PODCAST SHOWNOTES

Nicole Otchy: 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 snooze fest business advice that most personal stylists get told all of the time. No, 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 are the stylists that are absolutely killing the game right now doing? What do they have in common? How do they move? What kind of things do they think on a daily basis that gets them to where they are? That's what we're going to talk about today, because I've seen so many stylists in my career, both in this business and as a stylist when I mentored people. And I have some insights into that that I think will be valuable for you to hear, no matter where you are. The stylists I'm talking about are very consistent in their income. Some of them, most of them, I think all of them, I'm thinking of are six figures, some of them well, well past $100,000, $250,000 in that range. What do they have in common? So I think that one of the reasons this episode is so valuable is because when we are new to business and I can say this a hundred about my own identity, we don't realize how much of the work is identity work. And I would be remiss if I did not say that it's not just strategy, it's strategy and identity work. Lots of us call it mindset, but I think that mindset often neglects the fact that you can't just think the thought, you have to follow through on the thought in your actions to make it part of your identity. Why? Because identity is what you do all the time. It's who you are. When you stay in the world of mindset, you stay in the world of thoughts, but identity and consistency in actions that keep people and get people to six figures in their business as a stylist, that requires a constant understanding of yourself as a certain type of person, in order to get consistent results. One mindset shift may make your mood a little better and maybe that impacts your actions, but it is when you stick with something, even when it doesn't feel good, that it becomes an identity pattern. Today, I'm going to give you an outline of the types of behaviors of people that are stylists at top of their game, are in demand and how they move in the world as a result of the identity that they have lived into and that is exactly why they get the results they do. So what does it look like? Let's get into it.

Number one is they make moves in their business without evidence. They do not wait for people to clap for, you know, the money to be there, that's a big one I see. Like they make moves without evidence. How do you become someone that makes moves without evidence? You become someone that deeply trusts yourself. You become someone that really knows how to listen to yourself. And if the idea that you have or the thing you put out in the world, whether that be a marketing message, a service, an offer, whatever, doesn't blow up the first time, which it pretty much never does. That's not how this works. You trust yourself to pick yourself up, dust yourself off and keep it moving. And the thing about making moves in your business without evidence, is that this often very much looks like investing before you're ready. And that can look in a lot of different ways. But what I see a lot of is people that are stuck, have a very specific way of speaking about investments, or how they think about things, that keeps them exactly where they are. And when I hear people say things like, oh, you're on my wish list, or one day and all that, that's very flattering and I love that. But what I also hear in that comment that I obviously don't tell people one on one is that they are waiting to become the person that makes the investment, when they've already become the person. So you don't make an investment in something that you want to learn if you already have the money. Like if you need to learn how to make consistent income in your business, but you don't have that skill set, you can't wait to have the income to learn the skill set that will get you there. That's not how it works. You have to make the investment, get the skill set and then the money shows up. That's how this works. And so when you make moves in your business without evidence, you become someone who deeply trusts themselves to always figure it out, as I've talked about in past episodes and to always trust yourself to get the most out of your investments. Now, this doesn't have to just be coaching, it can be plenty of other things. But when you become that person, right, that trust yourself to make the investment, or to launch the service, without any evidence that people want it, right, all of those things require you to be a different kind of person.

And why they get my clients to the level of success and consistent success that it does is that they are not waiting for outside things to validate them, in order to make moves. And it took me so long to get this about myself. And I can tell you right now in my business, as I get to a whole other level and as I'm kind of experiencing this, it could be a little jarring to be getting to the next level and thinking, okay, I know what comes next in this business. I know what comes next for me. I particularly look at the industry as a whole and I think, okay, we're here. I want to get us here. What do I have to do to get us there? Right. And not just in my business, but like as a culture, how do I get us there? And when that's what you're trying to do, there is no evidence that what you're doing is going to work, because if there was, we'd already be there, right? And so the level of self-trust that I have to get into at the next level that I'm heading into in my business, it's a whole practice. It's a whole practice. And so how do you become someone that trusts themselves more?

