When a Master Certified coach sets aside the toolkit and invites a marketer to talk about family, friendships, and adult care, you get something quieter and deeper than most business episodes: a patient excavation of how relationships change over time. In this episode of Clean Your Toilet, Xing Jian and Will explore the hidden labour of keeping people in your life — the patch notes, the role changes, and the surprising costs of going solo.

Most people assume relationships are stable unless something dramatic happens. Xing Jian argues they’re more like software: without regular updates, assumptions and misreadings accumulate. Will was raised between grandparents and extended family, he grew up with multiple caregivers and a kind of gentle hands-off upbringing. That created space to be independent — but it also created gaps. For Xing Jian, years away from home felt like pressing pause; moving back felt like hitting play and discovering how much repair the stalled relationship needed.

This episode traces several subtle but powerful tensions: moving from dependent child to caregiver, the protective instincts that morph into managerial ones when people age, and the disorienting experience of learning to parent in a very different cultural moment. Will talks about concrete parenting choices — treating kids like people instead of babies, using candid language, and balancing scold-with-love — and the cognitive reframes that follow once you become a parent yourself.

They also talk adult friendships: why they’re rarer, why “friend-friend” status matters, and why it’s sometimes necessary to end a relationship rather than let resentments calcify. Will brings a marketer’s clarity to the emotional mess, reframing leadership and team-building as parallel forms of parenting: your company is your first child, managers are deputies, and different “parenting styles” can be tested across each domain.

Key questions emerge:

- How do you keep relationships updated so assumptions don’t calcify into resentment?

- What changes when you move from “receive care” to “give care,” and how does that affect risk-taking?

- How do you draw boundaries between clients, colleagues, and friends without losing humanity?

Xing Jian’s honesty about friendship breakups, parenting rules, and the “pause/play” dynamics of modern life is disarmingly practical. Will contributes a simple moral line he uses with his children — don’t do to others what you wouldn’t want done to you — and explains how modelling that steady ethic is both easier and harder than it sounds.

If you’ve ever:

- Felt a relationship go stale and didn’t know how to approach it

- Moved home after years away and been surprised by how people had frozen in time

- Struggled to balance work, family, and the invisible labour of caretaking

…this episode gives gentle permission to update, to speak plainly, and to treat relationships as ongoing work rather than static assets.

🧼 Your presence is the clean water.

🚽 Frozen assumptions are the drain.

💩 Neglect, resentment, and performative love? That’s the clog.

Unpause. Update your relationships. And be brave enough to play again.