living your dream

the how to guides

living your dream

Photo Credit: Aditya Saxena Unsplash

has your lifestyle changed?

As time passes, it is very easy to get carried along with the day-to-day patterns and complexities of your life and suddenly find yourself 5 or 10 years older. How on earth did that happen? While this is progression is obviously very natural and happens to us all, sometimes the passage of time means that your circumstances have changed, but your self-image and your wardrobe haven’t kept pace.

I have clients who still have collections of smart workwear, even after they’ve been retired for a few years. There is absolutely nothing wrong with those clothes, but there is also no chance that they will be worn again by their present owner. Perhaps you have been a stay-at-home carer who has returned to work, and you find that your wardrobe is woefully sparse when it comes to suitable business clothing.

Many people will find that their clothing priorities and lives change on a regular basis, whereas for others there is more of a slow burn. Being realistic and pragmatic about how you need your wardrobe to work for you is vital to getting the best value from your investments. Having a cupboard full of things that don’t work for your current lifestyle, makes it very difficult to express yourself well in a way that reflects who you are now.

If you realistically see the change in your lifestyle as temporary, then find a way to efficiently store the clothes and accessories so they can be retrieved to have another role in your life in the future. If however something has changed in a more permanent way, perhaps you need to take some time to reassess. your clothing requirements. This change doesn’t need to be a life transformation, it might just be that your knees won’t cope with high heels anymore. It is sometimes the small things that can have the most impact, but they also tend to be overlooked.

Living for the present is much more rewarding than living in the past. Having a wardrobe full of clothes from a bygone period of your life, that for whatever reason don’t fit in with your current circumstances, doesn’t make sense. With the aim of having fewer things and wearing more of what you have more often, being realistic about your lifestyle is a great place to start.

living a more creative life

Everyone has the ability to be creative, and to some extent this creativity is expressed in all aspects of our everyday lives. Whether it is the way you dress, or the contents of your sitting room shelves, the mode of transport you chose, or how you lay a table, this choice is a reflection of you.

Once you accept that you are already being creative on a daily basis, it is hopefully a simple step to becoming more adventurous in your choices and your approach to your image and your surroundings. This isn’t about suddenly dying your hair pink, or creating a minimalist shining white interior in your house, it is about doing things with intention, rather than just sliding into any given situation…just because.

Photo credit: Tu Tu Unsplash

Creativity is fun, and something we all enjoyed as children without thinking or applying labels. Whether it was dressing up, inventing games and play scenarios, having picnics with toys, football matches with jumpers as goalposts, making dens with bits of wood, or whatever else you can remember. These were all enjoyable pursuits and relied on imagination and inspiration to make them come to life. Unfortunately as we get older, we largely lose this sense of fun and joy in the simple things.

Creativity is about imagination, and being more imaginative in all aspects of life is free. You don’t need a big budget to wear the clothes in your wardrobe differently, to style your hair in another way, to lay the table with some of your coordinating, or eclectic, crockery, or to rearrange the furniture in a way that might be more comfortable. Create your own sense of fun, you can always revert to dull if you don’t like it. 

less is more

We live in a time when more is deemed good. More stuff, more money, more engagement, more media bombardment, everything is just more full-on, seemingly whether you want it or not. For some people this is just a sign of the pace of modern life, something to be applauded, for others this ‘more’ culture seems a bit shallow, not to mention leaving both their space and their lives very cluttered.

So, how is your personal relationship with stuff? When you look at your clothes, are you a hoarder or a chucker, or perhaps you are a reformed version of either? There is obviously a wide design gap between a life of stark minimalism and one of excessive ornamentation, and I suspect that for most of us, our life design preferences lie somewhere in-between the two. Being comfortable with your position on this imaginary scale, and getting it to work for you, is key to finding a good balance in your world.

Photo credit: Adrienne Leonard Unsplash

If your preference is for space and clean design lines in the way you dress and in your surroundings, then hopefully the organisation within your wardrobe look like an Ikea advert. If you are more a fan of a very elaborate style, you might wear lots of layers and enjoy patterns and prints in your clothes and in your home. However, this doesn’t mean that your wardrobe, or your house needs to be a muddle. You can always systemise and curate your collection in a way that means you know what you have and where to find what you are looking for.

Having fewer things, but things that fit in with your design ethos, will mean that you can see what you have, and you will also get far more use from the items that you own. It is often said that one of the reasons we are rested after a holiday, is because we are surrounded by less stuff. Hotel rooms are minimally decorated, we haven’t travelled with our whole wardrobe (hopefully) so we have fewer choices, fewer distractions and time to enjoy the change and the space. Do you come home filled with enthusiasm for a sort out, only for that to ebb away as the scale of the job becomes slightly overwhelming?

what are your aims?

