You can keep whatever you wanna keep because it’s your stuff. And you get to make those choices.
But there’s a conversation we’re gonna have around why you have what you have to help you. Is this thing, is this stuff really still relevant to your life? Do you wanna have it in your present and carry it into your future?
Do you want it to take up space and your space? And that’s really an important thing. A lot of people live in spaces they don’t like and or don’t even love. They just think that’s the way it’s supposed to be. And it’s not! Isn’t that weird? I mean, that just blows my mind.
You can even do little things to have an environment that you like more. So that’s my driving question: What’s going on here? Let’s have that conversation.
How does that Stuffology work when you live with a partner or adults in a household?
That is a really big topic. It’s actually kind of an advanced topic because it is way more simplified when you’re just working with one person and their things and their stuff, you know? But the truth is most people share space and you do then have to have that conversation.
And I oftentimes call it a negotiation. I have tools that I use with couples or partners or husbands and wives because I think a lot of times there can be some bad feelings between people where they have just come to terms with their living spaces.
I remind people that they really do like and love the person that they live with. And then you give them a tool to have a conversation with the other person around, let’s say, the kitchen.
The Roam Your Home Tool
I do this thing called Roam Your Home, and it’s when you dial way, way, way, way down, and only work on little tiny areas. Otherwise, if you work on big areas, people get so overwhelmed by having stuff.
Well, the truth is that our spaces are always changing just like we are. And just taking stressful weekends where we feel overwhelmed and not that happy about doing it and trying to declutter a whole room or home.
It doesn’t really work that well. So I invented this thing called Roam Your Home, and it’s meant to be like a lifestyle tool, like where you just use it on the go.
“De-clutter when you have gas in your tank”
Like when something catches your attention. You’re like, I wanna get back to that. You know, because you size it down to like a little tiny area or an area of your choice and you give yourself a time parameter. The trick of Roam Your Home is leaving the project when you still have gas in your tank and you still feel really good, like leaving it with an elevated emotion.
Like: Oh my God, that felt so good. But most people don’t do that.
“Most People De-clutter while in survival emotion.”
They just go, go, go. I gotta get it done. We’ve got this one weekend to organize a stupid garage. Right? And then they feel survival emotions and stress.
And I very much believe that Stuffology is about creation. You know, it’s about feeling good about our spaces, about implementing wonder and good feeling emotions into our space so they can reflect that back to us.
So I ask the couples: On a scale of 1 to 10 how important is it to you?
So when I work with couples, and we get to let’s say the refrigerator. One of the things that I will ask them is: On a scale of one to 10, how important is the refrigerator to you and I want you to be really honest. Give me your number on: I really have to have this be a certain way, or I can be kind of flexible.
And then I turned to the other person with them there: Okay, you just heard their number. Now you remember that you love this person and you like this person, and you’re with this person for a reason. I want you to say on a scale of 1 to 10 how important is this refrigerator to you.
I’ve never had two people come up with the same number. One person would say 7 and the other would say 9. And they figure out something of each other.
But then that doesn’t mean that the person who has the higher number gets to have everything to be their way. It just means they get to be the lead on the project, the final decision maker if there’s a sticky point.
Still, the other person is totally involved.
And they really love that because it gives them involvement. You know what? It gives them a connection to one another. They feel like they’re being heard like I’m still gonna get a say in this. But they are okay with deferring to the other person who has the higher number.
“We need to involve the other person in our lives and spaces.”
I worked with a man one time who was going through a divorce and moving into his own place. He needed some help with organizing his home because he had no idea.
One of the things that he told me about was when he was married. I literally almost cried when he told this me because he told me that he left for work one day and he came home and his wife had painted their bedroom in this crazy colour. He would never have picked it and then just reorganized everything.
And he had no idea she was gonna do that. And he was like, Oh my God. He literally felt so heartbroken because he felt like he had to live in this room now. And it just really illustrated to me how much we really do need to involve other people in our lives, in our spaces. Cause we share space. You don’t want to create resentment or frustration or anger or resignation. You want there to be some win-wins.
Because you wanna cultivate connection and cooperation with each other.
“You don’t have to fit into someone else’s system.”
I used to have this client who had moved into this high-rise apartment.
She was such a cool lady. I moved her in, I unpacked for her, and then she called me like a couple of months later and she was like, Can you come over and do your magic?
And I’d be like, Okay. So I would go over there. She would be at work. and I would organize her whole space for her. I would just go through her space and leave again.
Then she would call me in another couple of months, and every time I would go back, it would be worse than the time that I went there before. Like there’d be more disorder. After a while I was like: What is going on here?
I know what’s going on here: She loves walking in the door at the end of the day. And after I’d been there and seen everything totally pristine, but as if I was gonna live there, not HER.
“I had set up her environment for all of MY systems, not HERS.”
Her whole place just didn’t look like her, because I didn’t even know anything about her.
You’ve gotta really observe people because everyone is different. You have to know who you’re working with and then be able to set up systems that help them, their partners/family to feel good about their homes.
I think what people do to themselves is they don’t ask the right questions and are not used to self-serving. They try to fit into someone else’s systems rather than finding their own.
And that’s why I think everybody should get a home organizer help once a year to help them discover their own systems.
Because everyone has his/her quirks and idiosyncrasies. Even my stepmom who was the most organized person on the planet had her own system.
