How to Set Yourself Up For Style Success

I frequently hear many women saying things like…

“I’m not stylish”

“I have no style”

“I’ve lost my style and I don’t know how to get it back”

“I haven’t got the time to be stylish”

“I don’t have a big budget for clothes so can’t be stylish”

“I hate shopping for clothes”

“I’m too old/overweight/insert excuse here… to be stylish”

And I say pshaw to all your excuses as I know that it’s possible for every woman to be stylish.

It doesn’t have to take a huge effort but it does require some changes, and according to James Clear in his book Atomic Habits, teeny tiny changes are what you should be making to make any sort of longer-term positive change in your life.

And this made me think about how some of the ideas he shares apply to how to set yourself up for style success.

How you can use tiny changes to make a big difference to your style over time

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Environment Shapes Behaviour

When you set up your environment in a way that makes it easier to succeed, you’ve won half the battle. It’s like flowing with the direction of the river, rather than trying to paddle against it.

It’s very easy to form bad habits, either by not doing something – such as exercising regularly, or not picking up your clothes and putting them away, or by doing something that has what feels like a short term gain, such as eating the donut. One donut is fine, but daily eating of donuts will over time do damage to your body, when it has become a habit to make poor food choices.

You can use the process you use to form a bad habit, to help set yourself up for success and form new good habits, to make those new habits easier and sustainable.

Set Up Your Environment to Succeed

What is your wardrobe environment like?

Is it easy for you to access your clothes?

Is it easy to access your accessories?

Is everything organised so you can find things quickly?

Do you have a full-length mirror in your wardrobe or dressing space so you can quickly see if your outfit and accessory choices are working?

If your environment isn’t set up to make getting dressed easy, you’ll be taking way more time, for example, is that garment in the wash or the wardrobe? Where are that pair of pants I want to wear? Are they underneath another garment?

Organise Your Wardrobe

Accessories are easy to access – the wall of necklaces means nothing is tangled, rings and earrings are easy to find, clothes are hung by garment type and colour.

Make it a pleasant environment – it’s more enjoyable.

Organise it so that you can find clothes quickly and easily (tips here on how to do this).

Have the clothes that you want to be wearing easy to access, so that you can quickly and easily grab them, rather than having your sloppy clothes or your more formal but rarely needed clothes front and centre. Make it easy to succeed by organising your closet in a way that is practical and useable.

Put all your clothes on the same style of hangers so everything hangs at the same height so garments don’t disappear.

Turn shelving into drawers using baskets or containers so that your clothes don’t get lost down the back of a pile. Then Marie Kondo fold (vertical folding) so that you can see what you have in those drawers and access your items quickly and easily.

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What do you notice here? You’re wanting to make it easy and fast – this way a new habit isn’t time-consuming and heavy going!

We are all time-poor, so if it’s difficult to access an item, you won’t think about using them.

How is your wardrobe environment currently hindering your style?

Tiny Changes Make Big Changes Over Time

Making small changes over time stacks up and makes a huge difference. If you keep making a small tweak to your style every day, over time your style will change a lot. This is why I developed my Evolve Your Style 31 day style challenge – because you have to get dressed every day anyway, when you get that small prompt each day, over the 31 days your style changes in a big way, and how you think about your style also changes in a positive way.

If your excuse for not being stylish is that you’re not a slim model, why not do a search and look for “plus-sized bloggers” and see the plethora of stylish women who put that idea to bed.

If your excuse for not being stylish is that you’re not young, then just search Instagram for #50plusstyle or #over50andfabulous and you’ll find plenty of stylish women who are not 20 or 30!

If your excuse for not being stylish is that you don’t have a big budget, search up “thrifted style” and I’m sure you’ll find heaps and heaps of people who thrift all their clothes (these days Jill Chivers thrifts almost all her clothes) and who are stylish.

Whatever your excuse is, prove that excuse wrong and then look for small ways to do something a little different that will improve your style.

So what tiny changes will you make to your style or thinking about style today? The only way to change a bad habit or to make a new good habit is to take a small action!