To know where you want to go, or what you want to achieve, it really helps to know where you are starting. That may seem like an obvious statement but if you want to make a difference, how else will you measure any progress? When you are living your dream, what does that look like?

Photo credit: Sebastian Coman Unsplash

Is your dream to live and dress like a lady who lunches, to improve your fitness so you can go about your day with more ease, to be able to close your wardrobe doors, to create a household that runs smoothly, or to create a collection of clothes that work well for you in your new career? Think about what you would like to achieve in the next month, or 6 months, or year.

Once you have thought about your potential dream future in these abstract terms, you will need to drill down, get specific, and plan a way of bringing them to life. If we use a couple of examples from above, let’s see what this might mean. There is obviously no one way to do anything, so these are just a few of my ideas.

What does your ‘lady who lunches’ look like, what does she wear, where does she go, what does she think, who does she mix with, what are her aims and ambitions? The broad term of a lady who lunches, whilst it might be an aspiration, isn’t anywhere near giving you a plan of how to achieve this dream. You can see that you really need to think and plan as much, if not more, about the route as the destination.

Does this lady wear any of the clothes you currently have? How about your accessories? Starting to work towards your goal by looking through your clothes and updating your grooming, might set you off in the direction you are envisioning. It might also remind you of some of the wonderful items that you have forgotten about, and that you could be making more use of today.

Perhaps your overriding ambition is to close your wardrobe doors? One easy way to do this is to buy a bigger cupboard, but is this really what you meant? Another method would be to randomly throw out half of your clothes, again it is a possible method, but hardly a brilliant solution. You might find that your preferred option would be to declutter and keep the clothes that work for you and your current lifestyle, while keeping items that will also look great in the environment you would like to have. You can donate or sell the rest, knowing that you have made some informed choices that you won’t regret.

Knowing your aims, and then being specific and breaking them down into manageable chunks, will give you a structure to work from. You will probably not achieve your dream overnight, and if you do then I would then suggest it may not have been ambitious enough. Once you start on the road to change, you might find there are diversions and blocks on the way, but when you really know your aim then these things are temporary and will not derail your progress for long.

what is stopping you?

The fundamental ‘elephant in the room’ question. I know I’m not alone in thinking I’ll do ‘it’ tomorrow, or next week…or maybe never. While this is not a positive decision, it is a decision none the less. While you think you’re putting off making a move, not doing anything is as much of a statement of intent (or not, obviously) as doing whatever you are procrastinating about. Sometimes this ‘will I-won’t I’ conundrum is pretty meaningless, but sometimes there are consequences that are either intentional, or sometimes not so much.

So, for the purpose of this piece, perhaps you are thinking about revamping your self-image. Maybe it’s been on your mind for a while, and you may even have tried the odd new idea but have always gone back to your default look. It is something you intend to do one day, when you have more time, or have lost weight, or whatever excuse you can think of today.

But can you actually sit with the concept of change, and find out what is really stopping you? Perhaps it seems like an enormous task, are you asking yourself if is it even worth the effort, or is there another more personal reason that you are not taking action to do something you have wanted to do for a while?

I don’t know about you, but the thought of a complete wardrobe and image makeover in the manner of a house or garden programme on the TV would fill me with dread. But then wouldn’t it be wonderful to have a whole new collection of clothes and accessories, and it would save you so much effort…or would it? Who would know what your favourite jumper is, or the fact that you are more comfortable in boots, or that you really like pink, although you haven’t got round to buying much yet. There must be a better way.

Photo credit: Ron Lach Pexels

Many people find that making a start the most difficult part of the whole process. Do you think there has to be a perfect result, or perhaps you fear being judged by your friends and family? If you can identify your personal dream lifestyle/wardrobe/fitness/diet or whatever and can take small but constant steps towards your goal then it not only gives those around you time to grow with your ideas, but it also means that you can step away at any point and either rejoice in how far you have come, or rejoin your journey and move forward again.

milly’s top tips:

• Why not make a plan? Chunk things down into quick and manageable actions.

• Perhaps you can start with a vision board, or chose a couple of your favourite items or outfits and see what you can build from these foundations.

• Having a good declutter is another really cathartic experience and will remind you of what you have and can show you what you might need to add.

• Doing nothing is obviously an option, but taking small manageable steps towards whatever your goal is will be very rewarding.

• If you are thinking about updating your image, the very best time to start the process is now.

• Dreaming about what you would do in the future is a wonderful way to get inspiration, as long as that future isn’t always…in the future.

 All rights reserved. Milly Churchill asserts the right to be identified as the author of this work.