PLAYING WITH THE PIECES

I recently moved into a new place. As I'm sure you know, moving is not a fun way to spend a weekend.

Looking at all the furniture in the middle of the room, I had no clue where things should go, and it felt overwhelming.

When you move somewhere new, the hard part is figuring out where all of your stuff should go.

I was stumped because I didn’t know what would look good where. I would think about moving a particular piece of furniture, and my brain would instantly tell me…

"No, that won’t look good," or "No, there’s some Feng Shui rule I think about not putting a bed right there".

This mental strain went on for some time as I tried to envision where everything should go. I made no progress.

After a while, I said, "To hell with this", and I just started moving things around.

I must have looked like a madman.

I messed with every possible configuration I thought might work. Chairs, lamps, couches, artwork - I just started shuffling everything and playing with it all.

Shockingly, everything quickly fell into place.

The craziest part is some of those times my brain said initially, "I don’t think that would look right" ended up being the best-looking configurations.

I see this a lot with men and their closets.

When working with guys, they’ll say, "I don’t know what to pair this with," or "I heard you can’t wear this with that".

There’s always some variation of these mental barriers as to why they can’t pair certain things they own or why something won’t look good. They’re trapped in analysis paralysis. And usually, their assumptions are dead wrong.

I can see it, but they can’t. Not yet, at least. That ability has only come after ten years of working with men helping them improve their style.

So, I encourage them to try the pairing they’re unsure about.

And, invariably, they’re shocked that certain things they thought wouldn’t work together actually do.

The problem is this...

You (at least currently) do not possess the skillset to mentally visualize what would make an outfit work, much like I did not possess the skillset to visualize my living space before moving the pieces around.

In order to get past this, you have to try.

Your eyes must see things work together before your brain can accept it.

So, get messy.

You need to smash things together and play around. Throw stuff against the walk and see what sticks. Start with an idea and see where it goes. Some stuff won’t work, but a lot of it surprisingly will.

You then discover you have more great outfit options in your closet than you realize. And the only change was removing the mental barriers and starting to play with the pieces.

The trick to this is:

1) to start with great pieces that actually fit you well

2) and remove anything from the closet that doesn’t work. This way, you’re only left experimenting with pieces that actually work.

Otherwise, it’s like trying to solve two jigsaw puzzles at once, and all the pieces of both are mixed together.

Once you do this, you will start to see the puzzle come together, revealing, maybe, that you have more options than you thought.

And all along, you didn’t need more puzzle pieces - you just needed the right ones and to play with them.

So, move around the pieces. The puzzle doesn’t solve itself.

But I know all of this can be difficult. You might be the type of person who would rather have an interior designer just show you what pieces would look best in the space and then get you all of the stuff that goes together.

You can work with me and the team to do the same thing with your style. Outsource your closet and look better than if you were to try to waste time and money doing it yourself.

You can focus on what it is you do and take your style issues off your plate.

Hope that helps.

x Patrick