Welcome to the Six Figure Personal Stylist Podcast, the ultimate no-BS business podcast for ambitious personal stylists ready to build a six-figure and beyond personal styling business.

You won't hear the typical snoozefest business advice that most personal stylists get told all of the time. Nope. Instead, I'll be sharing business-building strategies that will help you create a killer personal brand, a cult following of loyal personal styling clients, and make a ton of cash while creating lasting style transformations for your clients.

I'm Nicole Otchy, your host and a former personal stylist of 14 years who built a lucrative styling business in three major cities, but only after spending years trying to crack the six-figure styling business code without burning out. And now I'm here to tell you how to do exactly the same. Let's get into it.

What if I told you that everything that you think is a marketing problem is on the other side of being fixed with just another little tactic, a little strategy, getting those hooks down, another hashtag, engaging for 10 minutes before you do a post, engaging in 10 minutes after, all of that, what if I told you that was really distracting you from having the business that you ultimately dream of and making the impact that you really want as a stylist?

I'm going to tell you some stuff today that is what I consider to be deprogramming that I am truly talking to my former self. I was obsessed with marketing. I'm not going to lie to you. When I am having a bad week or something is going on in my personal life, I will go to my marketing. I will beat myself up. I will have a whole meltdown about how my marketing isn't going great or whatever, even when that's not the evidence that's in front of me.

I want to remind you that we are sold every single day that marketing is the issue, that marketing is the problem. I am not going to tell you that marketing isn't important. It's so important. I'm not going to tell you that marketing tactics aren't useful. But I am going to tell you that you will never get where you want to go with those tactics and strategies if you do not have certain things in place.

It is just easier to sell people a PDF of hooks or a Canva template of Instagram Stories that people claim are going to make them a million dollars. But that isn't going to work if there isn't an existing relationship with the people on the other side of the screen. Think about how you buy. Think about the brands that you buy from. Do you buy from them because their hook is amazing?

Or do you buy from them because you know that some aspect of your identity is being spoken to when they share, when they create content, when they give you tips, and when you save their stuff?

When you look up to somebody that you want to work with and you think, “Oh, I really want to work with them,” even if it's a stretch, is it something in a tactic that they're doing? Is it because they engage for 10 minutes before on Instagram? Probably not.

It's because an emotional connection exists. The power of emotional connection in marketing is the thing that we are not taught enough. It's hard to teach. I'm just going to be honest with you. It's something I've been studying for the past couple of years.

I will explain to you when I think marketing tactics are useful but we tend to jump the gun and go towards things like growth and in our social media, or trying to build our email list and trying to do those things. But we don't really have any mastery in talking to the people who are already on the email list or on our social media accounts.

The purpose of this conversation is for me to help you as an established stylist, see what you need to be looking at in order to actually get somewhere with marketing tactics.

I will give you some examples from my own experience that illustrate this. But one of the things of being obsessed with these numbers and these tactics and these things does is it completely robs you of your creativity and excitement. It robs you of the relationship. It robs you of the opportunity to actually make a difference.

Because I actually have noticed that when I look at the success of this business, I get more DMs and emails on a weekly basis from people telling me how much this podcast has helped them than they have hired me in the history of the business to date.

If those people never hire me, it's okay. It's fine. I truly believe that when we are doing marketing from an ethical place, when we are creating messaging for people that we truly care about, we are getting so much more out of it than just money.

We are creating messages that help us feel more self-expressed that make us better, and that make us more creative if we're doing our marketing from a place of not just being blind robots and following the things everybody tells us.

Sure, there's a place for having a strategy that you follow until you get the hang of things. But I don't tell my clients exactly what to post. I tell them the types of content that build relationships to post.

Then we work on the messaging together based on their particular vibe, how they speak, who they're talking to, what things they really enjoy doing, and what their styling process looks like.

I can't sell that in like an easy template. I could pretend I could and sell you a spreadsheet and make a lot of money. I am asked weekly for templates and things like that because people see that I get my client's results. Then they want to know what the swipe file is.

