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.

Today, we're diving deep into a topic that is pretty popular in the styling world, but we're going to talk about it a little differently. Imposter syndrome. Because this is something that comes up a lot in my one-to-one calls with stylists and a lot of my discovery calls over the last year and a half, almost two years.

Sometimes what we label as imposter syndrome is actually not imposter syndrome. I think that's because it's become one of those words like narcissist that's just so much in pop culture, in social media, that it's taking a toll on people's understanding of what it actually looks like to build a business.

It's critical and often uncomfortable for us to realize that what we think of as imposter syndrome is an indicator of something else, something that is trying to point us towards exactly where we need to grow and become more successful in our business.

Start with getting crystal clear about what imposter syndrome actually is with its definition. Imposter syndrome is the persistent inability to believe that one's success is deserved or has been legitimately achieved as a result of one's own skills and effort.

Legitimately achieved as a result of one's own effort and skill, that is an important point that we are going to come back to later. Because I see imposter syndrome misdiagnoses showing up differently at different stages of business for stylists, and it's critical to understand the difference between self-doubt and imposter syndrome.

Here's why this matters so, so much. A false belief that you have an issue with imposter syndrome keeps a lot of stylists stuck doing mindset work, under-earning, and playing small when what they really need is skill development and better business systems. It is impossible to do any sort of meaningful mindset work if it is not accompanied by action that moves you forward.

Because then you're just sitting around “working” on thoughts that have no basis in reality because you're not in action. You can't work on your perception of the world if you're not engaging in it. You cannot mindset yourself out of a skill gap. Thinking about your limiting beliefs does not give you the skills you need to overcome them.

For a new stylist, it often looks like this. They'll say something like, “I've always had great style. Everyone tells me I have an amazing eye and I've been styling my friends and family for years with great results. So now I think it's time for me to start a business. But every time I get on social media to try to get paying clients, I feel like a fraud and I have imposter syndrome.”

Listen closely to what I'm about to say because it is critical. That is not imposter syndrome. That is a very normal gap between having natural talent and having professional skills to market and monetize that talent. When you work with friends and family, you have years of built-in understanding and you can read their non-verbal cues.

This is what my first mentor taught me as a stylist. You know their lifestyle, their preferences, their comfort zones. That's completely different from working with strangers. What I see is that many, many people, particularly in the pandemic when people were being like, “Become a stylist,” they had only worked with people virtually.”They went from working with friends and family in person to working virtually.

If that is you and you feel like something is wrong in your business, it is. Because working with strangers virtually, when you've not worked with strangers in person, is going to handicap you for a very long time. I cannot stress this enough. There needs to be a bridge between working with your friends and family for free, to working with strangers for free, to then trying to get and having strangers pay you for your services.

Most stylists right now in this time because of what is being portrayed online with being a stylist, miss that middle-free stranger part. You need to style strangers for free so you can see where your own gap is. You don't have an imposter syndrome problem. You have a huge gap in your skillset that needs to be handled. You need to learn how to read people that are not naturally in relationship with you. You need to learn how to market to people that you don't know so that they trust you and want to hire you.

That's literally the game of having a business. It's not imposter syndrome. For more established stylists, this will show up differently. Don't tap out right now if you're more established. They'll tell me that they feel imposter syndrome when they start advertising to a new niche or they add a new service or they raise their price. But here's the thing, 9 out of 10 times, that is also not imposter syndrome.

It is normal and necessary growing pains and skill acquisition that comes with having a business and going to the next level. It's not a reflection of already-proven capabilities. If you already had the capabilities and you had a message and market to the group of people that is in the new niche, that might be it. Sure, that might be imposter syndrome.

But if you don't already have proven capabilities that you are discrediting, and you have other skills you’re going to bring to it, you’re not starting from scratch, but if you feel a little shaky or you’re doubting yourself, that’s just called being a human being. I think that there is, in general, and I’m saying this as someone who can really almost 100% look back on my own underearning as a result of this is just there's just a lack of some mental toughness and just a reminder that nothing you ever did in your past, whether it was school or learning to tie your shoes or starting a new job, felt comfortable.

But somehow people think they're going to get online, start a business, and it's all going to feel comfortable because they love style and they love fashion. That's the part that's the hobby. That's the part that's fun. That's why people sometimes aren't meant to have a business. Sometimes a lot of stylists figure out like, "Hey, maybe I'm really not meant to be a stylist. I really like style, and I really like having people I know and love, but I don't actually care about strangers." And that is perfectly valid.

