I was on a zoom call the other night with a group of women from the last Wearing Your Worth® Online Course. One woman shared that she was afraid of entering the course, because she thought she would have to buy a whole new wardrobe.
This particular woman has not bought a single piece of clothing since the course finished in November last year. Yet she finds new outfits to wear in her current closet, that has her feel fully alive every day!
It is a falsity that we live by, thinking we always need to have new to feel new.
Your wardrobe contains more gems than you know about.
Feeling super alive and confident in your clothes comes down to three things:
- Your psychological relationship with your clothes
- Understanding which pieces of clothing truly ignite your authentic self.
- What combinations of your clothing aligns with your true essence and full expression of who you really are.
So, let’s explore how the current contents of your wardrobe got there.
Each time you have shopped in the past, you have selected clothing from various voices in your head.
There may be pieces that were selected with the need to impress others. Chances are, these were short lived in your wearing repertoire, or when you do wear them you don’t feel genuinely great, even if you get the occasional compliment.
There may be pieces that were repeat buys, thinking that if you stuck to a known formula you wouldn’t feel bad in what you wore, yet chances are you don’t feel good. In fact you may feel stuck in your wardrobe. And also in parts of your life.
Or there will be pieces in your wardrobe that you have bought in the past because something inside just felt right. Some of these pieces may have been rarely worn, and may even be at the back of your closet. Or some of these pieces you may have worn a lot, yet are starting to lose their buzz and you don’t know why.
People waste tens of thousands of dollars over their lifetime shopping for clothes, because they don’t know the essence of their style and how to authentically express their true self. They commonly come home with clothes that they wear and don’t feel good in or they simply don’t wear.
This lack of knowing who you are, including how to express that in what you wear, undermines your confidence, and it imprints a pattern each morning that interferes with and diminishes your self-acceptance, confidence and presence going out into the world.
This whole scenario is not good for your mental health, your wallet, or for the planet.
We have unsustainable levels of landfill made up from clothes. Fashion is the second biggest polluter in the world, next to oil.
We need to take responsibility for ourselves and the planet. And that means buying clothing you enjoy and that will stay in your closet.
What’s the solution?
The alignment with our authentic self in the wardrobe is the antidote to dressing turmoil and to the countless dollars we have thrown away on pieces of clothing that we don’t gel with.
Authenticity is also the answer to creating a new wardrobe from your current collection of clothes. Creating outfits that truly embody your soul, your genius, the truth of who you are, sets you on a whole new trajectory each day and indeed in your life.
I once worked with a woman who said she hated everything in her closet. After our session she found 22 new outfits, in that said detestable closet. Once the outfits were combined differently, she loved each one of them. They contained her Style Essences and she felt fully alive. She had tapped in to her magic and was in full charge.
Dressing is an embodiment tool.
It’s super important to give yourself the space to really allow your true essence to be expressed every day, and chances are you already have outfits in your wardrobe that will have you feel fully alive, and connect you into your genius, even if you don’t know it.
Don’t run out and buy a whole pile of new clothes, in the hope of bringing you into more alignment with yourself in what you wear. If you shop from that place of lack, thinking there is something outside of yourself that will make you feel better, then you will only go and buy more clothes that don’t resonate with the real you and will sit in your wardrobe and end up in landfill, eventually.
Find you in your wardrobe first. Let your wardrobe speak to you in ways you have never discovered before. Explore the psychological relationship you have with your clothes and reignite the true you. Then take her shopping in your current wardrobe first.
You may be surprised at what you find.
Photo by Cyrus Crossan on Unsplash