When I first started working in fashion, smoking was completely normal, especially during fashion week. The senior people did it, the people I thought were really cool did it. And a little voice in the back of my head went: okay, maybe this is just what success looks like in this industry.
Can you see how flawed that logic is? Nobody told me anything, the rooms I were in did all the persuading on its own.
On Sunday I wrote about why where you live changes what you earn. Today I thought I’d share the practical part which includes a scored check of what’s around you, and what to change at your stage of life.
In this issue:
Why willpower is overrated, and what disciplined people actually do
The Frugal Chic® environment audit: 15 questions on your people, rooms and habits
What your score means
The changes worth making at your stage of life
Willpower is overrated
I came to the conclusion that people love to blame themselves. It often sounds like: “If I just had more discipline, I’d stop buying the coffee, stop scrolling, stop saying yes to the £70 dinner.”
But there’s a study I think about a lot. Psychologists gave 205 adults in Germany phones for a week and asked them, several times a day, what they wanted and whether they were resisting it. The people with the highest self-control didn’t resist more often. They resisted less, because fewer of their desires clashed with their goals in the first place. And when the people around someone were already doing the thing they were trying not to do, their resistance got weaker.
The disciplined people you admire aren’t white-knuckling it. They’ve set their lives up so they don’t have to.
And the room you spend the most time in isn’t your bedroom or your office. It’s your phone. Women in the UK spend an average of 4 hours 43 minutes a day online on their own devices. When I first checked my screen time it was around five hours. Yes, my job is to be online, but I was spending way too much of it watching other people’s lives.
The good news is that it’s much easier to change a room than to change your personality.
The Frugal Chic® rule: Don’t try to out-discipline your environment. Instead, change it.
