Style Workshop Week 1: Setting Intentions
The New Year is synonymous with resolutions; come January 1st your best friend is at the gym 5 times a week, your work colleague is spending 20 minutes a day practicing Spanish on Duolingo and your mom is only buying organic food. While focusing on personal progress is commendable, a study has shown that only 9% of people keep their resolutions.
These resolutions promise life changing results with one size fits all quick fixes, but real change - especially when it comes to style - doesn’t happen overnight.
The problem is that instant makeovers will leave you with an image that isn’t authentically you. It is tempting to just completely turn yourself over to someone to tell you exactly what to buy and how to wear it. And this may work fine if your only goal is to appear “pulled together” by a generic standard.
But personal style is just that: personal. And so ultimately, the work of discovering what you truly like and how you want to present yourself to the world is something that only you can do for yourself. A stylist can guide and advise through the process, but they can’t do it for you.
No matter when in the year you are embarking on this journey, welcome! This workshop will require your deep engagement, but we also promise that the outcome will be deeply rewarding. You really will get out what you put in.
Why is understanding your personal style important?
So, what do we hope is the outcome of this workshop? In short: we want you to walk away with a greatly clarified understanding of your true personal style, and a framework of how to apply that style to your wardrobe moving forward.
In today’s world especially, it is so easy to be influenced into an impression of what you *should* be wearing - oftentimes without even realizing! Consciously or subconsciously you are absorbing what you should be wearing to fit in, to look “pulled together”, to “dress your age” or be “updated”, for example.
First, it is important to realize that many of these messages are coming to you from sources who are incentivized to have you constantly buying new things.
But, this also means that so many of us lose touch with what we *actually* like! We are fooled into thinking that our taste in fashion changes all the time, when our tastes in other areas of our life stay largely consistent or slowly evolve over decades of experience. For example: how much has your favorite color changed? Your favorite foods or flavors? Your favorite genre of books or movies?
Deep down, your true taste in style has likely stayed largely consistent as well - it’s just a matter of tuning out all the external messages, and tuning into those innate instincts about what qualities naturally light you up.
Once you have a grasp on this, lots of other pieces start to fall into place. You’ll have more clarity on what pieces you should buy without regrets and so you’ll be able to invest with confidence. If everything in your wardrobe slowly starts to align with this style, mixing-and-matching becomes easy and intuitive. You’ll want to wear everything you own; getting dressed in the morning becomes fun and creative rather than anxiety-inducing.
And so, that is what we’re here to do!
How we’ll do it: Our Syllabus
The next seven weeks are divided into three phases.
Phase 1: Define Your Style
In this phase, we will walk through steps designed to help you tune into those innate style instincts, and distill them into a clear visual direction and concise description.
Week 2: Collect Inspiration
Week 3: Edit Down
Week 4: Your Three Words
Phase 2: Evaluate Your Wardrobe
Here, we will evaluate your existing wardrobe through the lens of your newly defined style, taking inventory, editing, and getting inspired to use old pieces perhaps in new ways.
Week 5: Get Organized on Indyx
Week 6: Assess Your Assets
Phase 3: Build Your Roadmap
This phase is all about creating a plan to - over time - bridge the gap between what you currently own and fully achieving your new aspirational style.
Week 7: Build Your Wishlist
Week 8: Source Your Wishlist
A few other logistics…
Each week, we will share a “lesson” (our perspective on the task of the week) followed by instructions on your “homework”. You’ll be sent these lessons via email, and they are also available all in one place in the app.
Keep in mind that our weekly schedule is only a suggestion of how quickly you can move through these steps, so do not feel discouraged if it takes you more than a week to complete the homework. We all lead different lives, with differences in how much time we can commit to a process like this in a given week, so please take the time you need.
Join the Slack: Being a part of the Style Workshop gives you exclusive, private access to our Indyx Slack channel - and we’re having a lot of fun over there! You received a link to join in the email you received when you signed up for the Style Workshop. If you missed it or are otherwise having trouble joining, please reach out to [email protected] and we can get you sorted.
Without further ado: our notes on this week’s task.
The Lesson
This first introductory week is all about setting your intentions. We realize that this may sound a little woo-woo. You may be excited to jump right in and get your hands dirty collecting your inspiration and defining your style.
But before embarking on any journey, we think it is always helpful to get as clear as you can on exactly what you want to achieve, which will give you important ownership of this journey. If you don’t know where you want to end up, you’ll end up walking aimlessly, no matter how much guidance anyone gives you.
Additionally, we want to take this moment to actively release any negative preconceived notions or rules of what your style “should be”. All the style baggage you picked up from “the rules” on TLC’s “What Not To Wear” in the 2000s? This is the time to recognize them and finally let them go.
The homework will guide you through setting these goals and will also feature real examples of Indyx team members going through this same course.
The Homework
This week will require us to reflect on why we’re going through this process. Understanding our why will keep us motivated, engaged and with a clear vision of what success looks like to each of us.
We suggest actually writing these things down, as writing rather than just thinking helps to solidify your intentions.
1. Set your intentions
This is the time to write down your singular, most pressing goal for completing this course.
Consider why you first clicked on the signup link for the course. Reflect on the most prevalent feeling you get when choosing what to wear, and if you wish it was something different. Think about what you admire about other people’s approach to fashion.
2. Set a commitment
Success is a relative term, and this is your opportunity to set how you will measure your success. And yes, completing the full course is a valid and commendable commitment. Committing to not buy anything new until you finish the course is another good one.
3. Identify and release any negative or counterproductive beliefs or “rules”
Consider how your culture, family, and friends approach style and dressing. Analyze how you organize your wardrobe and think of your shopping. What are you telling yourself in the mirror - either consciously or unconsciously - about what you’re wearing, or what you should avoid?
Are these beliefs helping or hurting you? Identifying these mental roadblocks is half the battle to letting them go.
4. Unfollow accounts and unsubscribe from emails that don’t support this journey
Before we move next week into collecting inspiration of things that truly, well - inspire us! - it is helpful to clear out images or messages that may be confusing or knock us off course in this process. Declutter your brain and your social media feed, especially from accounts that are overly commercial, trendy, or preach any unhelpful beliefs or ways of thinking that you just identified in the prior step.
The Indyx Team’s Homework
Examples always help! Below is this week’s homework as completed by the Indyx Team.
Until next week…
Found yourself here without being signed up for the Style Workshop?
Obviously, we’re giving away this awesome content for free.
But, sign up for this experience in our app and you’ll get this 8-week course conveniently emailed to you at our recommended cadence to help keep you accountable.
You’ll also get private, exclusive access to our community Slack channel where you can meet other like-minded folks and discuss your progress.
