PODCAST SHOWNOTES

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.

Welcome to a fresh episode. Today we're going to be diving into a topic that has literally been on my mind for nearly two years before I even started the styling consultancy.

Today we're going to talk about four critical factors that will impact your results in business as a personal stylist more than any other strategy, tip, pricing structure, styling, certification, trend, business formula I could ever give you.

I know that's a big claim, but these are the things that people often avoid talking about because they can feel uncomfortable and that's ironic because, in the styling industry, we often discuss the psychological connection to what we wear and how we present ourselves on the outside, these harder connections between our internal world and our external experience, but we often don't talk about some of the real and honest things that get in the way of our client success.

Interestingly, everything I'm going to talk about today gets in the way specifically of personal styling client success in the styling container and also what gets in the way of our own success as stylists.

I think that sometimes the conversations we have just don't go deep enough for people to get the results that they truly, truly could be experiencing and that is not what I want for any of you listening.

As we become more visible as business owners, we're going to have even more opportunities to grapple with some of the internal and external connections in our lives. What's happening behind closed doors versus what we're showing on social media. What's happening in our conversations with clients versus what we wish was happening in our business.

All of these things become almost more juxtaposed and it would be wrong of me to not be honest about that because getting to the next level requires a little bit of tension. That's how we get better. That's how we sharpen our skills and that's how we get to the next level of ourselves.

Today we're going to have an honest conversation about some of the topics that I have been advised not to discuss with clients or on this podcast because feeling silent about them does not feel right to me. So let's dive in.

One of the number one factors that will impact your success as a personal stylist is you understanding how to regulate your nervous system. This is first and perhaps the most critical factor in your success as a stylist, but also just as a human being, is learning nervous system regulation and being someone that does the inner work.

That's because we spend a lot of time telling our clients that they have to look inside and not listen to what other people say about them and listen to only themselves and be confident. But we don't really always give people the tools to do that as stylists, we just give them the clothes.

The clothes aren't tools if we're not getting their mindset right before they put the clothes on. That's really what our marketing can be doing. But on our own, day-to-day, lived experience, getting your mindset right isn't just meditating and saying affirmations to ourselves or doing things when it just feels good.

It's about really examining your relationships with seeking validation, with breaking codependent habits, and being able to sit with discomfort when you think people are unhappy with you, specifically your clients.

Nervous system regulation, in my opinion, is really one of the hardest human skills we can master because our biology is set up completely against it. I have been in therapy since I was six years old, but nobody talked to me about nervous system regulation until very recently in my 40s.

It's excruciating work. It's actually more excruciating than the six years of IBS and pregnancy loss that I went through but it is the most valuable because the more I do this work, the more money I can earn, the more I can have deeper and greater breakthroughs with and for my clients, the more I am a better mother, a better partner. I'm just a better person quite honestly from just working on nervous system regulation.

If that's literally the only thing that people worked on, I feel like our whole world would be better because we would be less reactive and would be able to sit with other people, including, and most importantly, our clients when they're having a reaction and not making it about us.

But why is it so important? Why? Because so much of how we all grew up is connected to our basic sense of safety in the world, especially when we become business owners and we are on social media.

It's not normal to have that many people perceiving you as you do with the internet. Because that's not what our brains are really wired for, our nervous system regulation goes wild when we have to own a business. That is why nine times out of ten, the story we tell ourselves about what is happening in our business has nothing to do with what is actually happening in the business.

That's because our nervous systems are not regulated long enough for us to sit down and look at the facts. But in the context of your styling business, this skill becomes critical when you are receiving negative client feedback or when you think you're about to get negative client feedback.

Often when clients ghost us or they sort of respond, we make it mean something that it doesn't. That's because of poor nervous system regulation. Here are some techniques that have really helped me to learn how to start regulating my nervous system.

The first is cold exposure. This is what I started using more recently and I really love it. It can be really as simple as putting your hands under cold water, using an ice cube on the back of your neck or an ice cube on your back. That can be super helpful to just break the thought loop that's going in your head and get you to kind of come back to reality.

Another one is deep breathing that focuses on exhaling longer than inhaling. That has shown to help regulate the nervous system. Another one is a grounding exercise that I can do really, really quick at my desk, which focuses on five things that you can see, four things you can touch, three things you can hear, two things you can smell, and one thing you could taste like a sip of water.