That is why you need to have that middle period where you're working with strangers for free. There's just too much ego in people's heads right now, like, "Oh, I'm going to start a website. I'm going to do all this stuff,” but you've never worked with someone that is a stranger.

If you're established and you're starting to do a new marketing or messaging plan, or I have a mastermind that's six months long and I have this very specific, almost like a launching process that I have stylists do every season in order to get their marketing and their messaging really tight and book them out for the season ahead, of course, the first time they do it, it feels uncomfortable.

It's the exact system I use all the time in my business. It teaches me how to refine my messaging. It's how I have people in my DM saying to me like, "Oh my gosh, they're in my head." The first time I launched these programs and this process, it didn't feel good. Because I didn't know what I was doing, that wasn't imposter syndrome. That was legitimate growing pains that I should have to earn my way through to make significant amounts of money. It is the cost of income that is substantial.

Let me give you a personal example that really illustrates this. Back when I was a stylist a thousand years ago, just kidding, it was only like two and a half years ago, but it feels like centuries, when I first started doing corporate style trainings, which is something a lot of people want to do before they have their niche markets set up—and I just don't recommend that—This meant I was making thousands and thousands of dollars to be clear on these trainings. This was not a free lunch and learn.

Let me just be clear about the level that I'm talking about as I explain to you my own descent into insecurity. I felt totally out of my depth and what I think at the time I would have described as an imposter, I would have been wrong. Old me would have been wrong. I'm sure I used that word because it was a very popular term back then but this is why I would have said like, “No, no, it was imposter syndrome,” and I'd be wrong. It was because my niche at that time for the majority of my career was corporate, typically C-level executives or higher.

When I closed my business, it was not that anymore. I did work with them once in a while, but mostly it was really, really high-level entrepreneurs that were public speakers. I was super niched. For the majority of my career, I worked with C-level executives and women in that world. I had a lot of experience with clients in New York, Washington, DC, and Boston that fit that mold.

I was on a lot of podcasts for it. My website was very much suited to that group of people. My marketing spoke to them. I knew how to reliably get them in my sales pipeline. So I would have argued that because I had experience with that group of people, my corporate training, anxiety, or self-doubt was my imposter syndrome, but that discomfort wasn't because while I did have experience with that group of people one-on-one, I didn't have experience in group style trainings.

I had evidence I was good at one-to-one stylist, but I didn't have evidence that I could complete a really solid one-to-many style training that made an impact on people. It didn't matter that my ideal clients that I had had success with were in the audience. Could I borrow some things from that? 100%. I could tailor certain themes and conversations and talking points to them so the people were engaged and I had a higher likelihood of success.

But if I bombed those trainings—and I would argue that one of my first ones, I feel as though I did and want to die when I think about it—it would be and it was because I did know how to facilitate a group because facilitating conversations around style and these personal and private views of ourselves, particularly in a corporate environment where people are already masking and hiding things and wanting to keep things close to their chest, it ain't the same game.

How to create a presentation that kept people's attention and engaged, and had them walk away with takeaways, and because it was a lead-generating mechanism for me, even though I was being paid a lot of money, still, I wasn't going to forfeit clients, all of that are different skill sets that I had to bring to that one event, to that one experience.

Yeah, I could take some of my past experience, just like you can take some of your past life experiences that have nothing to do with styling and in fact, you should to be standing out more to your business and to the way you work with clients.

But you're also going to be, when you try new things in your business like I did here, operating at a massive deficit because you don't have the skill set yet and that's the part of business that sucks is that we have to do things we've never done before even with a coach, even with a consultant, we can get their steps, which helps make that process easier. But we still have to go through the discomfort of doing it.

I had to go through the discomfort of not being good at that until I was good at that. I had to go through the discomfort of feeling like I can't believe I just paid all this money to do this. I don't think it was as impactful as it could be. That's literally the cost of doing things you've never done before. You don't get to sail past that. That's why you cannot be good at something unless you're willing to be bad at it and keep getting better.

I think a lot of people stop before they keep getting better so they really do believe that it is imposter syndrome when it really just is a lack of follow-through on building a skill set. This is what I think the crux of the misappropriation of imposter syndrome in the styling industry comes from. But I don't just think it's the styling industry. I think it's online business and business in general because I think it's really hard to get better at your craft if you are virtual.

