Living with and Loving your Season and Image Archetype

If you're here right now, it's probably because you've invested in learning your season and your image archetype. There's no two ways about it, these are powerful tools for transformation that can save you years of agony in trying to find what works. But knowing what works is one thing, living with it is quite another. 

I often hear from clients for whom the honeymoon period of joyfully celebrating their newfound knowledge has ended as they face the reality of implementation. And to be honest, for many who wished for a different outcome, it never even started. 

Unfortunately, this reality causes plenty of women to run backwards to the delightfully naive stage of searching, sometimes indefinitely. Literally every week I talk to women who are struggling to break out of the paralysis of perpetual searching. Plenty of them could use some new information, but all of them need to change one important thing to create what they desire: their mind. In this issue, I would like to offer you three tools that have helped me to change my own mind, and consequently, my experience. 

1. Recognize Selective Attention

Take a moment to look around the room and make a mental tally of all of the red things you can find. Be sure to count them carefully and not to miss any.... good.

Now, how many blue things did you spot? 

It's human nature to selectively focus on certain aspects of our reality to the exclusion of others not because they're non existent or even unimportant but because there's just too much information relative to time needed to process it. This was an important survival mechanism for our ancestors, and likely continues to be. But sometimes, it sells is short. 

Recently a client asked me to create a detailed explanation of the casual mom version of her IA. She just couldn't seem to figure it out. And let me tell you, this is a bright, capable woman, but she didn't notice that there was already plenty of information available to her to answer this question. 

The reason she didn't is because she has been focusing on the thought that she didn't know how to do it, and so her mind obediently gathered all the evidence to support that thought. I could tell her the answer until the cows come home, and it wouldn't do much except prove that *I* know it. 

I've said it a hundred times but insight without action means nothing. I'm an image consultant, not a psychic. I can give you guidelines but I cant predict exactly what's going to work for your life, your preferences and etc. And no matter how much information you get, you still have to use it to see a result. 

Next time you find yourself stuck spinning your wheels, Ask yourself "If I did know, what would the answer be?" You can also find many free meditations online to ask your future self who has already solved the problem how she did it. Once you have an idea, take action. Whether it works or not you learn something. By testing your own hypotheses, you develop you own internal compass and sense of knowing. 

2. Become a Heat Seeking Missile

As we learned above, when we frame our situation as a statement about what's missing, we inevitably prove ourselves right. So if the thought is, "Whenever I dress YangN, I feel unprofessional", you will continue to prove that thought instead of solving the problem. 

It's not that there isn't tension there to be resolved, there probably is, but the best way to move the ball forward isn't to restate the problem, but to frame it as a question. A good format is something like "How can I X without/while Y?" I.e. How can I express my YangN physicality while still feeling professional? 

Curiosity and problem solving are in our nature as human beings. As soon as you ask the question, you become a heat seeking missile for the answer. I challenge you NOT to come away with at least 3 solutions to try. Again, not everything you try will work, but you will be on a trajectory towards the solution rather than the problem. 

3. Change One Little Word

I catch myself doing this all the time... I'm coming out of the gym and mentally groaning that I HAVE to go pick up dinner. Immediately, I'm thinking about how my legs hurt after all those squats and how cold it is... and completely missing how awesome the situation is. 

Now, whenever I notice myself doing this, I just change one little word and repeat it back - "I GET to go pick up dinner." It may seem little but I promise you this trick is magic. As soon as we make a statement, our mind comes up with supporting evidence even if we don't quite believe the statement yet. When I shift that one statement in my mind about dinner from obligation to gratitude, I see how fortunate I truly am. 

I get to walk through a pretty part of town I'm rarely in otherwise. I get to breathe fresh air into my lungs. I get to just go pick up a healthy dinner that I don't even have to cook, truly an incredible privilege few will experience, let alone every Thursday. I'm basically the luckiest girl in the world. 

I can't tell you how often, even without drama in the moment, a client tells me she HAS to wear such and such a lipstick color or length of skirt now that she knows her season and/or archetype. We can all be guilty of acting like we are the prisoners of these tools instead of the lucky recipients of them. The truth is that you don't have to do anything. But you do GET to do it. Your mind will fill in that blank, but whenever I think this way about my own IA and season, I remember how lucky I am to have this information, and from there how fortunate I must be to have such freedom of choice of what to wear and purchasing power to acquire it. 

If you're struggling with your IA or your season, this is a place to start. At the end of the day, these tools might not be the answer for you. But if you've come this far, I urge you to see if you can't approach them with an attitude of openness, curiosity, and gratitude before you decide what they can do for you. Or perhaps, what you can do for yourself with them. 

The ball is always in your court.