But it's not the swipe file that gets my client's result. It's who they become in doing the thing. It's who they become in showing up to their marketing over and over, even when no one's responding, even when they're not being clapped for, and even when they're not getting sales.

Because the thing that is easy to sell is the tactic and the thing that is hard to sell and why most people never succeed a business that start a business is that it is the doing of the tactic that creates who you are being in the world and should ultimately be changing who you're being in the world that leads to the result.

It's not that every single time I show up on Instagram, I have people knocking down my door to buy. It's that I build a relationship and I don't sell every two seconds. I sell you guys ideas. I sell you guys a point of view, but I don't sell my products or my services every two seconds.

Because that's not how real relationships work, but real relationships are constant back and forth of persuasion. It's a dance. No one's going to tell you that that wants you to buy an Instagram story set that's going to make you a billion dollars while they are on the beach at some Riviera in France making all this money in collecting sales.

I've been around these people and masterminds, guys. Trust me when I tell you. There's a whole other world of things they're not sharing with you like the team they're paying a ton of money in order to get that to work.

If you're here feeling insecure about your marketing or you tend to go down spirals of beating yourself up as I have, and sometimes still do, I want to assure you that tactics aside, you have everything you need to be successful and to gain more clients if you do the things we're going to talk about.

They are not marketing-related. They will influence your marketing. They will help your marketing get better, but they are not marketing. It's the holes in these parts of our business that actually hold us back from creating marketing that's easy, that's seamless, that's natural, and that really is an extension of our connection with ourselves and why we became stylists in the first place.

That is so missed when we get into the tactics and the strategies, “What's going wrong? How come no one's buying?” Because when we're in that particular place, we're not giving the energy off of being someone in command and control of things enough for someone else to trust us with their image and the vulnerability that comes with it.

Before we dive into the things I want to point out could be the problem before we even have a marketing problem, I want to share something with you to give you some hope.

The styling consultancy is like a year and a half when I record this, and I have worked with a lot of different coaches. One of the business coaches that I've worked with on and off, Erika Reiman, who's really responsible for a lot of the aesthetic you've seen of the styling consultancy, is a marketing genius, in my opinion.

I worked with her for a long time. She's a business coach, but she talks a lot about marketing. Quite frankly, she's a genius marketer. I hired her because she's a good marketer.

She has a real confidence that I really have wanted to cultivate in myself. That's usually why I hire people if I'm being honest. Because I know what to do in a business at this point. But there's often an energy exchange that I think is the biggest value that I get from coaches.

We reconvened about two weeks ago, and she did an audit of my presence online and my messaging. She's just really good at how you say things, how you get attention. I know I have my messaging right, but I do think it could have been sharpened.

I said to her, “Can you do an audit for me and we'll chat.” We did that. She came back to me with some feedback about where I stand in the space. Where I stand in the personal styling, consulting, and coaching world.

She gave me a lot of really helpful feedback about messaging that I should turn up and messaging that maybe could be made a little bit stronger. It was all great constructive feedback.

Then we got to this part and she said to me, “Can I give you a really strong piece of feedback?” I was like, “Yeah, of course.” She said, “You have the worst hooks on the internet. They are so shitty. I don't know how you got as far” basically is what she said.

I laughed because she's right. I probably do. Two seconds before she gave me that feedback, we were talking about how I had people DMing me asking to work with me, how I had to slow down because the pace of the requests were getting too much, how I just finished a program and every single person in it actually finished the modules, and all of them were like,” I've never done that before.”

How I was running roundtable calls that were 40 and 50 people at some points on certain topics at a time. Who wants to get on a Zoom call for no reason? The people who were showing up for these calls were pretty amazing to even me.

We're talking about the success of the business. Then she brought in the hooks. I'm telling you that only because I had all of the success with crappy hooks. Now I have a tactic that probably would be useful for me to get better at and I'm working on it.

