Why Your Wardrobe Feels Stuck

A phrase that keeps echoing in my mind from Atomic Habits is “the slow process of transformation.” Change isn’t usually a dramatic, earth-shattering event, but more often it's a series of small movements in the direction of our goals. It’s been a week since my last post, and that means I have one week’s worth of tiny steps under my belt. That has mostly looked like spending a few minutes each day making space for my cold-weather clothes. It’s been unseasonably warm here, so I’m grateful the weather is accommodating to my pace!

Nothing glamorous or exciting is happening in my closet, but I’m showing up for it daily. That has been the biggest takeaway I’ve had from James Clear’s book so far: consistency is what turns those tiny steps into something meaningful month to month, season to season, and eventually, year to year. It’s a practice I’m also trying to carry into other areas of my life.

Spending a few minutes in my closet doesn’t sound like a big deal, but something very surprising to me is that it’s felt like a big deal. I’ve had to fight a lot of internal resistance and it has me a little confuzzled. Obviously, someone who blogs about this stuff wants to make headway in their style practice, but why doesn’t this feel more joyful and fun?

Change can be a very scary thing and fear is not something we naturally move toward. In fact, it’s quite the opposite; we’re wired to keep ourselves safe. Our brains propel us to move away from danger and towards safety.  That’s just basic survival, and for me safety seems to be anywhere but dealing with my wardrobe.

Ha!

This has felt like the perfect opportunity to dig a little deeper, so it was serendipitous that one of my favorite YouTubers, Kristen Cain, has just released a new series: Style Self-Trust: 5 Key Shifts For a Wardrobe You'll Love. Naturally, I was intrigued! Her first installment, The Surprising Reason Your Wardrobe Feels Wrong (and How to Reset It), explores how perfectionism and self-limiting beliefs about one’s style could be what’s holding you back. In her years as a stylist, she’s seen how both of these can be at the root of our style issues. All the strategies, tricks and tips won’t help until these deeply held thoughts are addressed and reframed. We’ve recently uncovered the relationship between our thinking, feeling, and behavior during our dive into Atomic Habits, so this sounds like a natural step forward.

What Kristen Cain calls “Style Self-Trust” is really about how much confidence we place in our own decisions when it comes to getting dressed. At the heart of her approach is something she calls your "Style Story", which is the set of thoughts you repeat to yourself about clothes, shopping, and how you look. Since these thoughts don’t just pass through once, but over and over again; they harden into the beliefs that become the automatic backdrop for how we experience style. If you feel stuck, it's likely that there’s a limiting belief (or more than one!) that is running the show behind the scenes.

This really landed with me. I can definitely recognize some of the “perfect stories” I’ve told myself: "I need to have all this figured out before I try something new,  I’ll wait to replace my jeans until I find the perfect pair". These thoughts seem fairly innocent—and maybe even protective (I won't waste money, or I won't look silly!), but what they do is keep us and our wardrobe stuck. Perfectionism is sneaky like that. On the outside, it looks like research, careful planning, or just waiting until the timing is right. Yet beneath all of that could be nothing more than fear: fear of making a mistake, fear of wasting money, fear of looking foolish. Therefore, we keep doing things that feel busy but don’t actually move us forward.

This is me, for sure.

Kristen suggests paying attention to those “absolute” statements we tell ourselves: I’m too old. I’m too short. There are no good stores near me. I just can’t find clothes that work. These are the clues that we might be operating from a fixed mindset. When we believe there are no solutions, we stop looking for them (ouch). That’s how we stay stuck with the same results. When we open ourselves up to the idea of growth, even a little, we start to see our options, and we loosen perfectionism’s grip. We can rewrite our style story into one that actually creates new results.

That last point brought me right back to Atomic Habits. James Clear emphasizes that our repeated actions form our identity over time. Kristen is saying something similar about the stories we repeat: they shape what we believe is possible. In both cases, awareness is the first step. When we notice the habits (or the stories), that aren’t serving us, we can dismantle them, and start building something better.

This is definitely food for thought, and something we can take action on. When you notice them, write down those thoughts that make up your Style Story. How can you begin to reframe what you are telling yourself?

(Special thanks to Karen Cain for such an insightful video!)