I'm not saying you shouldn't be virtual. I'm saying, if you're not willing to get better in person, you will not understand all of the places that things fall through virtually. I just see a huge skill deficit in the industry right now and a lot of people wondering, “Why aren't I making money?” And it's because you're just not around real human beings enough to translate that well into the online space and into virtual. That's just the truth.

If you've never owned a business before, you probably don't know this thing that I'm about to tell you and if you have been in business for a long time, this is really easy to forget and I have to remind myself or have other people in my very private circle of other business owner friends remind me, when you are new to business or when you're doing something new in business—so I still feel like that after 15 years sometimes—you're basically a toddler and you're at the beginning stage of something that takes up an enormous part of your life.

When I was running group programs, when I changed my entire business model from one-to-one to group programs this past year in 2024, I had done group programs before, but I had not done it with this group of people. I forgot how many parts there were to launches. I forgot how tedious and never-ending and emotionally draining they were. That wasn't a sign I should stop doing them. That was a sign I should keep doing them so that they get easier.

Now four times in, it's so much easier. Every time I go to launch, I already have people in my program before the cart even opens or before applications even open now that I have an application process. Every time, if I had given up the first time, I would never have gone to the point that I am. If you don't remember that every time you do something new, this is why I raise an eyebrow at stylists that are like, “Well, I'm too advanced for such and such,” it's like maybe you are, but the likelihood that you're too advanced to test things and change them is absolute zero. Zero.

That's the kind of arrogance that doesn't create transformations. People think that because they're good at doing their two-hour lease closet edit or they're a la carte services, that it's not going to be a big deal for them to go to packages. But the expectation of people when you go to a package is very different. The relationship is very different.

It doesn't matter how experienced you are as a stylist, when you start a new way of working in your business, you encounter new issues, you encounter new insecurities in your clients, you encounter new insecurities in yourself. That is not imposter syndrome. That's also not saying that the years of experience you have should get thrown away. It's about learning how to be the kind of person that takes the good with you and expects there's still going to be hard things, that you were never done.

When you're that person, you also are a way better transformational stylist. In fact, I would argue, you can't be truly transformational without that, because lots of stylists fear being transformational. I think because they think like, “Oh, once I teach people things or they get to the next level, they're going to leave me.” That shows me a person that's saying that is not transformational because they don't get that when you are someone who's committed to transformation, you are committed to never-ending change and to getting comfortable with things being uncomfortable.

If you want to be a transformational stylist who does really, really well, that is the assignment. Not falling back and thinking, “Oh, maybe I have imposter syndrome.” The truth is that the discomfort that shows up when you're coming face to face with a skill deficit is difficult, especially if you are someone who struggles to ask for help.

But a skill deficit, when we are professionals, we either have to take responsibility for or we will pay the price in getting to and holding on to consistent revenue and consistent clients. It's really simple. Here's the thing—this is the good news—no one gets to be successful for real, regardless of what you see on Instagram, without putting the work in at some point to overcome it.

The question really is, how long do we want to prolong our success by not filling in a skill gap and calling it imposter syndrome or something else? Let me share another example that I think really drives this home. Late last year at the end of 2024, I worked with a stylist who's really cool and she had a lot of experience in the celebrity styling world, and photo styling, video styling.

She decided that she wanted to really get the personal styling side of her business she’d been running because she just had kids and she felt like that could be more stable than the travel and the bizarre hour she was doing and that really made a lot of sense.

She came into working with me one-on-one saying that she just needed to book more clients for the services she already had. But through the assessment process that I do in one-to-one and in my group programs, we uncovered that her real challenge was actually positioning her expertise to the right people and creating service packages that reflected the real value of her expertise and her unique experience as a stylist, given her extensive work in photo shoots and working with high-profile clients.

By following this kind of systematic approach that I do with clients to take a bigger view of her business, which we're going to talk about in the next episode, we were able to reposition her in the market and connect her with the right client base for her so that she was able to go from what she thought she would need to do to hit her goals, which is styling 75 clients a year, which is insane—it makes my head hurt—to at most, if it was a bad year, styling 28 clients and even less if she was able to get one to two retainer clients, which she ended up doing.

Then she was down to like 2022. Because she was focused on not having as much experience in the personal styling side of things, she was about to work harder for less and honestly burn herself out even more because what she had was a skill deficit. She came to me knowing that.

She had a deficit in understanding how long personal styling packages were, so she was underpricing herself. All of these mindset stuff that she was dealing with in her own perception of herself, she wasn't taking proper assessment of what she did bring to the table for a personal styling client given her past experience as a celebrity, video, and photo stylist.