Just taking your brain and focusing it on your surroundings can make an enormous, enormous difference and just creating a break in the thought pattern that you're having, which can start to de-escalate how you are experiencing whatever the perceived setback is.

These techniques are so important because obsessive thoughts or rumination take us out of our bodies and allow us to just spin out and make up stories. When that happens, we forget that feelings are not facts. When you're doing these grounding techniques and you're doing cold exposure or deep breathing, I like to say to myself that feelings are not facts.

That's basically just code for, “This person could be giving me negative feedback. That doesn't mean you're a bad stylist. This person could be unhappy with me and that doesn't mean that I don't have a right to do this job. This person is being slow to or not replying to my emails. That doesn't mean that they hate me or that I should just give up.” Feelings are not facts.

The more you can couple that thought with some of these techniques about regulating your nervous system, the more you'll be able to start to examine your own behaviors. When that happens and you learn how to kind of break that cycle, you get better and better at it, which means when you're with a client in person or you're dealing with them having a meltdown about their weight and you feel like you have to fix it, you can actually take a beat and not jump into fixing mode and overdo it.

This is usually where we get in the way of our client's breakthroughs, is that we're trying to fix things for them that is not our business to fix. Learning how to regulate your own nervous system can just be so incredibly helpful in keeping us focused on what is our work versus what is our client's work.

Okay, factor number two that is going to drastically impact the results you get as a stylist. The number one most controversial thing I could probably say, your relationship with your partner, your romantic partner.

This is controversial and I have been advised not to bring it up, but it is crucial. Your relationship with your long-term romantic partner or short-term or whoever that person is for you will significantly impact your success as a stylist.

I have seen many talented stylists be held back often unintentionally and in a way that is not meant but is still the result by their partners. It's usually in not an overt way, but in a subtle, more covert way.

It's because the partner doesn't understand our industry or has beliefs about what's possible in this industry that are not based in anything factual or reality-based. I often hear stylists say things like, “My husband doesn't think that this is possible for me.” Or, “He doesn't think it's possible to make six figures.” Or, “It's fine for me to do this, but I still have to be able to figure out all the things with the kids and make sure the dinner's on the table,” or whatever the agreement was in the house long before they started their styling business.

I'm using heteronormative terms here because I will be honest, I see it more in the clients I work with that are straight. I'm not saying it doesn't happen in gay or lesbian relationships, or in other types of relationships, I'm just telling you what I'm seeing. I'm just telling you what I'm seeing.

To be clear, I'm not saying that anybody or any husband here has any ill intent. It's expensive to live in the world right now, and it makes sense that people worry about their finances or their childcare, but underneath it, I believe there's often a fear of being left behind or concern about “changing the agreements” in the relationship that's actually going on here.

What I've observed is that stylists who have the most supportive partners tend to progress the fastest and go the furthest. If you are constantly having to prove yourself or provide any litany of answers to inquiries about your beliefs about your business and what's possible for you where you're just trying to prove it to yourself, it will feel harder to build your business.

This really isn't about blaming anyone, but it is about recognizing that if it feels like you're trying to run a race with one leg tied to the other, because you have a partner who is not fully on board or doesn't believe in you, or even just offhandedly says things that deflate your confidence, you are, in fact, running a race that's harder. You are.

That's a truth that we need to address as women in business, but specifically as stylists because this is not a field that a lot of people understand as it is. It's hard enough to have family members or friends that make off-handed comments or go to Thanksgiving and have your uncle be like, "How's your little styling business?" I know. I've dealt with all of that. People still don't know what I do.

But when you have the person you live with, the person that you depend on, the person that maybe you're even financially dependent on, making little comments or planting seeds of doubt, which is not the same thing as asking you, “Hey, do you have a plan for this business?” that's not what I'm saying, but being like, “Does anybody even make six figures as a stylist? Is that even possible? Do you really need to work? I make plenty of money,” those are the types of things that we'll eat at you every single day. That will make your job harder. It just will.

My advice for this is that you need to have an open honest discussion with your partner about their potential fears about you changing and growing, what it does to the agreement that you might have made many years ago before you ever considered being a stylist, and just to really clear with yourself that your self-belief has to be unshakable.

Doesn't mean you have to be perfect at everything, doesn't mean you have to get everything right, but you do have to have somebody, me in this moment, acknowledge to you that that will hold you back and that it is an added stress to the building of the business because society in and of itself doesn't quite understand the validity of this career in a lot of cases. If you're already dealing with somebody day in and day out who you're dependent on, it will make it worse or harder.