I can already see posting like just three or four posts with better hooks. It has made a difference. It has warmed up people faster. It has gotten my stuff in front of, I would say like 100 maybe more people. I don't have a huge following, but I have a very engaged following.

That was the perfect time for me to get tactical feedback that was useful. Because now I have my messaging down. I know what people connect with. I know how to talk to stylists about the things that keep them up at night.

Now adding in the tactic will just sharpen the message that's already there. What would be problematic is if I was going to her and saying, “I don't have any clients. I don't know how to make money. I can't get to consistent income, then I thought that the answer was hooks, “ that's what so many of us do.

I also want to point out that that kind of feedback that I have literally the shittiest hooks on the internet from someone that I respect and trust and feel is someone I look up to you in the marketing space would have been something that completely decimated me a few years ago but today, it's something that makes me think, “Okay, I should put that on the list of things to get better at,” and I keep it moving.

If you're someone who would have deleted your whole Instagram account like old me would have and probably had a crying fit on the couch to my husband and be like, “I should just give up,” I want to just assure you that that is a temporary state of self-identity, that you think that every little thing that isn't good is a marker of some sort that means something about you, or that's what I used to think about myself anyway.

If that's you, I want you to know that everything I'm going to share with you today is going to help you look at the right places instead of being paralyzed like I used to be by criticism.

In fact, I used to be so afraid of criticism that I never got outside help in my business. If that is you, I want to encourage you to really challenge yourself about that because we all have blind spots.

It would be completely unethical of me to sit here and tell you that I'm going to be a business consultant and coach to you potentially, but I'm not getting that kind of feedback myself because we are human beings that can only do so much in a day and we need someone else to look over what we're doing and help us get to the next level of ourselves because that is really all the businesses.

When we look at our marketing from the position of like there's the business, there's a strength of the business and the strength of the business is what allows us to market in a way that creates real momentum and that is actually not just about the sale but is about the message and the selling of a perspective, that's really how I think about my work.

I am trying to sell to stylists that you are a businesswoman, that this is possible for you. It's not only possible. It should be your bare minimum to make $100,000 a year. That should be joke money to you. You should think, “$100,000, I'm sorry, I don't get out of bed for less than $10,000 a day,” or whatever the amount is. But that's a little extreme, but you get my point.

I want you to start to have standards that is an, “Ooh, it would be amazing to one day have a $100,000 business, or to have a $200,000 business, or to have a half-a-million business.”

I want you to be like, “Yeah, of course, that's going to happen. I have to fix some things in my business or I have to develop some things in my business and then I'll get some tactics and some strategies. I'll build my muscle and I'll get to that point.”

Obviously, that's how this is going to go. That is what we're going to set the stage for for you today. Before you have problems in your marketing, you're going to have a problem with one of the things, there's more, but these are the ones I see most commonly in your business and not be aware of it and maybe think that the marketing problem will help it.

Because of course, we are not making money in our business. We think the problem is we need more clients. But sometimes the issue is that the business isn't really set up in a way that we can authentically market to more clients and feel like we can stand behind what we're doing.

That is not something we talk about enough in the business coaching space and consulting space. I want to make that explicitly clear that before you have a marketing problem, you have a whole series of other problems that lead to the marketing problem, which is just a symptom.

It's like your client's saying, “The reason I don't have the style I want is because I am not good at shopping or because I just wasn't born with a style gene or because my mom thought that I was not the stylish kid as a growing up or because my mother didn't show me how to do this.” I don't know why that piece of client like verbiage is stuck in my head forever. I'm sure I've said it on multiple episodes.

When I had a client say that, I would be like, “What? You're a grown-up. We need to start taking responsibility for ourselves.” Nobody knows how to do anything. But also it was such a symptom of the view that we have of being a woman that this was some innate thing we should have. We should just know how to do this. It broke my heart.

In the same way, I don't want you misappropriating or misjudging what the issue is and thinking that another Instagram course is going to help you. The first one, one of the things I see a lot is that people lack systems.

