Knowing your personal style and dressing how you want to feel is crucial to your happiness. It’s as easy as listening to your brain’s quiet messages about what will make you happy!
Hey there!
Today’s mission is to reclaim that personal style of yours – – even if it’s been missing in action for years.
We’ve all heard the old adage “when you look good, you feel good.” While there’s whole lot of truth in that saying, I’d like to suggest that you start with knowing how you want to feel. I believe looking good is an inside job!
Dressing how you want to feel is crucial to your happiness. This is as easy as listening to your brain’s quiet messages about what style for your personal wardrobe or for your home will make you happy.
As always, my goal is to make it quicker and easier for you to access more ease, joy, and intention in your life…because happy looks really, really good!
In case you’d rather read than listen…
EPISODE #4
Welcome to the Style With Intention podcast where we talk about how to use your personal style as a tool to create a life you love.
We believe that choice is empowering, complacency is boring, and happy looks really, really, good!
I’m your host, Annie Kip, and I want to welcome you to today’s episode. It’s all about how you can reclaim your personal style – even if it’s been missing in action for years.
For many of us, there’ve been a lot of competing pulls on us for years and our personal style has been less important. We’ve had kids who need us, relationships that require us to stretch and compromise. Parents who need our attention, friends we want to find time for, and jobs that require our energy and focus.
All of these obligations and commitments take time. If you’re like me, you barely have time to stop and feed yourself and your family at the end the day. Paying attention your style can seem like a luxury – or even a superficial indulgence. Style was something we might have paid attention to when we were younger, dating, and only had ourselves to think about. As adults, we don’t have the luxury of only thinking about ourselves.
Sort of like the Velveteen Rabbit, our sense of personal style may have been smushed, damaged, edited, adjusted, or ignored for years.
We may have forgotten who we are in some ways – and lost some of the personal power we once felt. I’m here to tell you that it isn’t too late to get that back. And now is the best time to do it!
This seems to be an age where a lot of my friends and I are taking a look around and wondering what’s next. We’re adjusting to the changing needs of our families. Our kids are growing up, going off to college, needing us a little less. We’re considering what’s next, and sometimes worrying about what’s next. This is a time when some of us make big changes and regroup to head in a whole new direction in our relationships and our careers.
Friends of mine recently sold the home that they raised their kids in and moved into a condo. As excited as they are about their new space – and it looks awesome – they had to get rid of a lot of things. The process of paring down was hard. They still feel a little weird that they only have one guest room for their kids to stay in when they visit. Nervertheless, it was time for this change and they’re glad they made it.
Instead of just limping along, feeling paralyzed as they ignored the bad feelings, they wondered what could be better. They thought of what they could do with their big house and noticed they were feeling really stressed about the upkeep and so they made a choice to downsize. It hasn’t been all fun and popcorn. Instead of ignoring it, they chose to do something hard, to get to the happier place they wanted to be in. Now they live in a home which is just the right size for them. They don’t have the worry of upkeep and they have only the possessions they truly love and want to live with.
Today, we’re going to talk about why it’s so important to use the changes in your life to make a choice intentionally and why it makes such a difference in your life.
Choosing something – staying or going, keeping or throwing out – is necessary. You may as well choose what’s going to get you where you want to go.
A couple of weeks ago, I talked about something I call the “whispers.” These little voices tell you when something works for you or doesn’t. (If you want to hear more about this, go listen to episode 2) They can be so faint that you barely hear them. Or so quick to pass that you sometimes miss them. But if you practice paying attention, you can become more and more aware of them and get the juicy info they have to offer.
This is where you get to reclaim your personal style.
This is how your personal style gets unique – when you let your choices be guided by what lights you up. When you listen to the “whispers” and the juicy truth they are telling you.
And we all want to have better experiences, right? We want to feel good more of the time. I know I do and that’s why I’ve become sort of obsessed with understanding how our style choices affect our emotions.
You know, one of those days when everything just goes well. It feels like you have it wired and dialed in and can handle whatever comes your way. You’re feeling friendly and the world seems to be smiling back at you. I call these rockstar days, because they feel amazing!
But when you don’t feel so good, you might not know why. You might not even be aware that you’re not “up.” Or that you feel a little more tired or even sad and the day just seems sort of “regular” or blah. We all have those days and we sometimes just assume this is part of life.
The whispers can help you understand what makes you feel the way you feel. When you’re wearing certain things or working in certain environments, it affects you. Even the interactions you have throughout a day can affect how you feel. It helps to pay attention to those flashes of information that tell you what makes you feel up and what makes you feel less up, or even down.
This gives you a better chance of managing them and creating better experiences for yourself
I believe this with all my heart – and I’m definitely still working on this in my life. It’s easy to get swept into a situation and think there’s not way out, but to feel bad, or sad, or mad. Just this weekend, I found myself feeling bad and struggling to get myself into a better feeling state. I took a walk with the dog, a warm bath, and did the self-care I knew would help get me closer to the feeling I wanted to be in.
Now, I can just hear a bunch of you out there groaning and saying – but how can I feel good about the bad things going on around me. Yes, I know there are some things that happen in the world which are terribly tragic and unexplainable and senseless. I’m not talking about those awful things. This is about ordinary difficult things that go on in our lives – like divorce and moving and getting fired or going back to work.
Yes, there are super hard times. I’ve had my share, believe me. And I can’t say I am perfect at this, but I do think there’s no good that will come from continuing to feel “down” and there’s all kinds of good that can happen if you figure out how to bring yourself, just one tiny, tiny step closer to “up.”
It may not be time to make changes right now. Maybe the kids have to get through school, parents need our help, or you might need to keep your day job as they say.
These questions will help you identify the places where you might unconsciously be giving up your option to choose. It will help you identify where the way you feel inside might be out of sync with what’s showing on the outside or how you want to feel in your life.
The answers to these questions will help you focus on the areas of your life which will get you the biggest wins and fastest gains. I advocate making small changes and choosing simple things that make you feel good as the way to make your life more of what you want it to be going forward.
This is what defines your personal style.
Many of us are staring down the road at the second-half of our lives – and I believe we can make these the best years yet. You can let yourself dream of a life filled with hell “yes!!!” and reverse engineer your choices to get more of that feeling.
You deserve to feel anyway you want to feel. It’s within your reach – because remember, feelings aren’t facts – they’re within your control. You deserve to feel peaceful, brave, free and happy – and whatever else you want to feel.
We talked all about the whispers of your heart in episode 2. You are the one and only expert on how you feel, so make the style choices which are right for you. Help yourself experience the feelings you want in your life by choosing what lifts you up and puts a smile on your face – this is the way to reclaim your unique style – because happy always looks really, really good.
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header photograph by: Yifei Chen