She didn't see how she could bring that in. Because she was feeling less than, she didn't use the term imposter syndrome, but I think a lot of people in this situation would think that's what’s going on here because she's clearly very experienced.

But she didn't have experience with this kind of group of people and she didn't have experience working in this way because personal styling is not the same thing as celebrity styling, photo styling, and these types of things because when you're working with a celebrity even though it's another person, you're doing it for an event, there's a lot of other people that are involved, often you're given notes of what designers they can wear, what silhouettes they can wear, and what colors, it's related to other PR things, other people are involved in.

What are they wearing? What can you not be photographed in next to this person who's wearing lime green? There are just different parameters, and the turnaround is different. You're borrowing the clothes versus the client buying the clothes. She didn't have an understanding of the personal styling world enough. Sure, she knew how to dress people's bodies and their colors and their shapes, all of those things, but she still was missing something. She, again, never called it imposter syndrome, but, again, lots of people do when they're on that side because they think, "Well, I'm a really good stylist."

Again, you can be the best stylist in the world, but if you don't know how to put your skill into the mechanism that you deliver that style efficiently to strangers, oh well. Really where I see this costing people a lot, is that they just burn themselves out because they're not able to see themselves clearly as a result of not taking responsibility for the skill set that they are missing because all a business is repeat skill sets.

That's why if you keep having to redo your main marketing points and what most people will call “content pillars”, there's a skill set problem there. We'll talk about where that comes from in our next episode, but that's the thing. If you're thinking, “Oh, it's just my audience that's the problem,” or, “ I have imposter syndrome,” or whatever, you're not taking responsibility for the skill set you need to be a professional.

That's why this is so important because I did not know this when I was a stylist. If I could pinpoint the one thing that has made me the most money and also allowed me to move as quickly in this business as I did, it's not that I was a stylist before because you can be a really good stylist and not know how to teach other people how to be a really good and profitable stylist.

Trust me, I know. I see people coming out of programs that exactly show people this. I'm a pretty good teacher because I practiced it. I practiced saying things in different ways to get people's attention. I'm not a naturally good communicator. As a matter of fact, I have a lot of visibility blocks, but I also have to take responsibility for those visibility blocks and not pretend that I have a mindset issue or imposter syndrome.

Could those be at the crux of it? Maybe, but that's not being a professional if I stay there with my visibility blocks. When you look at it like, “Oh, my gosh, actually hiding behind things that are really just skillset gaps that you can fill is like one of the most empowering things.”

I don't want to lose that thread because the only person that we have control of at the end of the day is ourselves in our whole life. If I'm telling you that it's not some mindset block that will keep you there forever, it's a very simple skill set deficit that anybody can get and people much dumber than everyone listening to this has gotten.

I think that's an important reminder. You can do it too. This is where having business strategy and systems in place change your life because even with an impressive background in celebrity and photo styling, my client was about to undersell herself even more and burn herself out because she was focusing on the wrong things and thinking that she needed even more personal styling experience when really she just needed to know how to position herself and create packages that were going to meet the market where they were.

She was willing to put her money down to get that sped up because a lot of trial and error will go into that, and it's not like you can go to personal styling clients and you're going to say, "Tell me what it is you want." They'll tell you, but it won't work out in your favor in terms of it being sustainable, being at a price you want.

People want what's best for them. They don't want what's best for you and them. That's why people invest in coaches, consultants, and people to help them. As we're talking about this, I want to talk about this very specific uncomfortable reality of being a stylist that comes up often and I do think triggers what a lot of people think is legitimate imposter syndrome.

It's so specific to styling that I couldn't step over this because I could hear some of you thinking about this in the back of your head, especially some of my established clients. Sometimes, we as stylists, sometimes you're going to have clients who don't like what you pulled for them.

Now, I have heard stylists say that's never happened to them in like 15 years. I do not believe them. I believe people have nothing honest with them. I'm going to keep it real. That's the truth. Lots of people will be nice to your face and not tell you the truth. That's why people ghost us. So let's just be honest. This is going to happen to you at some point if it hasn't already. I don't think a lot of people are honest about that.

You're going to even have a client who hates literally everything you selected. You are. This happens to just about every stylist. I don't care what anyone says and it does feel terrible. It can trigger what you think of as imposter syndrome. But I want to tell you this, self-doubt that comes from this terrible, horrible, no good, very bad feeling that you will likely experience at some point in your career is just a normal part of being a service-based business 99% of the time.

