Inspiration and Creativity as Springboards to a Beautifully-Lived Life

 Want to add a sparkle to your day? Read Thirty More Chic Days: Creating an Inspired Mindset for a Magical Life by Fiona Ferris. Ferris offers a month of ideas that will turbocharge your inner Parisian chic-ster (and upgrade your daily life experience.) Each chapter represents a day in the month. And each day, the author presents an idea to “up-level” the reader’s ordinary life experience. Whether it’s an idea to free one’s creativity or an idea to set aside a little time for additional self-care, each nugget of advice is gently and persuasively described. One cannot help but be inspired by the author’s sense of enthusiasm and ingenuity! Her main idea is that we don’t have to live a ho-hum life – we can design our own personal “5-star” life  – without breaking the bank.  Even in the midst of all of our normal life activities, by using our imagination and a little common sense, we can make a series of small upgrades to our surroundings and our own daily menal habits. These small changes result in an overall more elegant and more beautiful daily experience. Two examples that she gives are the mental habit of looking for something to be grateful for (the opposite of complaining) and the (surprising) mental habit of how to use the uncomfortable emotion of “envy” as a springboard into positive self-reflection! I first read it all the way through over the course of several days (and immediately implemented a few ideas.) Now I have just opened it again with the plan of reading one chapter on a Friday afternoon and then trying out the chapter’s idea over the weekend. The beauty of Ferris’s writing and creativity is that each chapter’s idea can be implemented in different ways depending on one’s mood and stage of life.