Small Steps to Change Your Shopping Habits

If you've been following this blog, you know that I advocate shopping with intention. I want you to banish any lingering habit of shopping for your clothes recreationally, and encourage you to instead shop with a plan and a list. 

I also want you to consider purchasing used clothing for maximum quality at the lowest possible cost. I understand that, for many of us, this could be a big shift in behavior! The best way I've found to shift habitual behavior is with small, tortoise-like steps that can disarm our resistance to change.

Marrying a Tortoise

When I was in high school, I was a terrible procrastinator. Worse, I was rewarded for procrastinating by getting good grades even when I studied for a test or wrote my essay the night before it was due. I would let assignments and commitments hang over me and then try to complete them in a flurry of activity at the last moment. 

Fortunately, I married a man whose approach is the exact opposite - a tortoise to my hare. It took awhile (ok, a long while), but I eventually came around to the idea that making daily incremental progress on a project was a better strategy than trying to tackle it all at once. Several years ago, I read a very influential book on the idea of small steps called One Small Step Can Change Your Life: The Kaizen Way by Robert Maurer, PhD. He asserts that we can get around our resistance to change by taking really tiny, non-threatening daily steps toward our goals.

There was a hilarious example of a manager who hadn't done performance reviews for his employees in a number of years - and the employees were beginning to defect to other departments where they might be more appreciated. The author, a consultant for the manager's employer, assigned this manager the task of imagining, for just thirty seconds per day, what it would be like to compliment one of his employees. The manager was to spend one month doing this brief exercise every day.

In the second month, the manager's thirty-second daily assignment expanded to include imagining what it would be like to give one of his employees constructive feedback. As you might surmise, by taking these tiny but regular steps, the manager was able to tackle the performance reviews without additional resistance in the third month. 

Take Small Steps to Change your Shopping Habits

How often do you shop recreationally, with no particular plan? Perhaps there's an outlet mall you like to visit, or you find yourself scrolling through clothing images online without any particular plan in mind. What if you took a couple of small steps this month to adjust your behavior? Here are some ideas:

1. Spend 30 seconds thinking about when you like to shop. Is it after a stressful day at work? Is it in anticipation of an outing? Is it a way to pass time?

2. Spend 30 seconds thinking about an alternative to shopping or online browsing. What would you do instead if you're stressed or bored? How could you pass the time in a way that's rewarding without spending as much money, or increasing your caloric intake? Could you call a loved one? Develop your own tea ceremony? Read a good novel?

Once you have some answers to these two scenarios, give these small steps a try:

1. Spend thirty seconds imagining what it would be like to have a wardrobe where you loved everything that you had to wear. What outfit or pieces from your existing wardrobe are you wearing? If you have time in your thirty seconds, imagine a variety of situations that typically crop up for you over a one- or two-week period, such as working out, meeting with clients (whether in person or on video), or getting together with a friend for lunch. Consider repeating this exercise daily for one week. You may wish to jot down any ideas or missing pieces that come to mind.

2. Set a timer for five minutes and put all of the pieces you imagined wearing at the front of your closet for easy access.

3. Set the intention of conducting an experiment, and schedule time to visit your local Goodwill store after work one day this week or on the weekend. For the purposes of the experiment, give yourself no more than ten minutes to walk into the store and locate the racks that hold the tops or other clothing that would likely fit you (you can always stay and shop).

If the experiment was a success, you can schedule an actual shopping date - list in hand. If it wasn't a success, then you just got to know yourself a little bit better, and you can identify what made the experiment fail so that you can try something else.

Use the strategy of taking small steps for any sort of change you wish to make in your behavior. But I hope some of the steps you choose will lead you to try your local Goodwill. Happy hunting!