I don't know, I'm a huge proponent of marriage counseling and relationship counseling. I'm not saying you have to do that. I'm just being honest that I have done that. I really highly encourage it because growth is scary for your partner. Growth is scary for you. Who wants to be in a relationship with someone that never changes?

Hopefully nobody here, nobody listening, because you can't be someone that tells other people as a stylist, “Don't listen to what everybody else thinks,” if you're always being taken down by your own partner's belief in you, because they're making underhanded comments.

Also, just note that if you feel the pressure of the people around you and what they think about you and your business, it's reasonable that your clients would feel that way about their own style. Just another point of us mastering things as stylists help us help other people master things as styling clients.

Factor three that will impact your success in business as a stylist, your relationship with wealth. Sure. You may think obviously how I experience money is so important to running my business and how much I earn, but I'm specifically talking about your beliefs about wealth. Not just having enough money, but in having more than enough money.

How do you feel about people with trust funds? How do you view people who got rich off of YouTube at 20? Do you automatically code having more money than you know what to do with as immoral or bad? It's okay if you do.

It's often society that kind of just offhandedly says that it is or is suspect, but it is something to examine internally because there will come a point when you will be stuck financially in your business, not because you don't understand strategy or pricing, but because of your beliefs about wealth.

You will get to a certain point, you'll be doing good enough, you'll be able to survive, but there are people and many of us get caught right at a point where it becomes more than enough.

This is really not, again, just about earning more money because we're like, “Oh, well, things cost more. I have to up my price as inflation.” That's not it. It's about being able to hold a level of responsibility and energy that comes with earning more, more than you need, more than you dreamed that you could.

We often struggle with holding real wealth or earning more than we actually need because it usually codes in our own mind as being expected to generate bigger results, to be a deeper of an expert, to navigate the world differently. I will tell you that earning more money, particularly when it's through a service-based business, often does mean you have to hold a new level of responsibility.

So we make a lot of things mean something negative about earning more than we need to, because at least, it keeps us safe from the weight of the responsibility that earning a lot of money holds in our mind.

Again, this is a practice. This is not something you're going to solve with one journaling session, but it's critical to examine because if you can neutralize your view on excess or wealth for the sake of wealth and just abundance, you'll be able to reach a different kind of client who also is in that state of mind and they tend to be a better and easier client to work with.

It will help you push past plateaus that aren't actually about strategy but are about you holding the energy of the next level. I have seen this again and again. It is work and a practice I do every time I start to earn more, every time I start to call in more clients, every time there becomes more visibility in this business, every time my Instagram account grows, every time I have more people in my DMs.

It's just about thinking, “Oh wait, I'm afraid that if I earn more money, I won't be able to serve people the way that I envision,” or “I am afraid I won't have any more energy left,” or “If I make this amount of money, it means this about me.”

It's a constant practice and every time I get a little bit more onto myself and a little bit more onto what the next level of my business is dictating in my head about how much I earn, what it means, where my blocks are, I have a breakthrough and I ease up a little bit on the tension around this and then maybe it comes back a little bit later when I create a new goal for myself.

Just knowing that that's going to happen and that's going to come up makes it so much easier to work through it because I'm just like, “Oh, this is part of the game. These are the rules of the game. This is actually how you play the game.” Nothing has gone wrong. It's not a problem.

It doesn't matter where you started with your income. It doesn't matter how you grew up. You can always rewrite this, but always look to notice first “What is the bad thing I associate with doing better, with earning more?” because your clients also do this.

They do this when they're afraid that people will notice them and give them attention for how good they look. We tell them, "Don't worry about it," but how absolutely human that they're afraid of the responsibility that that holds, that they're afraid of not wanting to give off the wrong message, not wanting to be rejected, not wanting to whatever.

They are just coding being seen in a new way in a negative way. It's fine. We just have to help them see it differently. That's the same thing about you earning more money. When you learn to earn more money and be comfortable with responsibility, the earning more means, usually in our message and usually in the transformation that we're promising, we can be a stand for our clients from a true place of integrity when we say things like, “Don't worry about other people like your outfit. Don't make compliments mean anything, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah,” because we're actually modeling that in our life.