Well, I spend a lot more time off the internet than I do on. I only let people in my life that lift me up. And that has meant a lot of people very close to me, including family members, are no longer there, right? I don't talk about my business socially, very rarely. I have two best friends that are marketing here in New York and I'll talk about it a little bit with them, but I don't, I have coaches, I have business friends, I don't talk about it. I don't have any time or room for somebody to plant a seed of doubt in me. I don't care if it's my mother. I don't care if it's my husband. It ain't up for, it's not up for grabs. So in order to build self-trust, you have to get your circle… has to be full of people that they don't have to rah-rah you. They don't have to, because you don't need that when you're this person, right? It's nice to have, you don't have to have it to be successful, but they absolutely do not, do not, it's non-negotiable, chill around people that could bring the vibe down, or that have any interest in second guessing. In my particular case, my view on this is like, you don't need to even know about it. But if you do know about it, I'm not interested in your opinion if it's not like, this is amazing. How's it going to work? I'm excited for you. That's it. So that is a really good place to start on your pathway there. And it's so cool to see stylists that are creating offers and doing really cool things. And here's a big one I see with these people. They're, you know, thinking about bringing on team members. They're starting to have to really become the CEO. They're teaching them how to market for themselves. They're teaching them how to get, you know, their own clients. And that requires them to really step into a whole new level of skills and strategy. And they, you know, they don't have any evidence that these people are going to generate more money for their business, but they believe in it, because they believe in themselves. So that is an enormous, enormous part of the identity of these stylists.

The next one is that the stylists that are really at six figures consistently and making really good incomes is that the people that they're talking to in their marketing, are very different from the people that are struggling with consistency. And I've really noticed this a lot, when I'm on social media and I'm like scrolling through, because I mostly only follow stylists on that account. And I can usually pick out the stylist who I even without ever having talked to them, or know them, is probably doing pretty consistent five figure months. Like it's just pretty or multi five figure months. It's it's pretty easy to see. And it's because they are talking to people that aren't in a, like a mired in problems state about their style. They're talking to people that want to use their style. They're aware that they have a problem. They're aware that their style isn't working at the level that they would like it to, for where they want to go. But they're not talking to the person that's trying to overcome the problem still. They are not talking to the person, who doesn't like their body and nothing looks good on it and they are kind of not in a place in their marketing, where they believe it's their job and I agree with this, to transform somebody's belief about themselves, in order to hire them. And they don't have services, I'm going to guess, from the people that I know and the people that I like watch online. My guess is that like no part of their identity shows up in their service as like, I have to save you from your negative body beliefs with my styling offer. They're not using the word transformation as code for, let me fix your self-esteem. This is critical.

The language of someone who's not going to easily, consistently call in the type of client that's going to get you $10,000, $12,000, $20,000 a month is not the stylist that's saying things like, do you have nothing to wear? Do you get so anxious every time you go shopping? Do you always hate how everything looks on your body? No, no, no, no. Why? Why is that not a great client to be calling in in your marketing? You're thinking, well, Nicole, they have a problem. Yes, but there are people that are far closer on the buying journey, which is something I talk about a lot in Income Accelerator, how to know where a client is on their buying journey so that your marketing is hitting people at a warmer point, so that they're converting faster. When you talk to people that are over here in the experience of not liking their body, you're talking to somebody that needs to overcome the belief that there is something in the world that could look good on them. They need to overcome the belief they can trust you, which is something most people have to overcome, no matter where they are on the buyer's journey. That that you're the person to lead them, in finding that piece and they have to become someone, they don't even realize this, but they have to become someone, who has an open enough mind that they're willing to let go of the belief that everything looks crappy on them. Because there's no way that you can go in there, with a styling client, in a four six week eight-week styling, you know, container and transform decades, decades of mindset work. You can't. And you may get an okay outcome with that person. They might, you know, find a few brands they like, you know, it's fine. But what the problem from a business perspective with marketing to that person is what you get is buyers, not believers.

