About January resolutions, and why nothing changes until you show up differently

I don’t ask this sarcastically. I’m genuinely curious.

So… how are your January resolutions going?

Are you still doing the things you promised yourself in the last week of December, or did they quietly dissolve somewhere around the second Monday of January?

This time of year always feels strange to me. There’s so much hope packed into a few days. So many lists. So many intentions. New routines, new habits, new versions of ourselves we’re sure we’ll become this time.

And then life resumes.

Emails. Weather. Hormones. Energy dips. Reality.

I don’t think resolutions fail because we’re lazy or undisciplined. I think they fail because most of them live entirely in our heads.

We journal.

We vision board.

We write affirmations.

And don’t get me wrong, I love all of that. I really do.

But over the years, working with women again and again, I’ve noticed something very consistent: nothing truly shifts until it’s embodied. Until you start living like the person you say you want to become.

Not thinking like her, or visualising her.

Actually showing up as her.

That’s where clothes come in. Not as something superficial, but as something incredibly honest.

The women who come to me are often not “bad at style.” They’re usually thoughtful, capable, creative women who’ve simply lost touch with themselves. Their confidence has shifted. Their body has changed. Their life looks different than it did a few years ago. And their wardrobe is still speaking to an older version of them.

So every morning becomes a small friction point.

“I don’t know what to wear.”

“I don’t feel like myself.”

“I have so many clothes but nothing works.”

What a stylist really does, at least the way I work, isn’t about trends or buying new things. It’s about helping you tell the truth about where you are now.

Who you are today.

What your life actually looks like.

How you want to feel when you move through it.

That’s why so much of my work starts with your existing wardrobe. Not adding more, but listening more closely to what’s already there. There’s always a reason you bought those clothes. There’s always information in what you avoid, what you over-wear, what no longer resonates.

Lately, I’ve been doing this for myself too, documenting what I wear and calling it wearing 100% of my wardrobe (find what I wore for the last two weeks here). Not as a challenge, but as a practice. Paying attention. Letting go of what doesn’t feel like me anymore. Making the most of what does.

This is exactly what I do with clients in a wardrobe editing. In just three hours, we go through everything together. We identify what stays, what goes, and most importantly, how to wear what you already own in a way that actually reflects you. We build 30+ outfits and turn them into a digital ready-to-wear lookbook so getting dressed stops feeling like a daily decision and starts feeling easy again.

But more than that, it shifts something internally.

Because when you start dressing in alignment with who you are now, you don’t need to force confidence. You don’t need to convince yourself you’re changing. You’re already acting like the woman you said you wanted to become in January.

And that’s when change sticks.

So maybe the question isn’t whether you’re keeping up with your resolutions.

Maybe it’s whether you’re showing up in your life like you believe they’re possible.

I’ll leave you with this, because it’s something I come back to often:

Are you trying to change outcomes…

or are you willing to change how you inhabit yourself?