I don't know why I started this with number one because I cannot think of a less sexy thing to tell you. But here we are this many minutes into this podcast. I'm going to tell you the most unsexy thing.

What it looks like when you have a lack of systems that can often be mistaken for a marketing problem is that you lack clarity in the true depth of clarity. You may know your niche. You may know the kind of clients you like working with, whatever. But you lack the clarity of the true before-and-after situation of your most ideal client. This is something I talk about in the Income Accelerator as these snapshot moments that we need to be aware of.

They are moments that really visualize or help us visualize, help our potential client visualize the moments in their life where it was incredibly clear to them, either before they worked with us that they didn't have the style they wanted and it was impacting their life in very tangible specific ways.

It was taking them so long to get dressed in the morning that they were almost always late to bring their kids to school and when they got to work they really didn't even want to raise their hand because they just felt like even though they knew their thoughts were good, their beliefs were good, and the things they were sharing at work, we're good, they didn't look the part so they shrunk. Then they were mad at themselves.

This is true of people's style. But we don't talk about it like this. Even when we say we're transformational stylists, we are not being honest that we are not asking the questions of our clients that would help us understand these moments so that our marketing can be good, so that we can actually be creating services that are better aligned to them. What happens after in their life, after they work with us? What is going on that they can now do, feel, or experience?

We put this on our client exit form often or our questionnaire, but it's really in conversation that these types of things get revealed. When people are filling that stuff up there, just going through emotions, they're busy, it's one last thing to check off, this is why when we claim that we're transformational stylists, we need to have real examples that we can show and actual points in our process that we can say, “Right here is where there's an evaluation that makes it a transformational experience.”

Because of that awareness from the client and also from us, to us, that what is happening once they get all their outfits and they're excited or whatever is truly a transformation because they now had to say with their own words what was happening before.

But we tend to rush through things when we're in a one-on-one with clients. I get it. I did it for a long time. But if you're not aware of these little snapshot moments—I have a whole process for how you get them from your clients in a way that's just super elegant and easy in your systems—when you have that, it completely changes the game for your marketing because now you don't really need the tactics, you have the actual words of your clients that are going to make you feel like you're in their head.

It's also going to help you feel more confident about your abilities as a stylist because now you have in very tangible detail what makes your service so impressive and remarkable in the lives of your clients.

That's actually a systems problem because usually when we're with clients, we're working so fast that we don't even have the time to slow down and be curious about these things.

That's usually because we don't have the time in our business. We don't have the time set up in our one-to-one consults. We don't have systems in place to capture these things and to have these conversations.

Then the next one is that you generally speaking don't have the information you need to easily go and create the content you want from the forms and the intake from your sales calls, from your one-to-one client, from your group programs, you don't have the kind of forms and the kind of questions in those forms, even if you have them that goes beyond sizes and stuff like that.

I used to just have a really plain intake form, and I thought I was doing so great. Then someone taught me how your systems can really recreate your relationship with a client and set the tone, and I am telling you, it changed my life.

I would say that because of how unsexy systems are and how many stylists I know, myself included, really don't want to deal with them. When my clients see the systems I create and I have created over the years from working with other creative entrepreneurs, none of them are from the styling industry and they generate and put them into their business, they're like, “What is this? I have never seen anything like this.”

I just had a client send me a DM voice note telling me that she changed all of her sales processes based on what she learned in the Income Accelerator. Not only did she sign like an ideal, ideal client, a client that she almost wasn't sure she was in the kind of age range she would ever have signed, but the systems in place helped her stay on track and helped her nurture the conversation with the potential client, so that she felt so at peace, regardless of what happened, whether it was a yes or a no in the sale, she felt so in charge and like such a boss that she was like, “This is a huge win.”

If I can go into every sales call feeling like this, I already won the game. She got so much content out of those conversations whether or not that person said yes or no. Your sales conversations, whether someone said yes or no to your service, should be where you're getting most of your content from.

