Our topic today is all about what a capsule wardrobe can teach you about creating more ease and less stress in your business.
If you have been following me for a while, you might know that I am really, really passionate about simplifying my life, around keeping things simple; everything to how I prep our food to how we run our routines as a family to how we live a very minimalist lifestyle and that has also included a capsule wardrobe.
I want to share with you guys some lessons that I have learned in having a capsule wardrobe and how it really, really translates to your business.
If you guys are similar to me, I know for many, many years I would open the door to my closet, look at hangars and shelves full of clothes and still say to myself, “Oh, my gosh. I’m so overwhelmed. I have nothing to wear.”
I would want to get ready to go out for a date night or simply just wanting something that wasn’t yoga pants to put on and go out into the world and I would find myself getting upset, getting frustrated, feeling overwhelmed.
Then starts the negative self-talk spiral. “I’m too fat. Nothing fits me. Everything looks terrible.” You start to feel like you have no control and it starts with something as simple as your closet.
Over the past few years, one of the things that I’ve been doing in my own life has been embracing the concept of a capsule wardrobe.
If you’ve never heard of a capsule wardrobe, it’s such a simple idea; a simple concept. Basically, you have a smaller wardrobe that changes seasonally, but it’s usually somewhere between like 30-40 pieces; tops, bottoms, jackets, shoes, et cetera.
The goal of the capsule wardrobe is that things really go together well.
This journey of learning how to create a capsule wardrobe has been really interesting for me because, like many women, I’ve fluctuated in weight up and down over my entire adult life.
All the way from when I got married and was a like a size four or six to now, after three children, when I’m a size 12/size 14. Like most women, I’ve always struggled with my wardrobe going through all these crazy transitions.
What I started realizing recently is as I’ve been editing my wardrobe, and specifically, hiring people and working with stylist to learn more about how to simplify my wardrobe – a couple of amazing things have happened.
I’m no longer staring at my wardrobe and crying every day. I’m no longer looking at it and thinking, I guess I just have to put leggings on because nothing else fits and nothing else is comfortable.
I’ve got a wardrobe that everything fits. Everything is comfortable because that is a big piece of my style. I’m a work-at-home mom, so I need it all to be mostly comfortable.
If I have an event to go to, I actually have a little curated travel capsule wardrobe just for events, just for speaking. If I’m at home mostly with my kids and working from home, I’ve got that wardrobe. I’ve got my workout wardrobe.
What I’ve noticed in curating this capsule wardrobe and going through this experience of creating a capsule wardrobe is that it’s really created a lot more ease in my life.
It’s not only just created ease in the mornings, ease in getting dressed, it’s also helped me to raise my confidence level and feel like I’m truly showing up as the person I want to be each and every day.
Which might seem so crazy, but I want to walk you through some of the parallels between your closet and your business and what might be happening.
The first step or the first challenge for so many women and why they feel overwhelmed by their wardrobe, by their closets, is because we simply have too much stuff. Right?
How many times have you looked in your closet and there is a pair of jeans that are super old but you’re hanging on to them because you might fit back into them one day.
Or, there’s that top that you bought on sale that you kind of liked, but it doesn’t go with anything.
It’s almost like a vault of our history in our closets. But, in our business, too much stuff can be really stressful as well. We stand in our business, just like we stand in our closets, completely overwhelmed with too many options.
What I start to see with a lot of entrepreneurs, especially women entrepreneurs, is they’ve overcomplicated and cluttered up their closet, their business has gotten too complicated.
I saw this a lot this last week when I was at a live event where I was speaking and coaching women entrepreneurs. As we started this event, the first thing we did was everybody mapped up what types of offers they had, what kind of marketing they had.
What I saw as I looked around was that they had too many things going on in their business. They were selling too many things. They had way too many offers.
Even those people who were just getting started were coming up with three or four or five offers that they wanted to put out there; different programs, products and services.
While on the surface that seems okay, in reality, that means not only do you have to create those offers and the systems to deliver them and create an incredible customer experience, but you also have to figure out how you market those offers, how you sell those offers.
What tends to happen is nothing really works together very well. It’s been a lot of creating, creating, creating, but not a lot of thinking about how it all fits together.
When we have too much stuff going on in our business, just like too much stuff going on in our wardrobe, we find ourselves completely overwhelmed because we don’t know where to spend our time, we don’t know where to spend our energy, we don’t know what to focus on or what to do next.
Instead, we just sit there feeling like we’re out of control of our business. This leads to the next piece that you can take away from having a capsule wardrobe.
The goal of a capsule wardrobe is that you have a signature look. This helps give direction to how you shop and what you decide to get and how you pull together your outfits.
This translates directly into entrepreneurship because if you can’t look at your closet and get an idea of what your signature look is, the same thing might be happening in your business.
Can you look at your business and get a strong feeling for what your brand is?
Your brand is your signature look and it’s more than just the graphics and the color scheme and the visual. It’s your message. It’s what you stand for.
Is it clear what you stand for?
If you have too many things going on in your business, you’ve got a cluttered business. If that business is too cluttered, then people never really know what you’re up to.
A confused mind always says no. If they aren’t sure what you do or what you stand for, then people aren’t ready to take that next step. They’re not ready to move forward.
Having a signature look in your closet is just as important as having that brand, that clear message throughout your entire business.
The lessons I’ve learned from designing a capsule wardrobe is that a capsule wardrobe is all about having strong foundational pieces in your closet that mix and match.
You pick these things that fit you beautifully, that are the foundation for most of your outfits. Now, these aren’t sexy. These usually aren’t the trendiest things.
