#4 - How To Reclaim Your Personal Style

Style With Intention Podcast

Knowing your personal style and dressing how you want to feel is crucial to your happiness and it’s as easy as listening to your brain’s quiet messages about what will make you happy!

Here are the biggest takeaways from this episode:

• The importance of knowing how you want to feel & how you can use that to define your personal style.
• Why it’s so important to use the changes in your life to make a choice intentionally.
• How I use my personal style as an exercise of living with intention
• You’ll discover how to uncover your personal style by listening to“whispers” (also know as: life's little nudges)

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” - - and 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 - because I believe looking good is an inside job! 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 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! Enjoy the show!

BONUS CONTENT

Been so long you don’t even know where to start? This week's free bonus content, "The Personal Style Audit Checklist," will help you get going! We know it’s so easy to put yourself on the back-burner, because let’s be real, life gets in the way. Now is your time! Download the guide now and get clear on what you need to do to start looking and feeling happy!

Click HERE to get the bonus content

and we’ll send it out right away!

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In case you'd rather read than listen...

FULL TRANSCRIPT OF EPISODE #4

RECLAIMING YOUR PERSONAL STYLE

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 - 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, so 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, the children’s storybook, our sense of personal style may have been smushed, damaged, pushed, pulled, edited, adjusted, or ignored for years.

Our preferences have definitely taken a backseat to the needs of others.

Lots of us don’t even know what we like anymore. 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 - 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.

The changes in our lives - expected and unexpected - can be quite disconcerting and make us feel out of control and vulnerable. Not liking the changes we see in our lives - in the mirror, in the work world, and even in our relationships - can really do a number on is. Feeling unsure of yourself can be paralyzing and it’s no wonder so many people get stuck in a style or way of life. This doesn’t have to be the end of the story. You don’t have to stay in this feeling forever. This can be a new chapter.

Endings can be new beginnings. This can be a time of growth - learning things that you’ve put off learning. Taking new jobs that stretch us and introduce us to new people. We can develop new relationships with our kids, as more grown up people.

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 and they still feel a little weird that they only have a guest room for their kids to stay in when they visit. But 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, noticed they were feeling really stressed about the upkeep, and they made a choice to downsize. The decided and went with it. It hasn’t been all fun and popcorn. 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. They knew they didn’t feel the way they wanted to feel in their big family home and they made choices to get to a better place.

Knowing how you want to feel is solid gold information, my friend.

You want this info - and 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. You’re going to have to choose something - staying or going, keeping or throwing out - so you may as well choose what’s going to get you where you want to go. Not making a choice is still a choice. A couple of weeks ago, I talked about something I call the “whispers” - those little voices that 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.

The whispers will help you make choices. It takes a bit of focus and intention – but it’s worth it, especially if you haven’t paid attention to your style for a while.

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.

The whispers help you do what’s right for you - and what will bring your emotional state up. They give you the confidence to to ignore what other people think. To not compromise or please or placate other people. They help you make choices which will help you experience happier feelings.

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. Most people know when they’re having a good day. You know, one of those days when everything just goes well. You feel 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. The day just seems sort of “regular” or blah. We all have those days. We sometimes just assume this is part of life.

But what if you could have more up days and fewer down days?

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. 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. At the very least, being conscious of these feelings and the choices you have, gives you a better chance of managing them and creating better experiences for yourself Because feelings are not facts. You can change how you feel, which means you can change what you experience. 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, I took a warm bath, and did the self-care I knew would help get me closer to the feeling I wanted to be in. You always have at least two choices - to change your situation or change how you feel about your situation. And 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. I’m talking 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.”

If you aren’t feeling the way you want to feel, let’s figure out why. If you’re going through unsettling changes and you want to feel more in charge, let’s figure out where you can take control. If you’ve lost track of your preferences, let’s take stock and start making small choices which will let you experience happier feelings. We can build on that.

I’ve put together a series of questions you can ask yourself to help with this. It’s a totally free download. Go to our website - www.stylewithintentionpodcast.com, and on the page for episode 4, you can download the free “Personal Style Audit Checklist”. Or, even easier, you can text the word STYLEAUDIT to 44-222 and we’ll send it out to you right away. Go through the checklist and think about each area of your life. It may not be time to make changes right now – the kids have to get through school, parents need our help, or you might need to keep your day job as they say – but you can become aware of the places in your life that feel like a hell “yes!!!” and notice the places that make you go “meh” or even “ick” 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. Making small changes and choosing things that make you feel good is 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.

It takes a bit of focus and possibly some attitude adjustment - especially if you’re used to thinking that you’re not in charge of how you feel, but it’s worth it. Change isn’t always easy, but the vision you hold for yourself and how you want to feel will gain traction and become more real the more you are able to identify which choices will get you closer to it.

Your personal style is defined by the way you feel inside. You deserve to feel anyway you want to feel. And 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.

Work from the feeling you want to have, listen to the whispers we talked about 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.

BONUS CONTENT

Been so long you don’t even know where to start? This week's free bonus content, "The Personal Style Audit Checklist," will help you get going! We know it’s so easy to put yourself on the back-burner, because let’s be real, life gets in the way. Now is your time! Download the guide now and get clear on what you need to do to start looking and feeling happy!

Click HERE to get the bonus content

and we’ll send it out right away!

P.S. Be sure you're subscribed by clicking HERE! Remember, if you’re new to podcasts, check out our free Podcast Cheat Sheet for everything you need to know about downloading, listening to, and sharing podcast episodes. Click HERE to get it! header photograph by: Yifei Chen