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A Chic Paris Lockdown – Day 27 – Our Strengths Can Help
May 16, 2020 Day 27 is “Choose To Look and Feel Amazing” in 30 More Chic Days by Fiona Ferris. Fiona writes about her efforts to make the habit of healthy eating feel fun and exciting. She also wanted to find a way to make eating junky food much less attractive. She used several mental tools to accomplish her goal: reframing, creating a positive future vision for herself and leveraging an already developed mindset. “Choose to look and feel amazing” is a good title for today – I write this tongue-in-cheek – because I do NOT look nor feel amazing right at this moment. My hair is pulled back into…
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A Chic Paris Lockdown – Day 21 – What is in a Name?
May 10, 2020 “Reframe Everything to be Beautiful, Magical and Luxurious” is the title to Day 21 in Fiona Ferris’s book, 30 More Chic Days. Fiona writes that what she names something is a powerful method to either draw her closer to the thing or push her away from it. She gives the example of a supplement of organic flaxseed oil combined with safflower oil. The name was Beauty Oil – she asks “who wouldn’t be drawn to it?” If the name was Health Oil that would be pretty attractive. We all want to be healthy. But the name Beauty Oil, Fiona writes, was a more powerful draw. The concept…
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A Chic Paris Lockdown – Day 16 – Choose Happy
May 5, 2020 In 30 More Chic Days, Fiona Ferris titles Day 16 “Be the Happiest Person You Know.” She encourages us to consciously adopt a positive, optimistic outlook on life. This “Day” is all about what is going on inside our heads. This has nothing to do with winning the lottery or discovering the cure for cancer. It’s all about how we want to feel deep down inside, right here and now. Fiona writes that given a choice between being around someone who is smiling and happy to share a new interest with you or being around someone who is all “gloom and doom”, “the world is going to…
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A Chic Paris Lockdown – Day 15 – Dining With Style
May 4, 2020 Fiona Ferris calls Day 15 “Elevate Your Dining Experience” in her book, 30 More Chic Days. Her idea is that we are chic and elegant individuals and we can enjoy an attractive and elegant dining experience. Her suggestion is to use cloth napkins. She claims that they are low maintenance, friendlier to the environment than paper napkins and look much nicer. We will both enjoy by our lovelier, more refined table and be inspired to be a bit lovelier and more refined with our eating choices and table manners. I wasn’t quite sold on the claim that the cloth napkins would be low maintenance with my two…
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A Chic Paris Lockdown – Day 14 – Elegant and Active At All Ages
May 3, 2020 Fiona Ferris titles Day 14 “Grow Better Every Year” in her book, 30 More Chic Days. She writes about aging as “growing better each year.” Fiona definitely has a good point about how our attitude and our actions have a great deal with determining how we experience any of our years. Our later years are likewise heavily influenced by our mental perspective and habits. We’ve all seen inspiring examples of people who move with grace and vitality through different stages of life. And we’ve seen the sad opposite. Our best option, as Fiona writes, is to create a chic vision of the people we want to be…
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A Chic Paris Lockdown – Day 13 – How To Be a “Lockdown” Chic Success
May 2, 2020 “Become A Chic Success” is Fiona Ferris’s Day 13 in her book, 30 More Chic Days. Fiona encourages us to really think about what our personal vision of a chic and successful life would be. Whatever springs to mind, write it down. With the list, we now have a motivating individualized blueprint of how we wanted to live our lives. I love the idea of it! Our question, according to Fiona, would be “If I was a chic success, what would my life look like?” I’m definitely interested in discovering what my picture of “chic success'” is with regard to my overall life. At the moment, however,…
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A Chic Paris Lockdown – Day 12 – Easy Does It
May 1, 2020 “Be Easy To Get Along With” is Day 12 in 30 More Chic Days by Fiona Ferris. Fiona writes that she wants to become “an easy-going, pleasant and positive person who travels lightly through life and enjoys a happy-go-lucky disposition.” She found that she was happier herself when she chose to see the world in an optimistic, upbeat way and to act in kind and down-to-earth ways. Even though things are often not perfect, she has found how to keep her internal setting at a positive level which allows her to enjoy her day. We are all getting a lesson on how to be calm and easy-going…
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A Chic Paris Lockdown – Day 11 – Rest & Recharge
April 30, 2020 Fiona Ferris calls Day 11 “Honour Your Feminine Heart” in her book, 30 More Chic Days. In this chapter, Fiona writes about the need to take a break from our daily to-do list and do an activity that feeds our souls. Or to be more accurate, schedule a little time as part of our to-do list to do something purely for joy. It seems as if modern life adores busy, busy, busy. I sometimes wonder within my own, American culture if the cult of “busy” and “over-scheduled” is considered to be a mark of pride. If you ask someone how are they doing, the answer is…
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A Chic Paris Lockdown – Day 3 – Chic and Svelte
April 22, 2020 Fiona Ferris calls Day 3, “French Chic and Slender,” in her book, 30 More Chic Days. She discusses her challenges with maintaining a slim and healthy weight. Happily, using her trademark common sense, she is able to develop an approach that gently and effectively keeps her weight where she wants it. Her approach bears more study because she addressed what was going on inside her mind first. She identified two major culprits that were derailing her original “chic & svelte” routine. The culprits were some hormonal changes that occur when moving through one’s ’40s and a strong sugar snacking stress response. Her fix for this disastrous duo?…
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A Chic Paris Lockdown – Day 2 – Food Is Life
April 18, 2020 I skipped Days 1, 2 & 3 from Fiona’s Ferris’s book, 30 Chic Days, when I started blogging each day of Paris’s CoVid-19 lockdown. (I started writing on Day 4 of Paris’s lockdown so wanted to start on Day 4 of Fiona’s book.) When I went back and reread those days in the book, however, I found too much valuable insight in each day to just cavalierly skip them. Let’s take a look at those first three days of 30 Chic Days before we close the book. Fiona Ferris calls Day 2 “Eat Real Food” in her book 30 Chic Days. In this chapter, she writes about…