And this is another thing I talk about a lot with my clients. You don't want buyers. Buyers, just getting a whole bunch of buyers means that you don't have a bunch of repeat clients. Believers are repeat clients. Believers are people that say, whatever you've got coming up, whatever you're putting out, I'm buying. And I'll be honest with you, that's what most of my clients are. They're believers, because of the amount of work I do on my messaging and the conversations that I'm having with people. And that wasn't always the case for me in my career as a stylist. But when I started to do specific things in my marketing, like talk to people who didn't want styling to fix their problems, but instead to go towards the pleasures and the excitement and the highest, most radiant versions of themselves, I got believers. Because we just mistake what is possible, what is possible in a styling container, particularly since most of us are not therapists, most of us are not psychologists, right? We also don't understand how change actually happens in human beings, which is something I'm going to be talking about even more. But you can't do something once. You can't just buy new clothes and take on the identity of the person that is super confident and likes their body and whatever. They have to live in those clothes. This is what embodied cognition is about that people don't really get about this, is that if you want to use that principle in your marketing, you have to make sure that everything that's in your marketing and in your process and all of that reflects this, that in order for somebody to use style and the transformation that you, or other stylists are creating, to step into the next version of their identity, you have to have identity work in the process. And that isn't just looking at a Pinterest board. That's something that most of us don't even understand or know how to do, because of course they don't, that's not what most people think.

That's why when I did the transformational versus transactional episode, I talked at length about the difference in those services, because most of us are not set up, unless we do the research and the work, to create the type of offer that truly, truly transforms people at the level that we promised. Like now you're going to have good self-esteem. You're going to know what you deserve. Like if they have 40 years of not knowing what they deserve, or not liking themselves, you think that eight hours with you over three weeks or whatever is going to change that? Please don't do that to yourself and don't do it to them. But you can still have a successful styling business and not promise that. And in fact, you can make even more money, if you're talking to them from a place of, hey, I know that potentially you could acknowledge these are the things you're dealing with. And the people that get the most out of my styling services, are people that want their styling experience to help them get to X, Y, and Z, to have this experience in their life, that's hopeful and positive, that doesn't require you to completely make over all their beliefs about themselves. Because true embodied cognition and that idea of like getting dressed and it impacting your psychological state, means that the person has to identify in their mind the positive state they want to go towards and the clothes that fit that state.

So what we don't do often as stylists is spend enough time talking about what they want their life to look like in these clothes and your marketing can start to prime people there. And stylists that do really, really, really well, help prime their audience in their marketing for getting excited and focusing what the clothes are going to be experiencing, if you will, when they put them on their body after hiring the stylist. They're talking not about getting rid of all their body issues, but about how they can go to these fancy events and feel like they belong and finally start charging XYZ as an entrepreneur and be in rooms with seven-figure entrepreneurs and go to masterminds with Russell Brunson, or whatever that looks like for your ideal client, because of your niche. And those things never even slip into their mind anymore. Versus saying, when you work with me, I will help you fix all of your, you know, self-esteem problems. You'll be a confident person. You know what? Like, maybe. But confident people become confident, because of the actions that they take. So that is the hugest difference I see, because when you create that kind of a believer, not just a buyer, by getting them excited about what's possible for them, when the clothes are on their body, because you're giving them the detailed vision of that world, they stay with you longer. Because those are people that become repeat clients as a result of their identity. And their identity is such and you can get them, you know, warm them up more towards us in your marketing, but their identity is such that those are people that are constantly trying to evolve. They're constantly trying to become better. They're constantly trying to get to the next level, which means they're constantly going to have to upgrade their style.

So when you talk to the person that's like the stuck stay-at-home mom, I'm not saying she doesn't deserve help. I'm saying that that's probably, if you don't get her from the place of feeling stuck, before she works with you in your marketing, if you don't get that person empowered, they're not going to be somebody that becomes a repeat buyer from you. And so many stylists that struggle, do not have the percentage of repeat buyers they need, to be able to do the other things in their business that they need to sustain that six figures. So by the stylists that I see really killing the game, staying to a market that is much more about getting excited and not solving the problem, they end up creating longer term buyers. And some of them realize that some of them don't, some of them realize it, because I've talked about it. But that is the thing. Because when you have longer term buyers, when you have believers, like I said, versus buyers, versus one time buyers, what happens is, you now have more room in your day, to create really good messaging, to create really good marketing. Because believers stay with you longer and pay more money. Because they're coming from an overflow of abundance of what's possible, not from a feeling of lack that they need to fix. So that is a critical part of the marketing piece.

