On Saturday I changed my hair.
But the new colour and cut wasn’t really the change. That had already happened inside. The outer was just catching up.
Over the past few weeks I’ve changed a lot. New perfume, new jewellery, I’ve moved my studio into a different room and started thinking differently about how I want to work in it. I’ve gone back to my old gym. I’ve cleared things out and I’ve made decisions about my business that I’ve been circling around for far too long.
The biggest change is much harder to see.
It’s a feeling. I woke up this morning and felt calm.
Not excited, not fired up. Not throwing everything into the air in a big gesture and declaring a new me!
I’m calm.
I’ve always loved taking action, a big change, a dramatic declaration — I no longer eat chocolate (yeah, that went well!)
I’m good at doing. I create plans, tweak offers, rethink a whole concept, research another idea, move things around, decide I need a new system and then decide that perhaps the system needs a system. I can make pretty much anything more complicated!
I confused all that activity with progress.
But it was actually a way of keeping myself somewhere familiar. I thought familiar felt safe, but ironically my safe was actually on edge all the time!
Because when you are constantly tweaking, solving, planning and thinking about what needs to happen next, you don’t stand still long enough to reflect.
There is always something else to do first.
And, you know I say patterns show up everywhere, so it wasn’t just in business.
I’ve spent a lot of my life being the person who sorts things out. The person who keeps going. Even when I’m tired, overloaded or running on empty, my instinct has usually been to find another gear rather than question whether I should still be driving.
A few days ago my laptop ran out of power. It said, “No power. Not working.”
I tend to say, “No power. Let’s see if we can squeeze another three hours out of you.”
There’s probably a blog in that all by itself! But that’s for another day…
This is about me realising I’ve been making things harder than I need to.
Not on purpose, and definitely not because I enjoy that feeling of overwhelm! At some point, it became part of who I am and what I do.
I juggle, I cope, there is always something to do. If I’m solving problems, I know what my role is.
This week I caught myself doing it again when I was planning a monthly masterclass.
My brain decided it needed to be in the evening. I started scanning my diary, looking for the right evening, thinking about which day would work for everyone and how I could fit it around everything else.
And then it hit me. It’s my business. I get to choose!
Tuesday lunchtime works for me. I can record it and people can catch up.
Nothing terrible happens.
It also made me think. How many rules are we living by that nobody actually gave us?
How often do we arrange ourselves around what we think we should be doing without ever stopping to ask whether it works for the person we are now?
I see this with clothes all the time.
Women come to me thinking they need more.
More clothes. More confidence. More inspiration. More discipline. More knowledge about fashion. More, more, more.
Sometimes we do need something new.
But more often, we need to edit, to subtract, to refine.
The clothes you keep trying to make work because you spent money on them. The outfits that used to make you feel safe but now make you feel invisible. The things you keep because they belong to a life, body, career or identity you think you ought to be.
I talk a lot about becoming the women we want to be, and I still love that concept. But I’m starting to wonder if becoming her is less about adding and more about refining.
Maybe there isn’t always a huge reinvention.
Maybe it’s about less. Less proving, less conforming, less pressure.
And then the outside starts catching up.
That’s what I see when I look at myself today. Yep, my hair is different, the clothes are evolving, the business is clearer.
But I’m not trying to create a new me.
If anything, I’m removing some of the noise that made it difficult to see who was already there.
Maybe becoming her is about less, not more.