If you don't have sales skills, which is our next conversation we're going to have here, then you may be lacking a lot of clarity in your marketing. One of the things we can do is when we're not having enough sales, we can blame it's the volume.

It's the volume of we don't have enough leads, we don't have enough people coming in. But closing sales is really an art form. Your marketing should be helping with that close for sure.

But even if someone comes to you relatively cold, I had another client just signed someone for $3,500 who was not following her, had never followed her, and they literally got a recommendation to work with her from someone on Facebook, wasn't even like a close connection, gone on a sales call with her that day, signed.

The person probably did scroll through her website or scroll through Instagram, but it was literally less than a 24-hour turnaround because of the sales conversations we were having because she practiced and knew exactly what to say.

While I think marketing absolutely should warm people up, I want to remind you that if you're having problems in consistency or you're struggling with your marketing or it's not converting, you're basically going to a sales call cold and that's totally fine because lots of people run ads and close sales. That's fine.

But it's easier to close sales if your marketing does the job, and you're able to do what I talked about in the last point, that your systems are actually capturing the information so you don't have to remember all this all the time because we're so busy and we're trying to remember all the client sizes and what ruffles they don't like on their shirt and who likes this type of neckline and who doesn't and all that.

You need to have systems in place to do that for you because your brain can only do so much. Same is true of your sales skills. Your sales skills need to become something that are just so incredibly ingrained in you that closing sales with or without your marketing actually warming people up is not a problem.

That means you now have power in every room you step into in every single place where you meet someone and they're interested in what you're doing, when you're at your kid's school and it comes up that you're a stylist and they're like, “Oh man, I could use one of those.”

When you have sales skills that feel like they're just part of you, they're not even gross, they're not “salesy,” I don't even know what that means, but you're not manipulating people, we're asking people more questions to get to what they really want, then we're making an offer, when you have that, the whole world changes and your marketing gets better.

Because you don't need your marketing in the same way and your sales skills and the conversation you have as a result of those sales skills end up informing your marketing really, really quickly.

The next thing that can very much look like a marketing problem—but it is not—is having a deep mastery of your services. Now, I think one of the ways that we can get ourselves mixed up on this is that I am not saying that you are not good at what you do, that you don't get results for your clients, 1,000%, I have not worked as a stylist yet that doesn't know that they're a good stylist, that doesn't get their client's results. That's not the issue.

The issue is that we often, because it's so instinctual to us what we do, don't stop after we get mastery of being a stylist, after we get over this first phase of learning to be a stylist, learning to do a closet edit, learning to shop for a client, those types of things, we often don't go back to the beginning and look at why we have the offers we have and how they are fitting in with the audience that we most want to serve.

So when you lack a deeper mastery and understanding of your service, you're not lacking an understanding of styling or how to get the result, you're lacking an understanding of how the way you've packaged those skills get the people that you want to work with an end goal.

We tend to say things like, “When you work with me in this package, you'll get nine fully styled looks,” “You'll have a season of new clothes,” or “I will shop for you and edit your closet and you'll walk in and feel like it's great.” That's not what sells a service.

What sells a service is when you tap into somebody's identity, when you tap into why that person wants that thing. It's easy to say confidence because, sure, top-line level confidence is the result of having a style that is fully your own, but it's more like confidence so that you can.

What comes after the can in that sentence is where you show your deeper mastery and understanding of your services and your target market. So if you can, to pick out aspects and pieces of your service to address the pain points that your client experiences on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis as a result of them not having the clothes they want, then you probably don’t have a deep enough mastery of how your service is packaged.

You’ve likely, like all of us, myself included, went and were like, “Oh, those seem to be the services that most stylists have,” then you didn't stop and think about how you can refine them, how you can make them better.

This is why I say often when I see people going back to change their services because they're thinking, “Well, what I have is an exciting people,” that's actually not the problem.

It's because you haven't dug into your service enough. You haven't refined it. You haven't made it better. You haven't added interesting elements to it that are going to surprise and delight your ideal client.