The next one is that they don't wait for people to give them permission, or for their audience to ask, or for their clients to ask, before they launch something. They don't wait for their coach, they don't wait for their consultant, they don't wait for anyone to give them permission. They're not sending me every single little post that they do, asking if it's good, which isn't even something I offer anymore, because it doesn't make, that's not how you get better. You get better and you become a multi-six figure entrepreneur by putting things out there and being willing to be shitty at it, in order to be great. No one post that you put out there, no one message is going to save your business and none is going to break your business. And that's the best news ever. And they know that, so they don't wait for permission. They don't wait for a client to say, oh, do you have this service before they put it on their menu. And if the client does ask for it and they don't want to do it, or it's not in alignment with the overall vision of their client journey that they have in their business, they don't do it. So they don't ask me for permission. They don't ask their audience for permission. They don't wait for people to tap the polls, or interact with them, in order to create the content. They may ask them like, hey, do you want to see this, or do you want to see this on my Instagram stories? And if people respond, they'll give them what they want. But if they don't, they're still going to put out the content. They don't wait for permission.

Why is this so important? Well, an energetic level is important, because then they tend to attract a client that doesn't need to ask their husband for anything. That doesn't need to, you know, make sure that they're getting compliments from everyone in their office, in order for them to decide that their styling experience was a success. Because that is a critical question that I have all my stylists ask. What would make this a success for you? That is why the systems and the questions that you ask completely, completely determine your success in business. Because if you know the answer to that, you can know if that person is going to be a good client and you can take the answers to that question, drop it in your marketing and completely attract the right client. That's why you don't wait for permission from anyone to tell you, you know your client so well, you know what your business is doing, you know why your business is doing what it's doing, you will not become somebody that needs permission. And that's what these stylists that are killing the game are doing. They're just killing it.

The other thing that they do, this is the next point, is they just act. They just take action. They take massive action all the time. We get on a strategy call, by at like one o'clock, by three o'clock, they're on Instagram stories doing the thing. These are my clients and they don't just do it once. They do it all the time. They don't just do it for two weeks, they do it for 90 days, they do what they have to do immediately. And they don't think, okay, I got to get it perfect. I got to have the website up. I got to do all those things, or I have to say it perfectly. They may say it not so perfectly. And then the next time we talk, they say, I didn't really say it right. I'm thinking about saying it this way, what do you think? Again, they don't ask me for permission to change it. They ask for my input. That's a very different vibe. And they're going to show up and do it regardless. Because they have full agency. I'm telling you right now, action takers are money makers. Period. If you are someone that sits in perfectionism, this is going to be the thing that keeps you from making multi-five figure months. Like it just will. And as someone that doesn't come to quick action very easily, it's not really perfectionism anymore. It's because I don't, I am very specific about what I offer in my business for a very particular reason. Like I'm not out here making offers to people, telling you that like, I'm going to give you a PDF of a marketing, you know, hack and it's going to take you to six figures. Like I'm not lying to people about that stuff. So I don't offer just like whatever kind of services to make myself money. And I don't recommend my clients do either.

