Shownotes
Why belonging beats shame every time
Most people who join Clutter Free Academy don’t show up with cheerful introductions. They arrive calling themselves lazy, terrible, bad moms, bad wives. They expect judgment. Maybe rejection.
Instead, they’re met with kindness. Sometimes aggressively so.
In this solo episode of Find Your Freaks, I go deeper into my conversation with Kathi Lipp (Ep 2) and explore how Clutter Free Academy became one of the kindest corners of the internet — not through rules or chore charts, but through belonging. Clutter may look like a housekeeping issue, but it’s really about overwhelm, perfectionism, and shame. What people need most isn’t motivation. It’s safety. And safety starts with kindness.
This episode is about the mechanics of creating community around sensitive struggles: why guardrails matter, how to universalize pain so no one feels alone, and why exclusion is a feature, not a flaw.
Episode Highlights
- [03:51] Kathi’s trust: building on free rein
- [07:20] Guardrails that made Clutter Free safe
- [09:21] Tonya’s story of clutter, hoarding, and healing
- [12:29] Insisting on kindness—even toward yourself
- [17:55] Universalizing struggles to normalize experience
- [20:15] Aggressive kindness in practice
- [25:40] Why exclusion is part of belonging
- [27:37] Belonging before belief
Leading with Kindness
New members often introduced themselves with harsh self-talk: “I’m lazy. I’m terrible. I’m the worst.” My first response was always the same: “Whoa, whoa, whoa. We are the kindest corner of the internet. That means you must be kind to yourself.”
Kindness wasn’t optional. It was the baseline that told people they already belonged.
Guardrails That Create Safety
We didn’t open Clutter Free to everyone. “Born organized” types who came to gawk or critique were kept out. Guardrails weren’t about control—they were about creating safety so vulnerability could thrive.
Universalizing Struggles
Clutter might show up as messy homes, but for many it’s cluttered calendars or cluttered thinking. By naming clutter as part of a universal human struggle, members realized they weren’t defective—they were human.
Belonging Before Belief
You can’t shame people into belonging. Whatever your community’s focus—health, parenting, creativity—the same truth applies: people must belong before they can believe.
Meet Your Host
Tonya Kubo is a community strategist, marketing consultant, and rebel with a cause: helping people find the place where they truly belong. For nearly two decades, she’s built online spaces that feel less like comment sections and more like chosen family. She’s the fixer you call when your Facebook group has gone straight-up Lord of the Flies and the bouncer at the door of internet nonsense. As host of Find Your Freaks, Tonya brings together unconventional thinkers and bridge-builders who know “normal” was never the point.
Support the Show
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Links and Mentions
Let’s Stay Freaky
What’s Next
Next week, we’ll tackle how finding your people doesn’t always mean starting a group. It can also mean using your unique gifts on behalf of others. Stay tuned for a conversation about secrets, support, and the unexpected ways belonging shows up.
Transcripts
(0:00 - 0:50)
I know you think you are the only person on the planet who struggles with this issue, but once you get inside the group, you will realize you are in good company, my friend. So a lot of times when people join, they love to tell us how horrible they are. They're lazy, they're terrible, they're a bad wife, they're a bad mom, they're all these things.
And the first thing I'll usually do is come in and just say, well, well, well, when I say that we are the kindest corner of the internet, I'm going to have to insist that you're kind to yourself. We're wired for connection, but most of us are faking it to fit in. I'm Tonya Kubo and this is Find Your Freaks, the podcast that flips the script and spotlights the quirks you thought you had to keep quiet.
Subscribe now and head to findyourfreaks.com for show notes and extras. Because around here, what makes you weird makes you wonderful. Normal was never the point.
(0:56 - 3:51)
Hey, freaks, Tonya here. In episode two, I talked with Kathi Lipp, bestselling author, podcaster, and the co-creator of the Clutter-Free Academy Facebook group. If you have never met Kathi before, buckle up.
She doesn't just help people declutter her home, she creates sanctuaries for people who have been shamed for how they live. And if you have already listened to the episode, you know just how powerful her voice is in naming the emotions most of us are too scared to speak, fear, guilt, and shame. Now today, I want to go a little deeper into that conversation, especially around the role of kindness in building real community, because what Kathi and I have built over in Clutter-Free wasn't just a Facebook group.
It started out as a Facebook group, but it has become so much more, and it really has become a trauma-informed space before most people even knew what that phrase meant. So let's unpack how that happened and why it works. Now, I would be remiss not to kick this off without saying that Kathi actually gets 100% full credit for the name of this show.