Because if you did that, you would have no lack of things to talk about in your marketing. But we blame our marketing when really what's missing is a deeper understanding of how our package is working, how it gets results.

It's not that it doesn't get results. It's that we're not able to say the specific ways that it gets results in a way that captures the emotion of our ideal client. Because what people do is they buy from an emotional point and then they justify that purchase with facts.

When you give them, “Well, my service gives you 19 fully styled outfits,” or “My closet edit will have you feeling like you walked into a boutique in the morning,” that's not the thing that grabs their heart. That’s more of the logical brain, and we have to tap into the emotional brain before we tap into the logical brain.

I talk a lot about this in Income Accelerator because we are taught that, for example, educational content will show how we—and I have struggled with this over the years—I really lean towards educational content because it's easy for me. It's just something that works in my own brain. I can come up with it quickly. I feel like it's valuable. I feel like it's valuable.

But it's not about what I feel like. It's what the other person needs to feel like to buy so that they can get the result, so that they can feel confident in their life in the ways that matter to them and the circumstances that are relevant to them.

So when we don't know how to look at our service and zoom out and say, “Okay, I know I have this because this is what ‘stylists’ have in their service menu, this is what it looks like to be a stylist,” when we get to the next level as a stylist and as a business owner, you then become someone.

It doesn't matter how long you've been styling, it matters how deep your business acumen is, then you become someone who says, “Okay, I have mastery over how to be a stylist. Now let me package these skills in a way that hits people's hearts so that they can opt-in faster.”

So your marketing will express that. Your marketing will be the vehicle through which you talk about that for sure. But if you don't have an understanding of the service and how and why you're packaging it the way you are, then you're stuck with having marketing tactics, but nothing to put into those tactics to get your client to a place emotionally where they feel connected to you and buy.

Here's an example. You work with an ideal client who is a personal brand. You work with women who are entrepreneurs who are personal brands. Say part of your process is color analysis, I had a lot of this on my own. I did virtual color analysis through a different company because I didn't have color analysis certification.

I could just say, “Oh, you get color analysis with the service,” and I think it's so valuable. I think it's obvious that people that are personal brands need that. But if I was going to talk about this from a place of service mastery, from truly understanding how this package is developed, the styling package is developed for people that are personal brands, I would say something like, “One of the things that I hear from my clients often is that they have to travel for events because they're a personal brand, they're an entrepreneur, whatever they are, they are speaker.”

When you have to get on the flight to go somewhere and you feel like, “Oh, just like throw on yoga pants,” or whatever, and you don't really feel like wearing makeup, well, the truth is that you never know who you're going to sit next to on a plane.

So I get that you want to be comfortable, but one of the reasons why I developed my signature styling service, XYZ, for my clients, is because when we do color analysis, sure, it helps them look great on the stage, sure, it helps them look great in all these places, but what really it's great for is that no matter where you go, whether it's the grocery store, you're getting on a plane, you're going to feel incredible, even if you're not wearing that much makeup, because the colors that you're wearing closest to your face are going to light you up.

You're going to look like somebody that people want to get to talk to and know, which means that you're always going to be ready for the opportunities that will build your business.

Color analysis is really this opportunity for you to always be ready as a personal brand to make more, to be that person that just seems like the go-to person in your industry because you're totally lit up by your colors. That was like a little bit. I just made that up right now in this conversation.

But that's what this looks like. I could just say, “Oh, and my service has color analysis.” I have to do this work first. This is the thinking you have to do. This is the hard work that most people will never do, which is why they get stuck in their business, why I got stuck for years. I didn't even know to do this kind of thinking. This is what makes the difference.

Also, this is what helps my clients when we go over their services and we're refining them in the Income Accelerator. This is what helps them understand why it's not necessary often to have certain pieces of a styling service because it actually derails the client.

I had clients for years that really did not need closet edits because I was dealing with a group of people for whom their socioeconomic status was such that having a decluttered life, having an organizer, having these things was a part of their identity. It wasn't a thing that they needed, they didn't need me to get rid of stuff. They were already there on their journey. They needed me to refine their style.