Now, here's why it's important for me to not completely dismiss that. I just think it's important for me to tell you that it's normal. That's just its own useful thing. But—and yeah, it's a big but—if you notice this happens frequently, 40%, 50%, 60% of the time, that is not normal, and it's also not imposter syndrome.

That is a signal that something in your process needs to be fixed. If you can't get reliable, consistent results for your styling clients, again, not imposter syndrome, that is about needing a more robust set of processes and likely business plan.

In fact, it is so important and so eye-opening to so many stylists that I work with, that an entire model is dedicated to this exact challenge in Income Accelerator because of how you communicate at every step of the way in a styling container, virtual or in person, will dictate the client's ability and willingness—and that's most important—to communicate with you early enough on about their likes and their dislikes in order to avoid that.

I'm not saying that they're going to like everything. It's normal for people that are perfectly happy and satisfied with your process and they're experienced with you to not like five sweaters. That's normal if you're pulling 100 things. But if you keep seeing that your clients are leaving the container saying something like, “I'll just do it myself,” or, “Forget it, it doesn't matter,” then they ghost you and you have a very low repeat client, that isn't imposter syndrome. That is a lack of skill in business planning.

Now, again, good news, because a lot of stylists take this to mean they shouldn't continue being a stylist and they doubt themselves and they beat themselves up. This is why I have small group programs so that I can do one-on-one coaching with people inside a group because what happens is the stylist starts to code that as, "Okay, I need to work harder. I need to pull more. I need to add more appointments. I need to overgive until the point that I actually wear the client out.”

This codependence will start to show up here and behavioral things that actually annoy the client more and if they just had someone look over their business and see, “Okay, if we communicated here and here and you said this on sales calls and we made it clear in our onboarding and we structured our style discovery process like this instead of what you're doing, you're going to get different results.”

Again, I will never promise you people love every single thing you pull, but it will drastically change it. If you're saying certain things in your marketing, if you're doing certain things in your onboarding or before sales calls, it will change how that person shows up in the container.

These are the types of things that I see lots of stylists, again, thinking, "Well, all of a sudden I started getting these clients that weren't happy and now I have imposter syndrome." No, you have a skill deficit and you have a business problem. That is the best news I could give you because that can be fixed.

Having really clear systems in place, I know they're not sexy, I know a lot of my listeners are neurodivergent as I am and you're just like, “Whatever, that doesn't sound that interesting,” it will change your life. It is the number one thing that people say as soon as they enter my program and get their bonuses, they're like, “Oh, my gosh, I had no idea what I didn't know about my business.”

Stylists who have been doing this for 20 years have told me that that alone was worth the price of entry. Systems are one of the most powerful antidotes I have ever found to both real imposter syndrome and just a general normal lack of confidence in your business.

When you have solid systems—and I just give them to the stylist who works with me—you can see exactly where things are working and just as importantly where they are breaking down in your business so you are not constantly buying every single thing out there trying to figure out where the breakdown is.

When someone explains this to you in a very detailed way, it will change your whole trajectory as a business person because this means you will know precisely what skills or help you need to improve specific areas and you can either hire someone for that or get an assistant or do whatever you need to do so you can feel genuinely good about your business based on evidence and not things you make up or false positive thinking.

Because remember, your success as a stylist isn't about feeling qualified, it's about being qualified. That comes from having clear systems, measurable results, and the ability to confidently communicate the value you deliver to your clients and to consistently deliver that value more often than not.

When you have these pieces in place, charging premium prices becomes a natural reflection of your expertise, and you do not even think twice about it. It's not something that you need to convince yourself you deserve or psych yourself up about. There is not a single day in my business that I doubt the prices that I charge.

I have tons of insecurities, I have tons of doubts, but it is not that. In fact, I feel that $3,500 for an Income Accelerator is a deal because I spend over $250,000 getting those systems and I genuinely can tell you that is how you should feel about every single service and every single part of your business because it changes how excited you are to talk about it.

If you're ready to overcome these challenges and build a styling business that commands premium pricing, I'm going to invite you to join me, fill out an application, and finally say, “Yeah, that skill gap that I have is not me living at my professional highest. That fear I have of asking for help isn't helping me be the best stylist because now if I get help, I can help my clients even better.”

When we are focused on our self-doubt and what's not working out there or in our past investments, we are not taking care of ourselves at the level that we could be, which means we are then not able to take care of our clients at the level we could be.

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.