And so as a result of that, there's a difference between being thoughtful in your messaging, right, and kind of like going a little bit slower, so that you're being deliberate and just procrastinating or be a perfectionist or just not taking action and using it as an excuse. I've had people tell me like, well, I hear what you're saying, but I'm just really specific about getting it right. You can't get it right until you get it wrong. You can't really get good at things, until you're willing to test them and action takers test things. They don't take any one thing, like I said earlier, as the be all and end all of their business and that means that their business continues to brand new leads, continues to have new energy. They have more things to be excited about, right? And that doesn't mean that they're messy or they're sloppy. Like we're talking about this. They have a coach, they have a consultant, they have a strategist, right? We're making sure that it's like the things they're saying connect to their offer, but they're not expecting it to be perfectly said, in order to get results, because that's never how it is. And they know this really important thing about human psychology and that is that nothing is quote-unquote perfect in the world, unless the other person that you're talking to, has an understanding of what the thing should look like. Only stylists know what the quote-unquote perfect thing is in their head because they know what a styling offer that they want to create looks like. But your clients only care about what they're going to get out of the experience, who they're going to get to be in the world, what it's going to do for them, how they're going to be able to now feel like they could actually go on dates and not wonder, like, does my outfit look like trash the whole time, right? They don't care what the offer is. They don't. And so that's why you really got to just believe in yourself enough to the first point that you just take action and the evidence shows up. You just make the investment and the cash comes. That's how you get to the next level.

The next thing about these stylists that I notice is that they're action takers, but they also take action on very specific things. So they spend the majority of their time on income generating activities. So they don't wait if they're going to launch, like I have a client that's about to launch like a kind of like a mastermind, a very small mastermind for stylists. It's a really cool idea. And it's actually for her established clients. So I think sometimes we really are not very creative or original about how we think about our established clients and what could be possible for them. Because we're like, oh, I got them a season 4 of outfits, I guess they're done. You're not digging deep enough if that's how you're thinking about your established clients. Like, oh, they'll just need a little shop. No. If you have the right client, they're going to want to really go deeper on multiple levels. So this stylist really had this intuition. She wanted to do this. We were like, yes, let's do it. We built out the whole offer. She started taking action. She started reaching out to people, started marketing it. And what she didn't spend time doing, because she was really busy, she had a full load of other clients, was screwing around with the website page, was, you know, doing all these launch emails and getting them perfect. She just went ahead, put it in a Google Doc, wrote the whole thing out, had her assistant put it in Canva, look nice, made a PDF and shot it out to her clients. This is something I do often. If you're in my established client world, this will not surprise you to hear that she did this. This is something I've done and it's what I did for a full year and a half with the Styling Consultancy without a website. Why? Because I know a website doesn't make me money. I make me money. My messaging makes me money. My Instagram account and how I talk to people there makes me money. This podcast makes me money.

Now, like I said, there's a reason for me to now go and have a website, because I have a podcast and I have SEO show notes. Now someone else is doing that for me in the background. But I don't spend my days, nor do my clients that are, you know, making consistent income months that are doing $10,000, $15,000 a month, they are not messing around with their own websites. That's just not what you do. It's way more valuable for me to spend an hour on a coaching call with my coaches, who are making a million dollars a month, than it is for me to screw around with the website page. When you become someone that does not screw around with the things that don't make a difference in your business, your business becomes different. The way you move in the world becomes different. And the people that really invest big money in styling services can see that about you. They can see that about you. Everyone thinks it has to be quote-unquote perfect in order to launch it. But that's not what your clients want. Your clients want to know that you see them so deeply that the words on that PDF are exactly what they've been wanting that they may not have even known they needed. That's the difference. Because it doesn't matter if it's on the website, or if it's on a PDF, or it's on your Instagram story. It just matters that you're saying the right things to the right people. Eventually, yes, it will go on a website somewhere when she has the time. But she had a $30,000 launch of that mastermind on a PDF. Like I have $20,000 a month without a website. It's not a problem. So when you get stuck with the website, when you get stuck with, think to yourself like, what could I be doing that could be generating way more success, way more energy, way more income in my business that's not playing in Canva? What am I avoiding right now? And honestly, you can't even know this until you know that this is like something that's possible that you might be doing. So just the awareness of it's going to skyrocket. Just the fact that you're listening to this and hear this now, going to change the game for you. So I'm super excited about that.

