A Chic Paris Lockdown – Day 6 – What Does Your Very Chic Future Self Do?
April 25, 2020
Fiona Ferris calls Day 6 “Be Your Own Chic Mentor” in her book, 30 More Chic Days. Fiona writes about our vision of our “dream” life can inspire ourselves to more fun and living with more authenticity. But first, we have to know our dream vision! Fiona advises us to sit down with pen and paper and brainstorm what we would really like to see in a “perfect” mentor. If we could describe someone who would be our perfect chic mentor, what would that person be like in terms of inner character, appearance, dress, activities, self-care, home decor, reading list… whatever we can think of! Fiona is on to a good thought because I would love to have a real-life terrific chic mentor that embodied all the traits that I find interesting and important who could inspire me on a daily basis. (I know, needy, needy!) I have a wonderful real-life chic mentor but she’s back in the US and I’m not able to interact with her on a daily basis. (Also, I don’t want to seem one of those emotionally draining types with strangely probing questions like “what are you having for lunch today? And how did you fix that?” — asked every day!)
But the idea of a magical, on-call, fairy-chic-mentor who could inspire me back to fun, chic heights whenever I’m feeling a bit lackluster or dowdy (or stage an intervention when the All Butter Scottish Shortbread Cookies are calling my name?) Sign me up!
The power of Fiona’s idea is that we are not looking to some famous person like a Hollywood actor or actress. (We might take ideas from a magazine photo or from an interesting, positive interview.) We are creating an imaginary person who has all of our best qualities and embodies our highest dreams. We are really creating a mental image of who we want to become as inspiration to do one or two things each day. This helps us enjoy our path as we become our vision.
Fiona provides a list that can help us create our own list of inspirating actions.
I adopted one of her list items for my own (just beginning) list:
Fiona’s item: I regularly organize and declutter my closet became:
I take beautiful care of my lovely clothes and keep them in tip-top condition and stored neatly in my closet.
This morning, I looked at my stack of winter sweaters sitting on the bedroom chair and the stack of off-season sweater storage envelopes on the top shelf of the closet. Right. Each sweater had already been gently washed and laid out to dry (that was last week.) Today became the day for examining each sweater, folding it and putting it in its storage envelope. My chic and organized future self begins and finishes item-care tasks without long, cluttery, “stopped-in-the-middle” periods. So simple and so quick. And my bedroom looks much nicer!
I will come back to my list and keep adding to it as I discover/imagine additional traits my future “best” chic self.
