I like to use the soft sell with clutter busting. Much of the world uses a pushy hard sell to tell us why we need to do something different. That often leads us into buying or acquiring something that isn't for us. We're left feeling stuck with a bad feeling and things we don't want.
I found it's best to offer and leave open the idea of clutter busting and if someone's curious they can take a look. There needs to be an openness for this to work. We can't even force ourselves into doing clutter busting. Resistance prevents the innocent looking to see if something is for us or not.
When people find out I do clutter busting, they often say, "I can't have you over, you'll be telling me I need to get rid of everything." The funny thing is when I visit someone's home for non-clutter busting reasons, I never see clutter, nor feel a need to suggest tossing. When someone does hire me, my clutter busting radar kicks in and I jump into it. It's their openness that compels me.
None of us can be forced to be open. Pushing, demanding, threatening and scaring never makes people change in a positive way. They may do something different because they are intimidated or afraid. But it won't benefit them. We can even use those same tactics on ourselves with equally perilous results.
The openness that allows change to happen comes from a spontaneous natural reaction inside of us. Suddenly there's a feeling that we want to do something different. It feels like, "This is something I want to do." It takes that kind of realization to fuel us to do something positively different.
I got an email from someone who wrote, "I spent most of my life living under the hell of my clutter. I hated it. I felt guilty about it. I told myself I have to do something about it. But nothing changed. And then there were the people telling me I had to do something about it. My family would give me books on organization every Christmas. They refused to come over unless I did something about it. But nothing happened. And then one day I got this feeling that I had a chance to be happy without all of this stuff. I just knew it. It was a simple feeling. It wasn't me beating myself over my head. It was a permission to start. So I began to let go of what I wasn't using and I began to feel better."