Because years ago, I was co-teaching with Kathi. She'd invited me to teach in like an intensive at a writer's conference with her. And one of the things that she talked about at that conference was how when it comes to building your platform as a writer, it's not about blending in with everybody else.
It's not about pretending you're not weird. It is about finding people who match your own brand of weird, people who are attracted to your weirdness. And what she said at that time, she says, you know, you just have to go out and find your freaks.
And I wrote that down. And several years later, when I was thinking about this show, about creating the show, I was like, that is going to be the title. If I ever get this podcast off the ground, I am going to call it Find Your Freaks.
And I talked with Kathi, and Kathi was like, yeah, I don't actually own those words. Totally. If you want to name your show that go ahead.
I love it. But I think it's important for you as a listener to know that she gets all the credit for the title of this show, because that is important. And part of why I think it's so important, because it's so much of who Kathi is.
Kathi doesn't go around trying to change people. You know, if anything, she is a proponent for radical acceptance of who people are, what makes them unique, and what makes them wonderful. And when it comes to the Clutterfree Academy community, you know, that is the community that I have said for years, it was the first time one of my clients had come to me and said, I have this vision for a community.
(3:51 - 4:52)
But rather than trying to micromanage it, rather than me telling you all the things that you absolutely positively have to do to build this community, I want you to take what you know, as best practices, I want you to take what you know about the audience, and how online community develops, and what really does foster belonging. And I want you to take that I want you to build that and build it, you know, under my name, build it for me, but use what you know works. And she gave me free rein.
In fact, I remember at the beginning going, you know, it takes a lot of time, it's gonna take like 45 hours the first month to get this off the ground. Are you okay with that? And she was like, if you're okay with it, I'm okay with it. And I said, Okay, well, you know, part of fostering belonging is setting up space where people can be honest.
And sometimes what people say is not nice. It's not all positive. It's not going to be a PR machine.
(4:52 - 7:19)
And she was like, Yeah, hey, I trust you, whatever works. And so if you've listened to episode two, you know, then the Facebook group initially began as an online Bible study. And there's a couple things.
So we started it on Facebook, because Facebook is a free platform. And you know, to this day, it is one of the few places where you can build a community that is fully featured, you've got all these different features and functions to foster that online belonging and community without having to pay for anything. And it's also a great testing ground, right? If you don't know if your community is going to take flight, if you don't know how exactly you're going to build it, or what's necessary to make it thrive, you know, Facebook's a great place to try that all out, because you're not paying for the platform, you're not paying for the features.
So that was part of the reason why we decided to launch it as a Facebook group. The other reason, however, is Kathi's community is Facebook forward, I would say her base audience is probably over 50 now, but they didn't always start that way. It's just she got her start speaking at church women's groups, and mom's groups.
And so a lot of that was back, you know, say 15 years ago, when she started speaking to church group, these individuals were in their early 20s, to, you know, say, early 20s to early 40s. And they have, of course, now added 15 years to their lives. And so they have aged with her, and she is always attracting a younger audience, but probably not to the same extent.
Because, you know, like anything, the platforms come and go what's in vogue today is not necessarily in vogue tomorrow. She has definitely leaned into video, she's always been video first. So I think that's part of why she even though she doesn't speak at church events quite as often, mainly because we just don't have as many in person events as we used to.
But part of that is that she's so comfortable with video, that she is able to attract younger audiences even today. But that Facebook group, you know, initially, when we got it started, because it was the Bible study, it was easy to come up with core content for the group, right, because it was just around the Bible study. But what I knew, because I was part of her community, one of the things that I knew is the mindset of the individual who would come in.
(7:20 - 9:21)
And so we started off as a Facebook group, we started off as a private group, and we had some pretty high guardrails to come in. We had some entry questions people had to answer. And mainly what we were trying to do is we're trying to establish a safe space for people who were cluttery.
housekeeping problem, even in:
It is an issue related to overwhelm. It's oftentimes perfectionism in disguise. Commonly, those who are cluttery, who are really just burdened by clutter, feel stuck on start, they feel like they lost before they even began.
And so that is the thought I had at the front of my mind as I was building this community for these individuals. Now, just happens that I kind of had a cheat code on the whole thing because I'm cluttery. If you listen to the episode, you know, but if you followed me for any length of time on social media, if you are one of my newsletter subscribers, you know, my mom was a hoarder.