One of the biggest things that I notice, just to kind of wrap this up about my clients that are making the most of my money, is that they understand that obstacles and self-doubt and lack of belief, are like part of the game. That's what I always tell my clients. If you deeply doubt something, if you're super excited about it, you go, you start doing it and as you're in the middle of doing the thing, whether it's the marketing, or the messaging, or the strategy, as you're trying to live it out, you feel self-doubt, nothing has gone wrong. Now, if it was an offer you kind of had like sick to your stomach about and you kept going, you kept doing it, you're not listening to your intuition, fair. That's a different conversation. But I'm saying you're excited. This happens to all of us, right? We launch a business. We're so excited. We put up the website. We make a big deal, like doing all this stuff behind the scenes. We do a big launch. No one really cares, because people only care about themselves, right? Maybe our parents care, but that's about it. What happens is when these types of doubts come up for my clients, what they do, how they act, is they take it in stride. Maybe they have a few hours where they feel like crap and they, you know, we talk it through. Maybe they give themselves, you know, half a day and they go for a walk or whatever. They blow it off. Maybe they get some bad criticism from a client. Maybe somebody doesn't resign that they thought would. Whatever it looked like. Their launch didn't quote unquote go as well as they wanted to. What they always know, even if they feel disappointed, is that the disappointments and the things that don't go according to plan in the life things that are inevitably going to come up, when you're trying to grow a business, they're not excuses for them to stop, they're evidence of why they need to keep going. Because we talked at the top of this episode about identity, about not becoming someone that's placated by a few small wins. Like I am not here for stylists to be excited about having two clients a month and not knowing where their next client is going to come from, day in and day out.

Honestly, I think that six figures should be your bare minimum. I think that when we just try to make $50,000 or $30,000, we play too small and we don't take the massive action and learn the types of lessons we need, to actually get where we want to go. Now, I'm not saying you're going to come out the gate never having been a stylist before making $90,000 the first year. That's not what I'm saying. But if you've been in the game for three years, four years, five years and you see, there's nothing in sight to indicate that you are anywhere near six figures, you are not taking big enough action, especially if you've worked with at least a dozen clients. And if you are taking action, my question is, do you let small things, or even big things, deter you from getting back on the horse and starting again? So I just did a launch. It did pretty well. I did not make the numbers that I hoped and I am so excited, because you know what I get to do now? I get to take everything I learned in that launch, polish it up and apply it to my next launch and make it better. And that's what stylists that are constantly getting to the next level in saying they're doing, is that it's not that they don't have negative feelings. It's not that they don't experience negative emotions or setbacks or that their kids are, you know, never get sick and they, you know, all of a sudden have all the time in the world. That's not what, that's not the truth about successful people.

It's that even in the face of those things, they don't let it knock them down. And that they understand that those things are not evidence that they should stop. They're evidence that if they get through it and if they look at it as ways to get better, they will in fact get better. And that your identity is the result of what you do not once, not twice, not a few mindset shifts, all of the time. And so the biggest thing that has changed my life, more than motherhood, more than anything else, is becoming someone and it's why I did those episodes very early, is that if you become someone who always figures it out, who understands that there is no, like, it doesn't, there's no easy path here. There's no, oh, I posted one Instagram story and it made $100,000 a month. Nobody's telling you the truth that tells you that. They're just not. Because I've worked with some of those coaches. And what they don't tell you is there's $90,000 worth of people in the background running those ads, doing those things, that's getting them to that amount of money that they're telling you their one Instagram story got. And it's also a decade worth of figuring out the messaging.

So what is so important is that we learn and become, as soon as possible, it doesn't matter how long we've been in the game, doesn't matter, we become people that are willing to stick with things, when they feel uncomfortable and tell ourselves, literally brainwash ourselves into believing and knowing that this is just making me better. It's not like you work out once and lift weights and when you're sore, you think, well, that was good enough, I guess I won't do it next week. Like you're not going to get results, right? And it's the same thing in business. It's even more the case in business. You're going to have so many feelings in a day as an entrepreneur. And if you make them mean something they don't mean. If your vision is not big enough. That's why I use the kind of terminology about six figures that I use. Quite frankly, I'm about ready to get to like 500,000 as the bottom line kind of messaging now, because I want you guys thinking so much bigger. Why? Because when you think really big and you miss your target, you still get super, super far. Right? Super far. Like I gave my accountant a number this year for my goal that I knew was like insanity. But the way that it changes my brain, every time I see the report, every time I see and the way that it clarifies for me, why I sit here every week and do this. I have never felt more connected to my belief in what I do in my life. I did start to feel that as a stylist in the last five years, but I still felt like something was missing.