So knowing my client and knowing where they were in their style journey or how close they were to hiring me in terms of where they were in their belief system, that made an enormous difference in how I created my packages.

So I got rid of closet edits because quite frankly, they were annoyed by them. That's how well I knew my ideal client because most of 90% of my ideal clients were at a point where they had already edited out their closet and that was when they knew it was time to hire me.

I knew that because of all of the ways my systems helped me look into what was going on with them. That was a talking point I used often. When I used that talking point about my service, it signaled to them that they were for me.

There were plenty of people who asked me, “Would you do a closet edit?” I was like, “Yeah, that's fine.” But that was the minority and I didn't sell to the minority. I sold to the majority of the people that I wanted because they were the people on their buyer journey, they were closer to buying with me because they already had that awareness.

This is why you have to have an understanding of your sales skills of where your client is psychologically, all the things I talked about before, and you have to understand how that applies to the service. Now when you do your marketing, it's a different level.

Sure, you can have a hook tactic. Is it a carousel or is it not? But that is just what the wrapping of the actual content is. That's not the main event. The main event is me understanding how to talk about the thing.

Then the last reason where I think—and this is so true for everybody at every stage and I still am dealing with this on a daily basis—is that one of the reasons why we mistake a marketing problem for a deeper problem is because we truly are really needing to look at our self-concept.

The number one thing that I get asked, interestingly, about marketing when I ask, “What do you want to learn more about in marketing or what do you want to learn more about in your business?” when I do Q&As, it's like consistency. I'm like, “Well, how do I actually teach people consistency?”

You just have to decide that you're a consistent person is what I've been thinking to myself. This has really been something that I thought a lot about is I give a lot of people tactics, strategies, and how come some of my clients do really well and take it and run? And how come some people have a lot of stories of they're stuck, it's too hard, blah, blah, blah.

I can have three calls in a day and have two clients that I'm giving them the exact same thing, and they're killing it, then one that just isn't willing to even get out of their own resistance to try the thing. The number one reason I have realized is because of their self-concept.

One of the reasons why I think that one-to-one coaching and consulting in this space is something that I have thought more and more about doing less of is because I actually think that being in a group is the thing that helps people's self-concept go the fastest.

Because when someone's in a one-to-one relationship in a business coaching situation, they're expecting you, which is fine, to give them all the tactics and the tools. You do that. You give it to them. I do that all the time.

Then they go and do it and it's not working. They're thinking, and this happens to all of us. We take a course. We took a class. We go to some expert and we want to learn the thing. Then when we do it, we feel like it's not working.

Now, sometimes we're lying to ourselves and we're not actually doing it the way the person told us to, we're cutting corners and telling ourselves, “That's fine.” But nine times out of ten, and I heard Tony Robbins talking about this, the reason why is because what is missed in 90% of the time when people give us a strategy, a course, or whatever, is that we don't tell them who they need to be, the thoughts they need to think in order to get there.

So when I had an online styling course for people that were personal brands, one of the things I changed in it that made an enormous difference was the first module was about how to shift your identity, how to look at this information.

It wasn't just, “Oh, you're going to learn how to make outfits.” I wanted them to look at when they were making outfits, what were the thoughts that were coming up? Because that was the issue.

It wasn't the outfits. It wasn't the clothes. It wasn't the access to clothes. We all know that. It's never the budget, you can go buy secondhand. There are a million ways you can do this in terms of getting the style you want. But the thing that will hold all of our clients up as a stylist is their thoughts about it. It is absolutely the same thing in our businesses as stylists.

I have clients who really struggle to do the deeper connection work of the emotions like in their marketing. They think, “What's going on?” Or they do it once or twice and talk about things beyond, “Here's my outfit, here's some places you should shop,” they start to go a little bit deeper, they don't get the same type of reinforcement that they get from the links and the outfits and showing their outfit every day where everybody wants it and where they got their pants from.