My mom died in:
-:
So a lot of the openness and the candor I speak on today when it comes to clutter and my cluttery history is not something that would have been possible when my mom was alive. But we, you know, launched Clutter-Free Academy in 2016. It was after my mom had died.
And so I could be honest about my journey with folks. And because I was able to be honest, I was able to lead with vulnerability, not from a place of pain, because I had already done a lot of therapy and a lot of healing about my own cluttery journey, I could really lead with compassion and hope. And so when we created this container for folks, it really was a little bit like your average recovery community, right? You're a member because you say you're a member, like, we're not going to go into your home and examine whether you're cluttery enough.
If you say you have a clutter problem, we believe you know, and if you say you have a clutter problem, and you post a picture, like there's nothing we haven't seen. And there truly is nothing I haven't seen. I haven't looked at a single picture of anybody's home in Clutter-Free Academy and thought, oh, dear God, how could they live like that? Like genuinely, nothing I haven't seen before, nothing I didn't live in, at least when I lived with my mom.
So having this container set up where you can't shock us, you can't surprise us. And oh, by the way, and this is something I mentioned in the episode, I know you think you are the only person on the planet who struggles with this issue. But once you get inside the group, you will realize you are in good company, my friend, good, good company.
So part of what we had to do when we created the group, part of what I needed to do was acknowledge the fact that there was so much shame, the biggest barrier that we had to overcome for any of our members, if this group was going to get off the ground, is to let them know it was a safe place to come into and let them know once they came in, nobody was going to judge them, nobody was going to treat them with shame. And then I had to make sure we made good on that promise. So we started that community with really strong rules.
I don't typically start communities with a rigid set of rules. I like to set up some what I call guardrails, right, some like written rules of engagement, and then let the community's culture organically develop with some shaping and some guidance. I don't like to overmanage or over moderate a community.
However, in this case, I needed to be a little heavier handed, because cluttery people are so mean, Kathi said this, they're the meanest people in the world, but only to themselves. And so we had to establish like, this is the kindest corner of the internet, we started with that focus, this will be the kindest corner of the internet. And we will insist on kindness, not just on each other, but we will insist that you are kind to yourself.
(:
So a lot of times when people join, they love to tell us how horrible they are, they're lazy, they're terrible, they're a bad wife, they're a bad mom, they're all these things. And the first thing I'll usually do is come in and just say, Whoa, whoa, whoa. When I say that we are the kindest corner of the internet, I'm going to have to insist that you're kind to yourself.
(:
Can we give you a little bit of grace? And they will try to talk me out of it. I don't know. I don't know how bad they are.
If I only knew and I'm like, surely, surely you can't be nearly as bad as you say you're painting yourself out like you're some kind of serial killer. You're not. And it takes a lot.
It takes a lot of grace and a lot of compassion for them to believe us, right? And they're constantly waiting. They're waiting for the other shoe to fall. They're waiting for them to post the thing where we finally come out and say that's that.
You are lazy. You are a terrible person. And I don't want this episode, this conversation right now, though it is about the interview with Kathi, I don't want it to just be about clutter, right? Because if you're listening right now, granted, you know, Kathi threw out a very real statistic, which is over 60% of the women in the US identify as having a clutter problem.
So if you're a woman and you're listening, you're either in the 60% or you're at the 40%. But to make this all about clutter, I think ignores the real lesson that you can get from the Clutter Free Academy community when it comes to finding your freaks and letting them know that they are safe and they are welcome with you. And that is number one.
And this is something that Kathi said is whatever your focus is, whatever your theme is for the freaks that you are gathering around you, whether it is citizen scientists, whether they are writers or advocates, or I'm thinking of some of the other folks that have been interviewed on the show, even the ones that haven't come on yet, whether they are performers, entertainers, the number one thing that you have to do is you have to take whatever the theme is that makes them feel like they are outcasts. In this case, it's clutter, but in other cases, it could be cancer patients or victims of abuse or assault. It could be people who struggle with mental illness or chronic health issues of another sort.
You have to take whatever that very unique experience for them is and help to make it a universal reality. So in clutter, because there's so much shame around clutter, you have to normalize it and say there are people whose houses look Pinterest perfect who suffer from clutter, and maybe it's just not a matter of stuff. Like, you know, maybe they have an attic that you can't even walk in, so it is stuff, or maybe it's cluttered thinking.
