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DAY 1: 30 Day NO-BUY Challenge

Day 1 of the 30-Day No-Buy Jumpstart Challenge is about spotting and clearing the “yuck” in your closet and in your self-talk. You are not doing a full declutter or a total makeover, you are simply removing the obvious yuck that drags you down and beginning to replace harsh inner criticism with gratitude, love, and a “New year, better you” mindset.

ACTION STEPS

Closet: Spot The Yuck

  • Do a quick scan of your closet, not a full declutter.
  • Pull out anything that gives you a yucky feeling:
    • Stretched out, worn out, or holey
    • Bad or heavy memories attached
    • Does not fit and makes you feel bad when you see it
  • For too-small items:
    • Box them up and move them out of your main space (garage, extra closet, high shelf)
  • For too-big items:
    • Only keep them if they feel good and you can imagine styling, pinning, or tucking them
  • Remember: you are not clearing space for a new haul, you are just removing the true yuck so your possibilities can breathe.

Mindset: Clean Up Your Self-Talk

  • All day, notice how you talk to yourself, especially around your body and style.
  • Use the 5-year-old test:
    • Ask, “Would I say this to 5-year-old me?”
  • When a negative thought pops up:
    • Answer it with gratitude and facts:
      • “These arms are strong.”
      • “These arms hold my kids, help me cook, help me live my life.”
  • Swap the mantra:
    • From “New year, new you”
    • To “New year, better you,” honoring where you are right now.

 

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Day 1 – Spot The Yuck

Happy 2026, happy New Year.

Welcome to the 30-Day No-Buy Jumpstart Challenge. Because I only have 30 days with you, this is going to be jam-packed with so much good info. I’ll be moving in fast forward, but heck, that is the point, it is a challenge, right? We got this. You got this. I know you do.

This is our year to banish closet overwhelm, to get off the compulsive consumption hamster wheel, and to get out of autopilot with our style and especially our shopping. This year, we slow down, we take pauses in our buying, and we become conscious, and we actually maybe just might become friends with our closet.

I want this year to be the year when you look at your closet and you stop seeing questions and you start seeing answers.

So, welcome again to the 30-Day No-Buy Challenge.

Maybe you are here because you want to jumpstart a full no-buy year, that is awesome. Maybe you are here because you are like, “Well, I will do a no-buy six months,” great. Or maybe you are like, “I am not really quite sure, I’ll do 30 days and see how that works,” that is fine too.

And then maybe you are not planning on doing a no-buy at all, or maybe you have no problem with not buying and you are just like, “Hey, I am just here for the really fun style advice,” and that is great too. I am just happy you are here, that is all. It is going to be fun, it is going to be really exciting, and I am really excited to have this month with you.

You can think of these voice memos as not official course content, but more like your fashion bestie coming in, popping in, checking in on you, giving you a little guidance, and just being here for you.

I have a really, really, well, we have a really, really great month ahead. I really want to talk about a lot of organization, structure, and style advice. But today, I do not want to put too much pressure on you.

We already put a lot of pressure on ourselves on January 1st, and I do not want to add to that today. This whole year is not about doing everything perfectly, it is about just starting.

So today, we are just starting to wrap our heads around what we are about to do and the cool transformation that is about to happen.

We will get into more official organization in the next week, but for now, we are going to focus on simply what gives us a yuck feeling. Day one is all about spotting the yuck in our lives, the yuckiness. And we are going to first talk about the yuckiness in your closet.

Part 1: The Yuck In Your Closet

Most stylists, when they first start with you, say, “Let’s declutter, let’s get rid of a whole bunch of stuff.” I actually do not like starting that way, because once I teach you what I am going to teach you, you might want to use some of the things you would have gotten rid of.

So instead of just getting rid of a bunch of stuff, the one thing I 100 percent want you to get rid of is anything that gives you a yucky feeling.

The yuck might be:

  • Things that have been stretched out over the years
  • Pieces that are worn out
  • Clothes with holes in them
  • Things that carry not-great memories
  • Things that do not fit

Those are the things I want you to start getting rid of and moving out of the main space of your closet, because when they are there, they start to clutter everything else and they mess with your mind.

What we want to do in this whole course, with everything that I teach, is ultimately change style and fashion from a look to a feeling. We do not want to focus on just the look, we want to know how the clothes are making us feel. And if they are making you feel like a bum, or less than, or just yuck, we need to let them go.

That is the main thing I want you to focus on.

Fit Talk: Too Small, Too Big

Let’s talk about fit, if something does not fit.

If something is too small, and you are like, “Yeah, it is just too small,” you can just get rid of it. But maybe you are hopeful, like you are wanting to get to wear it someday in the future. I still want you to take that piece, and not just that piece but all the pieces you feel that way about, put them in a box, and put that box somewhere that is not in your main space.

Garage, extra closet, somewhere where it is not just staring at you every day reminding you that it does not fit, because we want to honor our body where we are now.

We will talk more about this, but I really want you to be okay with the body that you are in now and not always hoping that you were something else. Instead of constantly wishing, “Ugh, I was this size and now I am this size and I am mad about it,” let’s honor where we are.