So, when you work with people and ask them probing questions, they will give you all of these answers. And then you can figure out the systems.
The whole reason behind all of this inquiry is because when your home feels really, really good, it then is powered on and it starts to be able to support you more. Because you don’t have this energy of resistance and fatigue or frustration or irritation lingering all around you. You can go more quickly into your creative self.
The organized, disorganized people:
If I walked into an organized, disorganized home and they had all of their glasses there: all of their plates and all of their water glasses, all of their wine glasses, all of their martini glasses and it all looked beautiful, right?
But if you were to actually take everything out of that cabinet. And then say: Let’s make sure all of this is relevant to you. Relevant is the word I love to use. They were like, God, why do I have all of these wine glasses? Like I have like 24. I don’t need them all here. Or I don’t need all of these water glasses, or I don’t want all of these.
All of a sudden they start seeing that even though it is organized, it looked flat. It didn’t have vitality because it was just holding a place, holding space.
So I tell even organized people just go through their things. Even if your closets are really organized, I went through my closet the other day and I was like, Oh my God, this is so funny. I wear all the clothes in the centre. That’s actually a pretty logical way to organize, to put the things that you wear most down the centre.
So I just kind of took a pass at it. Even though it looked really organized and they were all hanging straight. Oh man, some of these things are truly not relevant anymore in my life. Like I’m not even gonna wear them ever.
How many things do you have in your house, a space that holds memories and emotions?
Things very much hold energy. And that’s why you wanna take time and why you wanna size down and do little bits of time because I call it the jack in the box. Like you don’t know what’s gonna come out at you. Like you don’t if you’re gonna run into something that triggers off an emotional chain reaction then you need to spend some time with it. You want to metabolize it, right?
Hold good memories
I’ve had this dress for 25 years, it’s classic. I looked at it and I’m like, Okay, you haven’t worn it in 20-plus years. And I just was like: What is going on?
I am tapping into memories here because as soon as I took that dress out, I looked at it and I remembered that I wore it to a wedding that was down in California and it was a great wedding. There was a big party.
I got to see all my friends from college. We danced. I remember exactly where I was sitting underneath a tent. We were up all night. It was all in that dress. So subconsciously I was holding onto the dress because my consciousness was. You might wear it someday, but in my subconscious was the wedding, the fun. The people that I didn’t wanna let go of in that memory.
Then I thought to myself, All right, is there another option? Yes, you can just take a dang picture of the dress, and you’re gonna look at that dress and remember.
So I took the photo, and then I passed on the dress to someone else.
How many of those things do people have in their lives? That’s the question. And that’s a really different conversation. You know, circling back to traditional organizing and clutter, because that is when you realize that those conversations are all over your space. You realize that your space might be more about your past than it is about your future.
Hold bad memories
I’ll tell you one more example. I worked with a man who went through a pretty traumatizing divorce. We were going through his closet when he moved in into a loft. So he had less space, but he didn’t have that much in the first place. He hadn’t taken that much and he’d already had all of his clothing in his closet.
He’d unpacked his clothing and I go: “Hey, do you wanna just do a pass at that?” And he was like, Yeah, we might as well. His whole closet with two big door closets was all filled with clothing.
When we were working in this closet, this man became emotionally enraged. And I was totally fine with that because what he had realized is that all of the clothing his ex-wife had picked out and she had said, “This is how you should dress. This is what you should wear to work.”
And he didn’t even like these clothes. I’m not even kidding, this man literally had like eight pieces of clothing left in the end. He was literally throwing them out: I don’t want this, I don’t want that.
I mean, his exhumation of energy. He was literally emoting and releasing on such a deep level. Oh man, that meant he did some beautiful work. And I don’t do this very often, but I said: “Okay, you’ve got like eight pieces of clothing left. Are you gonna be okay with that?”
He said: “I’m so okay with it, Nicole” because it was all about this person that he was no longer and never had been.
“Why it’s important to be so gentle with ourselves.”
I know this sounds crappy, but I actually do tell people, don’t get your friends to help you because your friends are always gonna tell you, Just get rid of it.
It’s so personal. It really is. You know, if people could be listeners if they could train people to ask these questions or sit there and be with me while I go through this because this might be hard.
That’s a different process. I don’t know what I’m gonna come up against here. When they get stuck my number one question is always: Tell me about that. Tell me the story of it. It’s a totally different track because they’re trying to figure out: Do I keep it, Do I not keep it?
And that is the start of their process than coming to the decision themselves. They know what they’re gonna do with it after they’ve worked with some of the information around it.
You mentioned to me that people can even take a course with you on Stuffology. Can you tell me more about it?
Yes. I love working with people and my favourite way to work with people is by teaching my online classes. I really love it because there’s a group of people and then we share. They’re sharing what happens. I offer a class that’s called Stuffology 101! Your Organizing & Decluttering Journey.
My next course is starting January 10th because I’m in progress right now with the course, so it starts January 10th. It’s a five-week journey and we go through topics week by week. It’s about my kind of principles, not my rules. It helps you to get started.
They then do the homework in between the weeks and it’s really great, and I really love teaching this course, and people get a lot out of it. And they are so excited to come back week after week and share and they’re like, Oh my gosh, this is what I worked on.
We get to share how it was for them. And then they get to build an energetic, muscular system around how to keep doing it that way.
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