You know, maybe they have a really loud inner critic in their head and 22 competing loud, boisterous thoughts going at any given time. Maybe their schedule is cluttered, like maybe they are overscheduled, overpacked, overburdened, right? For everybody in this group, the issue of clutter manifests in our home, but that doesn't mean that other people don't deal with other types of clutter. Be the same thing if you're talking about the recovery community, right? I'm thinking specifically of alcohol, right? There's a lot of people who can drink a beer once every four months and be good to go.
There are people who can go to a party and drink one beer and call it good, and there are some people who could drink a beer three, four times a week and call it good, or a glass of wine, or a cocktail, or whatever. And then there are people that one leads to 10. And those individuals could spend a lot of time and a lot of energy going, why me? Why can that person pick it up and drop it like it's no big deal? And for me, it consumes me.
(:
And that's just not a very productive line of thinking, right? It's like the why me, why can this other person live a life that I perceive to be of ease while I struggle so much? And so when you make it a universal issue, part of it is while other people may not struggle with the same thing you struggle with, they struggle with something, right? Everybody struggles with something. It just may not be this. Luckily for you, lucky for all of us, we have created this space for people who have this struggle.
And so that is what it means to create an environment, or at least to lay a foundation where whatever the topic or theme is of your group, you make it a universal reality. You're not saying everybody has this problem or everybody has this problem to the same extent. You're saying everybody has a problem.
Theirs may look different, but we know everybody has a problem. We have just created this space for people with this specific problem. So that is something that I would encourage you if you feel called to serve or help people who have a particular struggle, right? Whether it's, you know, you feel called to create community for moms of young children, you feel called to create community for parents who have suffered loss, right? They've lost a child, they've lost an infant.
If you feel called to serve people who have escaped toxic or abusive relationships, whatever that could be for you. And maybe you simply feel called to create a community of people who want to pursue a different, a specific type of degree or a specific type of career. You know, it doesn't have to be serious.
(:
It doesn't have to be a healing journey, emotional or physical. It can just be interest. But the first thing is, is to find a way to create or to at least paint a picture of a universal reality around it.
Because once you paint the picture of the universal reality, then you can go into this is specifically, so there's the universal reality. Here is the specific of who this community is designed for. And so if you fit this specific subset of the universal reality, we're here for you.
We have laid the foundation. Come on in, come into the living room, sit on our couch, have a cup of tea, have a cup of coffee, whatever it can be. The other piece that Kathi talked about, and I already alluded to this a bit is the importance of aggressive kindness.
When you are trying to build a community around something that is sensitive, that is particular people who've been treated poorly in one way or the other, aggressive kindness. Or I would even say a community of people who are surrounded by a lot of rules, a lot of pass or fail rules. So you see this a lot with parenting.
There are good parents, there are bad parents. And good parents and bad parent can get labels slapped on it. Everything from what kind of diapers you use, how you feed your baby, how you practice discipline, how you don't practice discipline, where you send them to school, where you don't send them to school.
I mean, parenting is a phase of life where you are surrounded by judgment from the moment somebody finds out you are going to be a parent, whether you are choosing to adopt or you are choosing pregnancy. And I don't think it ever ends. My kids are fifth grade and 10th grade, and I know I'm still parked into the constant messages of what I need to be doing if I am a good mom versus a bad mom.
My husband doesn't deal with it as much because here in the US, we don't place the same societal demands on dads as we do on moms. But he still has some of it. You know, he gets labeled a good dad a lot of times because he goes places with his daughters by himself.
He participates in their activities with me and without me. And there's not a lot of expectation that he would do that, but he does. So he gets the good dad hat a lot, where I get the, sometimes I get the good mom hat, sometimes I get the super mom hat.
A lot I get the barely hanging mom by a thread mom hat. And we're okay with that. But if you think about the community that you're serving or that you're trying to build, if it is a population of people who are constantly fed messages that they are not enough or they're being given a standard that is really hard to attain, leading with aggressive kindness is never the wrong move in how you build that community, how you let them know that they're welcome.
Right? So when we talk about aggressive kindness, what we mean is like just normalizing the positive and the negative feelings and emotions and letting them know that every day that they keep trying is a day that they get to make progress. And it's always progress over perfection. And I think that's true no matter what the focus of your community is.
And the other thing that I would say, because I don't want this episode to be super long, and I could talk about this seriously for years, because Clutter-Free Academy is such a great case study in what it takes to build a thriving, vibrant community, is understand that you're not for everyone. Okay? If you're doing it right, if you are serving your people better than anybody else can, if you've built this community that is tailor-made to this target population, you are ticking somebody off. Right? You are offending somebody.