So let’s just put those clothes that do not fit away, out of our main sight, so we can honor who we are and what we are right now.

If you have clothes that are a little too big, I personally sometimes like that. It can be a stylish item, it can actually be styled very interesting and cool. So I would not automatically get rid of something that is too big unless it is giving you that yuck feeling. There are ways we can pin them, tuck them, style them, and make them work.

But for now, your “getting rid of” category is just seriously the true yuck. We will get into how to style oversized pieces later, and if I forget to, please remind me to talk about that.

For now, just think about stretched out, worn out, holey items, items with bad memories, all that kind of stuff. This is not the New Year of “get rid of everything so we have space for more.” We are not clearing out our closet so we make room for another clothing haul.

We are just getting rid of the yuck.

We want to keep our possibilities in there, but just get rid of what we all know are those yucky things that make us feel weighed down.

Part 2: The Yuck In Your Self-Talk

Okay, let’s talk about the yuck in our self-talk. This is part two of what we are going to work on today, and honestly not just today, but for the whole 30 days, for the whole year, for the whole forever, because 2026 is about talking a lot better to ourselves, okay?

Because it is the New Year, and on the first of the year we tend to talk about New Year’s resolutions, I want to also talk about this mindset.

New Year’s resolutions sound positive a lot of the time, but often they are built on negative self-talk. Think about it. You say, “I do not like the way I look, so I have a New Year’s resolution to do this.” Or, “I do not like this about myself, so we are going to do this.” Or, “I do not like this about my life, so we are going to do this.”

Yes, it is a positive motion, and I get it, but it is centered around a lot of negative self-talk.

Something I have always believed is, you can have all the clothes in the world, I say this all the time, you can have all the clothes in the world, but if you do not love yourself first, it will never be enough.

So part of this 30-day challenge is how you speak to yourself and how you honor yourself.

I want you to start working on loving and speaking to yourself in a really beautiful way, and to be grateful for who you are and where you are in this life, instead of always wishing we were something else or something more. We can absolutely want more for ourselves, but also honor how far we have already come.

The 5-Year-Old You Check

So think of it like this.

Ask yourself, when you are talking to yourself and you hear that negative self-talk come out, “Would I talk to my five-year-old self that way?”

I am a little self-conscious maybe about my tummy after kids. If I look at my tummy and go, “Oh, gross,” would I look at five-year-old Casey and be like, “Oh, your tummy is so gross”? No, right?

You are still that little person inside, the little one that really wants love and gentleness and encouragement. You deserve that positivity.

And that is how we will start to radiate in our style, when we can work on ourselves inside and we start shining from the inside, but we cannot do that when we are constantly bashing on ourselves and talking negative to ourselves.

That is what we are going to work on, because that is actually the core of style and personal style.

So in the next 30 days, I want you to notice how you talk to yourself, and to start using more loving language.

Handling The Negative Voices

An important reminder in this is that the bad and negative voices will always show up. Unfortunately, that is just part of our human makeup. They are not going to disappear forever, but as we practice this, they will quiet, they will quiet down, but we will probably never fully erase them.

So the thing is, do not feel bad when they pop up. Instead, decide what we are going to do when they pop up. That is the self-love. It is how we quiet those voices, how we quiet the little gremlin in our heads saying something mean.

We want to say, “Be quiet, negative voice. Be quiet, gremlin. We are better than this,” and we start to battle them, right?

We do not let the negative self-talk sit with us. It might come into our world, but then we battle it and we start to honor ourselves.

If you have negative self-talk about your arms, you look in the mirror and go, “Oh, my arms are so gross,” instead we battle and go, “No, they are not. They are beautiful. They have held my kids. They help me get dressed in the morning. They help me drive. They help me cook. I am so happy I have these arms.”

We need to start quieting the negative self-talk and battling it.

We are switching how we talk to ourselves. Instead of talking from criticism, we want to talk to ourselves through gratitude.

And that will actually help in style. No joke, I am not kidding, it will help in your style.

Day 1 Theme And Wrap-Up

So day one is really about noticing where the yuck is in your life:

  • Where the yuck is in your closet
  • Where the yuck is in how we speak to ourselves

January 1st is a day that we are hardest on ourselves. We are always trying to improve. So instead of being like, “New year, new you,” you know that saying, I want you to think, “New year, better you.”

We want to honor where we have already come from. We want to honor the body we are in right now. And we want to work on speaking to ourselves from a place of love and not hate.

So that is what we are going to work on for day one.

For today, start pulling out the yuck in your closet, the obvious things that feel bad or look tired or drag your energy down. You want to start getting in touch with how you feel in your clothes.

And then we also want to work on the negative self-talk, the yucky talk that we use on ourselves. Those are your action steps for today.

I will be back tomorrow with more on style and concrete steps and where we can go next in this challenge. I have some other fun little surprises I am setting up, so come back and we will talk more.

For today, have a wonderful day. I am happy you are here, I truly love you, and I am so excited for this journey together.

Have a wonderful day. Happy New Year.