Number four, the fourth thing that will deeply, deeply impact your results in your business is your relationship with visibility. I mean, obviously, we're stylists, so there are so many things I could say here about the connection, but this final factor, the one that I actually believe is the most crucial for stylists understanding what will block them from the next level is your relationship with visibility.

This isn't just about like being seen on camera or having a large audience or being afraid of a large audience. At its core, it's about being visible with just one other person or really letting people see us. This is something that we can struggle with even ourselves.

We can struggle to validate our own feelings. We can struggle to believe that we're worth it. We can struggle in all these different ways that make us feel like maybe we have imposter syndrome. They're all just a fear of visibility. That's why I started this episode off with learning to regulate your nervous system.

Because if you can do that skill, you can get better at visibility and busting through any visibility blocks that you have. Some of the ways that visibility issues or blocks or discomfort with the relationship of visibility can show up is discomfort in sharing processed experiences and lessons learned.

I am never going to get on here and tell you to just share things in the moment. There are people that share every negative experience they have while traveling or every bad customer service experience on their business account.

I get what you're trying to do, but number one, put it out on your personal account, because every time you share an emotion like that, it gets associated with your brand negatively. Because now you're just coming off as somebody that's complaining to the masses.

Whether or not you're meaning for it to be associated with your brand, it is. Because strong feelings get associated with people and things, whether they're true or not. Look at politics. Don't do that, but if you have an experience where you go through something difficult in your life and you processed it and you've learned a lesson on the other side, share that with people so that they can relate to you.

If you can do that and you can let it just sit there, the processed lesson that you could share with people, if you can just be with that, then that's a sign that your visibility and your comfort with visibility is really growing. If you can't, that's more nervous system regulation you need to do and you really need to look at why that would be the case.

Because often clients aren't relating to us because we're not sharing enough processed life experiences for them to relate to us. If you have reluctance to tell people that you're a personal stylist because of their potential judgment, you probably have some things about visibility to look at.

I know this because this was your girl's favorite way of being small. I used to hate telling people I was a stylist. I used to always be so like, “Please, don't look at me. Please, don't ask me questions. Please, don't judge my outfit.” That was one of my big ones.

That was something I had to work on for many, many years and that's also a huge visibility block because you're not going to promote yourself or your business with any amount of authenticity online if you feel like that offline.

If you really struggle with believing in your offers, you may have a visibility struggle, but often we keep ourselves stuck in this place, not because of our lack of experience as a stylist or lack of experience with business or even because we're not smart enough to figure it out, but because having confusion or struggling with getting our offers right means we don't have to show up and be seen and sell.

That is often where I think a lot of people stay stuck is in their confusion and their overwhelm because it keeps them safe from being judged when they put themselves on social media or whatever visibility struggle that they're coming up against that they may or may not want to admit to themselves.

It's critical to understand not just for yourself but also for your clients all the different ways that visibility anxiety can come up because many clients ghost us or go silent or struggle to hire us because they fear being seen.

This is why I want you guys to learn sales skills. This is why I drill this into everyone that goes into Income Accelerator because at the end of the day, what I want you to know is how to understand the way that people think, why people ghost you, why they hesitate, why they don't hire you, not because they're your problem where you have to fix it, but so you can just take all of this less personally and keep showing up.

I have people that ghost me all the time. Honestly, if someone's truly ghosting you, not just taking a long time to get back to you or whatever, that says so much about who they are and how much they are not ready to be your client, that they are giving you all the information that you need.

If you can really work on the nervous system one and really getting the relationships in your life on track to be the most supportive you can, now again, you can't make anyone else do anything, but if you can really just acknowledge, “Hey, maybe there's some places in my life that I have to work on my relationship so I can get more support, or I can not talk to certain people in my life about what I do or whatever.”

I need to become someone that is always not necessarily perfect in their visibility, but trying to polish your visibility comfort in your skills with constantly looking at your relationship to wealth and to access and to having things just because they feel good or because you want them without needing it to be from this deep dire sense of “Well, I need it to survive, you have to get out of survival mode to really help your client get out of it in their own life.

So if you can work on each of these things we talked about in your personal life, again, it's a process, it's not an event that's going to happen one day, you will be a better stylist in your business will go so much further because you have done the work to be the example for people that you lead in your styling containers.

Thank you for listening. Until next time, keep growing your business, keep growing yourself as a person. Remember that the level of transformations we are able to get in our own life are directly correlated for the level and depth of transformation we can get for our clients as stylists.

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.