And it was this. It was getting to this level. It was making an impact on the industry at this level. That was my calling. Doesn't mean it's your calling. But I need you to tap into the depth of the calling. What is it that you want to be known for, when this career of yours is over, whether by death or by, you know, retirement or whatever, what would you be the most proud, the most proud to look back on to have somebody say when you're not in the room about you, about your impact, about your career? If you cannot imagine that I tell you you're a millionaire tomorrow, a millionaire. And because you make so much money on just the interest of how much you've earned from your styling business, you now have all this time to be a true philanthropist, both with your time and your money. Who are you helping? What are you going to be most excited to handle first? What is it now, when you cannot earn any more money that you would be so excited to make the sort of transformation come alive in other people's lives for free? What is it? If you can't say that, answering either of those things, either of those sort of thought experiments for yourself, we're not going deep enough. Because we often launch businesses, because people say, oh, you're good at this and you should do this for a living. We get excited.

Like I remember I used to think I was going to be in malls all the time. Like I had this, someday I'll tell this episode on like the things I believed about being a stylist that are hilarious. Like that I was going to be, you know, eating lunch in Bloomingdale's all the time. I'm I don't even think I did that till I was like five years in and at that point I was like so tired I was like this is what I dreamed of, like, wow, way to keep it small, Nicole you're eating a sandwich in the Bloomingdale's in like DC somewhere, like, way to not like have big dreams, right. That's what I'm saying when I tell you guys these things I was the person that believed these things. So when I look at the stylists that are really killing the game, they're so tapped into. They can so quickly answer the question when I say, who do you want to be here serving at the highest level, no matter what? It doesn't mean they don't charge. It just means that the energy they bring to the experience is different, because they're not here for the $20,000 a month. They're here for the experience that the $20,000 a month creates for people. And that's why they killed the game. Because they're not just saying, well, I just want to make $5,000 this month. If you have “I just want to” in front of anything your goals are, we are not reaching high enough. We're just not high enough.

And I think a lot of times what's required of this is really looking at what the cost of our success is in our personal life. I'm not going to get into this a lot, but one of the things that my stylists that are really consistently at the next level do and then I see the stylists that are pretty close, but they're not consistent, is the ones that are at the next level and are consistent, have really acknowledged and dealt with what it would look like if they were successful. Because it's fun to think it's just going to be like rainbows and puppies and whatever. But my experience was, the more money I make and I experience that now, the better I do, the less people that I can really be around. And that's not because I'm so great, or because I've changed. It's because it makes a lot of people uncomfortable. That's why I never announced to my friends and family, you know, like that I started this business because I don't need their, I don't care what they think. I know it's going to be, I don't need them to pat me on the back. And that's also true of the stylists that I see consistently working on things, is that they're dealing with, you know, issues that come up in their marriage, because their partner is threatened, or they're dealing with the fact that there's certain family members at, you know, Thanksgiving that they can't really have, you know, share that their wins with, because it's like, oh, now you think you're so great.

Now, I hate to even bring this up because it's kind of negative, but it's also the things we don't talk about, when we talk about identity formation and becoming the next level of ourselves. And I don't want to give you only like a little bit of the picture. I want to give you the whole damn picture to be who you need to be. Now you also need strategies and you need other things. But if you start adopting the kinds of things we talked about today, your life is going to change and you are going to fall so in love with the process of building the business that you are capable of building. And that's what I want for every single one of you listening to this. So please come back to this episode, when you're having a hard day, or when you're thinking, how do I get to the next level? Do I need to get another Instagram course? Do I need to get new pictures? No, you don't. You need to become this person. And then when the money is consistent, those things are just icing on the cake. I'll talk to you 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.