They’re having a great pair of black pants. It’s having a great dress you can always depend on, that always fits great. It’s having the perfect pair of blue jeans that you can wear with a blazer or you can wear with a baseball t-shirt.
Those foundational pieces aren’t very exciting, but when you have those foundational pieces in your closet, it’s so much easier to get dressed. It’s so much easier to pull things together because you have the basics down.
How does this translate to your business?
What I often see for people and where they’re getting stuck is they lack the foundational elements of a strong business design plan. They lack a solid signature offering.
Instead, they likely have lots of offerings for people. If you have 20 different ways somebody can work with you, they never really understand who you are, how you work or what you’re up to in the world.
Strong signature offerings, strong foundation.
I saw this all over the place last week when I was at this event. Everybody was writing down the marketing that they were doing, but nothing fit together. They were writing down, “I’m going to do this over on Instagram. I’m going to do this over here on Facebook Live. I’m going to send this newsletter.”
But none of their content, none of their marketing was working together. Instead, it was all these separate pieces. Just like in your closet when you have all these crazy pieces where you can’t pull an outfit together.
When you have a strong foundation and your marketing is working together with sales strategy and is working together with your customer experience, that’s the difference between being able to reach in your closet and pull out outfits really easy with a capsule wardrobe or standing there wondering,
“Why can’t I get this together? Why is nothing working together?”
These couple of things here, these little lessons that I’ve pulled from creating a capsule wardrobe have been really interesting to see how we approach business.
Here is what I want you to think about instead.
What really made me start thinking about this analogy was this conference that I was at last week. I said,
“Something I always say to my private clients before we get started in our first session is, ‘This first session is like cleaning out your wardrobe. We’re going to pull absolutely everything out.
We’re going to take a good look at it, we’re going to edit things out, let go of things and only put back what makes sense. That way, you’re not overwhelmed.'”
What do you need to do to put your business through this process?
The first thing you want to do, really, is think about your signature.
Just like your capsule wardrobe, I would say if I were working with a stylist, “Here’s the style I’m going after. It’s pretty simple, minimalist, comfortable. But if I were to pick out of magazines, I would say a little bit more Joanna Gaines than high fashion.
I want to be comfortable and I want to look nice. I want to look polished, but I don’t want it to be high fashion and I don’t want to be in high heels.“
I know what my style is. In my brand, in my business, the messaging that I put out there, the things that I talk about, it’s the same thing.
I know exactly what I stand for in my brand.
I stand for helping women find more freedom through their business, how to help them simply their business so that they can get better results with less effort. Everything I talk about has to do with this.
Everything from business design, marketing strategies, sales strategies to self-care for entrepreneurs. If you follow me on Instagram, you know I talk about this quite a lot.
Everything has to do with helping women to work smarter, not harder, so they can really have the freedom they want in their business. That is the through line of absolutely everything.
Having that signature is going to be really helpful for your business. It lets you know what you need to let go of.
If you are pulling things out of your business closet and realizing it doesn’t fit under that message, it doesn’t fit under what you stand for, you can let go of it. There’s nothing wrong with letting go of things.
I have let go of several offers over the years because I realized this doesn’t fit with where I’m going. This doesn’t align with what I’m really up to right now.
I let go of an entire brand. I let go of the Yogipreneur.com. It’s still up, you can still go check it out, but once I realized it wasn’t under the umbrella of what I wanted to focus on, it was okay for me to move forward and stay focused on the things that do align with that signature.
The next piece to help you really learn how to simplify your business is, just like if you were to create a capsule wardrobe, you’ve got to pull everything out and you’ve got to see what still fits.
[clickToTweet tweet=”You’ve got to see what still makes sense and what works in the scope of your business and your life.” quote=”You’ve got to see what still makes sense and what works in the scope of your business and your life.” theme=”style2″]
There are things that you might have started when you first got into business that don’t fit anymore.
There might be things that you’ve added in because it sounded fun or it sounded interesting, but it’s just not in alignment. It is okay to edit those things out.
It is okay to say, “I’m not going to offer this anymore.” It is okay to clean up your offerings and say, “Instead of selling one hour of my time at a time, I’m instead only going to work with people for three months at a time or six months at a time.“
When you edit things down suddenly everything starts to fit together so much more beautifully.
Everything works together and you don’t have to work so hard to get your marketing out there or to sell your offerings because it becomes much clearer who you are, what you’re about and how you can help people.
The final piece of this is what basics you need.
In my wardrobe, my basics consist of dark wash skinny jeans, really comfortable tops in creams and whites and greys and occasionally green and purple. Those are my two accent colors.
My basics include comfortable flats, which are my pair of black Toms that I wear all the time. Having those basics makes getting dressed in the morning a whole lot easier.
Now, in my business, those basics are the foundational pieces. It’s the 20% of your business that does 80% of the hard work. For me, this is my marketing strategy.
My Attract strategy is getting on Facebook Live once or twice a week.
My Engage strategy is all about getting people to sign up for my Fired Up and Focused Challenge or check out a masterclass.
My Nurture strategy is sending out a newsletter consistently every single week, just as I have for the past six years.
Because all of these things were designed to work together, they get even better results.
When you have those foundational pieces in your business, you’re no longer finding yourself constantly chasing the next trend.
Instead, your business is ready for whatever needs to happen as it evolves.
I hope you enjoyed my little insights into how creating a capsule wardrobe can help you design a business with more ease and less stress. If you loved this, I know that you will love my all new masterclass, if you haven’t checked it out yet.