Does Shopping Fill the Void?

Caught an interesting TV show this evening. Shopping is my Life told the tale of 26-year-old Louise Hendry, who it seems pretty much lived for shopping. OK, so she was much worse than I have ever been. When the presenters decided it would be a good idea for her to sell some of the clothes she doesn't wear so she could buy the camera she needed to further her career, she managed to flog around 200 items! I don't think I even own 200 pieces of clothing! If I did that I'd have to run around naked and spend the money I'd made ensuring I was suitably attired (don't think that would go down well with the recent 'business attire' dress code at work!).

What was the most interesting for me was when she was talking to personal development coach, Nick Jankel, and he suggested that she shopped because she was bored, because she'd lost that spark of ambition she once had and was using retail therapy, as, er just that! I think we've all been guilty of that at some point. How many times have you justified a splurge because you've had a hard day at work and 'you deserve it'?

Looking through old photographs and certificates Nick took Louise back to a time when the spark was there and reminded her how she felt at that time, what her hopes and ambitions were. From this she created a mood board of how she wanted to be in the future (for her this included lots of travel, photography (her job and first love) and doing a parachute jump - go girl!). It bought her back on track and made her really focus on what she wanted and what she needed to do to achieve it.

She was also taught how to shop smart by super stylist - Faye Sawyer, who suggested going shopping with a list of items in mind, sticking to it and buying good quality key pieces rather than cheap throwaway fashion.

It got me thinking about how we do use spending as a way of forgetting our troubles, or to fill a void. In a way, if we buy those clothes we maybe see it as a shortcut to becoming that person, when really we can only do that by doing some soul searching. It's certainly got me wondering about creating my own mood board of where I want to be, to see if that helps with the saving. OK, so I generally think mood boards are pretty cheesy. In fact the words 'mood board' and 'look and feel' have a tendency to make me feel a bit icky as they're so over used in the more creative side of the marketing world. But anything that focuses the mind on the end goal and helps to save money has gotta be good, right? And to be fair, while I'm happy where I am at at the moment, I'm really not sure where I want to be in the future, so maybe it's time for a bit of soul searching? Let the research begin!

Money Spent: £11.05 - stocked up on salad so I can make lunch for the rest of the week, and also bought more tissues to replace the ones I used when I had my cold!
Money Saved: Nil
Money Made: Nil