That's fine once in a while but that doesn't make them a buyer, that makes them a consumer of your content. When you are working on your self-concept, you have to be someone in your marketing, in every aspect of your business, including one-on-one client consults, who believes they can sit with the discomfort of ambiguity.

Because nine times out of ten, people are not rejecting you, they just don't care. If you can code silence as, at worst, ambiguity, you're not even registering to them, or at best, a silent lurker, which is what 90% of the people that have hired me in both of my careers are, I have people watching me, every time I put out content and I don't get a response, you know what I tell myself, someone's watching this that's going to be ready to work with me or to get the transformation or to have me style them at some point when I was a stylist.

The more I believe that, the more it is true. Why? Because when look at my self-concept from that view, not like, “Oh, I did a bad job,” but like, “Okay, this is just one more opportunity for someone who wants to work with me to get to know me better, for me to make them feel safe, for me to make them feel understood, whatever it is,” when I look at it from that point of view with my own self-concept, now my marketing issues go away.

Now my consistency isn't a problem. Now, consistency is just, I'm just a consistent marketer, like that's just what I do. Why? Because I know I don't have a business if I don't market.

If I have very inconsistent income and I have some clients sometimes and no clients other times, yeah, that's a financial issue. But it's also going to take a huge toll on your self-concept.

This is why I think it's easy to think, “Oh, it's a marketing issue about my consistency because I haven't found the right formula, the right tactic, the right framework.” But that's not true. Because if you were someone who believed about yourself that you were a consistent person even when no one was clapping for you or me or anyone, because I used to be this person, then it wouldn't even be in your frame of reference to think that consistency was a marketing problem.

You probably, like me, have issues in consistency in many areas of your life. For me, it's like I really struggle with eating in a consistent way healthily. I really struggle with exercise in a consistent way. So what do I do? I put in the systems I need to do that.

I need accountability. I have a Pilates teacher. I need a nutritionist. That's someone I'm going to hire. I need coaches so that I actually sell things and don't screw around in my business and get on Canva.

I put in the things I need. As I do that, I become someone whose self-concept is such that works out, that sells all the time, that eats healthy. But when we look for the tactic instead of looking for the self-concept first, we will constantly grab at the wrong thing and then wonder why it doesn't work for us.

So I hope that this is really, really helpful. I think all of us fall into this. I think every new level that you get to in your business, these things can come up again, so it's just really good to remember.

Also to just remind yourself that when you're looking at it from this perspective, like, “Maybe I need to look at something deeper in my business plan. Maybe I need to look at something deeper in how I sell. Maybe I need to look at my self-concept. Maybe I need to create deeper and better relationships with the clients that I have,” it takes a lot of the anxiety off of the marketing because it's so public.

It's like how we're publicly showing up in our business, and we can just relax and have more fun. Because if I am creating crappy hooks for a year and a half, and my business is still at six figures, you're really not going to break your business. The only way you're going to break your business is if you don't show up, if you don't do the foundational work.

The thing is, once you do it, it's not like you have to do it all the time. You do it, then when you're ready for a new growth phase, you go back and you have the system to look at it again. It's not a big deal. Nothing has gone wrong.

It's just like our clients shouldn't expect that they have the same clothes forever. We shouldn't have the same business forever. Our business should be a reflection of our growth. That can only happen if we're looking at the right things in our business and reaching for the right things in terms of tactics when we have our business handled. I will talk to you in the next episode.

Thank you so much for hanging out with me. It turns out that social proof is actually pretty important. So if you could help me out, I'd so appreciate it. If you just had a quick free moment and could leave me a rating or review on the podcast app, that would be killer. And even better, if you wanted to share this episode on Instagram and tag me, that would totally make my day and it would bring so much more awareness to the podcast and would help other stylists just like you who are looking to build lucrative styling business because the better each of us does, the better all of us do. Thanks for hanging out with me and I'll chat with you next time.