You are repulsing somebody. You are excluding someone. And it's not that you're excluding someone from a place of elitism.
It's just if you really want to build the perfect environment for your target population, you have to exclude others because not everybody's in that target population. Kathi talked about, she had this post about how she doesn't sort her laundry and people lost their marbles. What she doesn't tell you about this, there was a post about years ago about whether to use a top sheet or not.
And I don't use a top sheet. I haven't used a top sheet since college. And people lost their marbles about that.
It was just like, oh, you're sick. You're dirty. You're disgusting.
You have the grossest comforter. I'm like, no, I just wash my comforter every other week, like some people wash sheets, I guess. Right? But, you know, you're not for those people.
If they're criticizing, if they're angry, I mean, just look at the criticism you get with an objective eye and go, okay, would my perfect person say this? Or would my perfect person say the opposite of this? And if the truth is that your perfect person would say the opposite, then you don't worry about it. You don't need to change what you're doing to serve a critic who isn't part of your freaks, right? They're not coming to your freak show. And quite honestly, you didn't build the freak show for them.
So that pretty much brings us to the end of what I wanted to talk to you about today. To quickly recap, I think the main takeaways from the interview with Kathi from episode two is in that specific situation, right? The real problem isn't clutter, right? Clutter looks like a stuff problem, but it's really not. So for you, it's really looking at what is the universal reality you can tie the focus of your freaks or your freak show to, which helps normalize the situation, but also helps to establish that container or that space of belonging.
I think more than anything, the biggest lesson is that you cannot shame people into belonging, okay? Making people feel badly for how they are living, what they are doing is not, is not laying down the welcome mat for them. So I don't care if you are in a health and fitness space. I don't care if you are in a ministry evangelical space.
I don't care if you are in a performance space, like, you know, maybe you want to help kids go get on Broadway or whatever. Shaming them is not the way to lead them to belonging, okay? In copywriting, right? Because I have a marketing background. In copywriting, we talk about how you establish a problem, then you agitate the problem so that the person reading or the person that you are addressing with your marketing is really hungry or desperate for a solution.
Using shame for that is not, it's not the way to win. Let me tell you, it is not the way to win. So you want to make sure that you have led with kindness.
You want to make sure that you are fostering belonging because they need to belong before they can believe. Whatever message you have in your community, if they don't feel like they belong, if they don't feel like there is already connection and they are seen and they are valued, they're never going to believe a single thing you have to tell them. And finally, I would just say if anything that I'm saying today resonated with you, you know, go listen to the full episode.
Listen to episode two where Kathi can get into how the group was formed, why the culture had to be so carefully guarded from her perspective as the leader. You know, I always say it's her name on the door. I got to build it.
I got to be the architect. But, you know, it was all under her name and her brand. And that's a different approach, right? Like on me building something for somebody else, but she had to be okay with what was being built under her name.
And I think there's humorous parts, right? It's not heavy. It could be heavy, but it's not. And I just think you'll really enjoy listening to how Clutter Free Academy developed.
And I think that if you are somebody focused on building community or even if you're looking for a community that will welcome you in any regard, I think there's some great tips and some great things to be thinking about that are presented in that episode. So, that's it for today's reflection. If you've ever felt like your mask, physical or otherwise, makes you unworthy of connection, I really hope you hear this loud and clear.
You are a human and you're doing your absolute best and that is enough. So, go listen to episode three with Kathi and if you need a place where you can say the hard things and be met with kindness and clutter happens to be your issue, go find us at Clutter Free Academy. That's it for today's reflection.
If you've ever felt like your mask, physical or otherwise, makes you unworthy of connection, I hope you will hear this loud and clear. Okay, you're not your mask, physical, emotional, otherwise. You are a human absolutely doing your best and that is enough.
And if you don't feel like that's enough, right, if you are surrounded by people who are giving you impossible standards to measure up to, I won't go so far as to tell you to find other people, although I really think you should find other people, but keep listening to the show. Keep listening to Find Your Freaks because maybe what you will do is you will find a place for you to belong in one of our future episodes. That's it for this episode of Find Your Freaks.
To help more weirdos find their way here, subscribe, rate, and leave a review. And if you're craving connection, join the freak show at findyourfreaks.com. What makes you weird makes you wonderful. Normal was never the point.
