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.

In honor of Mother's Day, I want to talk about something that comes up pretty often in my world, both with my one-to-one clients, in my group programs, and in Q&A boxes when I post them on Instagram, and frankly, in my own life. The tension between building a styling business and raising a family.

Because let's be honest, a lot of us chose this career of being a stylist thinking it was going to be the perfect mom job. It's got flexible hours, creative expression, high income potential. Many of us thought it would be the way to have it all on our own terms.

Then reality hits. It hits very differently, in my personal experience, than the dream that I think is often laid out for us. You kind of realize that no one warned you about what it's going to actually feel like to hold two identities that were honestly never designed to coexist, motherhood and entrepreneur.

So it feels like you're constantly failing someone—your business, your kid, yourself—but you are not doing something wrong. What you're experiencing, and what I have experienced and didn’t realize, was bumping up against this cultural myth that was absolutely built on a faulty blueprint.

When I asked you guys what you were most curious about on this topic over on Instagram, the majority of questions I got were about logistics. How do I fit it all in? Do I really need childcare? How do I actually make time to grow a business without letting everything else fall apart?

I totally get it. The temptation here is to jump straight to tactics, to logistics. But we're actually not going to talk about those things today. I'm saving that for an upcoming episode on preparing your business for summer, because that's when a lot of this juggling really kicks into high notch.

The other reason that I'm saving that is because you can have the best schedule, the smartest business plan, and still feel like you're not doing enough or you're not doing it right if the identity that you are operating from is working against you. And today I really want to lay the groundwork for something much deeper so that the logistics become just very simple.

How we see ourselves, how we define success, and how the two roles that we are all trying to inhabit—mother and CEO—are often carrying really wildly different and conflicting rules for how to be successful. When I started my styling business almost two decades ago, I truly believed that I had cracked the code.

I was like, "This is it. This is how I'm going to be the kind of mom I want to be and have a career that I actually love and is financially successful." It kind of felt like I had discovered the secret loophole when I discovered personal styling. But what I didn't know was that it would take me nearly a decade for my husband and I to have our daughter.

Over those years, I built my business in three cities. I juggled a lot of financial instability with my husband and quietly started pushing off motherhood, if I'm being honest. Not just because of fertility issues—I didn't know about that when we first started in those early years of trying to get pregnant—but I started to push off motherhood because I couldn’t figure out how those two roles were ever going to fit together without me becoming a failure at both or one, publicly.

And I think if I look back, that was my biggest fear. And at some point, I really started believing that I would have to choose. Because the version of motherhood I had absorbed up to that point—the one that looked like endless self-sacrifice, emotional labor, and my family of origin staying home with your children—didn’t seem compatible with the version of business ownership I was fighting so hard to build in the years before my daughter got here.

I truly didn't see examples of women doing both well in my personal life. Or at least I didn't have examples of women that were doing it in a way that felt honest and felt like a reflection of my business, my specific type of business.

So I tried to delay this choice. "If I could just hit one more financial goal. If I could just get one more type of client that could open up a network to me that would be really fulfilling. If I could just complete one more launch and unlock the code to how to do that on repeat, then I would be ready to be a mother."

I know that what I'm explaining is something that most people don't experience. They either come to their personal styling business already as a mother, and then they're trying to fit into their life, or the other side of it, which I see a lot, is that women build their career and then assume or hope or plan on being mothers later on, either because they haven't found a partner yet or they're planning on doing it alone when they have more money or they kind of figure it out.

So I have lived both sides of this, and I really am being honest with you when I say that I tried to delay motherhood. Again, like I said, I didn’t know that there were these other issues in the background that would get in the way and would even prolong the road to becoming a mom.

But I don't think people talk about the truth of what this experience is. I really lived in a place of striving to be good enough as a business owner to also be a good mother. Like I felt like my entry, or my cost of admission, to motherhood was going to be the business.

So when I say that it took seven years for me to hit six figures, the reason that I was striving so hard for so long, that I've not really talked about publicly, is because I really felt that it was the cost of admission to motherhood for me. Because if I didn’t get it to be successful, I would have to leave it behind, because it would be getting in the way of doing my role as mother well.

If I couldn't bring in money to legitimize why I was spending time away from my child, then what right did I have to keep the business?

So that striving for my business to be at six figures, which was the number that I really felt like would be what I would have to be able to prove, this was not something my husband brought to this conversation. I don't think he was at all aware of it. He's always been very supportive of my career and felt like it was really important for me to have both experiences. He has been an incredible champion of both and truly does a lot in our marriage so that I can have the type of career that I have.

So that wasn’t where that was coming from. It was coming from me, internally. It was coming from a view of motherhood that was really, really making it difficult for me to honestly succeed in business, and would have made it almost impossible for me to succeed as a mother had I continued to hold that view.

What I didn’t realize is that I was buying time. I was dragging emotional baggage back and forth between two identities, one of which I didn’t even inhabit yet. They were not designed to live together the way that I was envisioning them, at least not without a significant amount of conscious rewriting.

Because motherhood and business are both full-time identities. If you do not separate them, if you don’t consciously decide which values and expectations you’re keeping and which ones you’re letting go of, you will end up in identity limbo. You’re going to always be second-guessing. You’re going to always be striving. You’re going to always feel like you're “failing” somewhere.

The reason why this is important is because very few people in our lives have to make this type of identity-rewriting decision. It’s a decision. Because when you go and work in an office or you have a corporate career, the expectations of success are already outlined for you within the culture of the business, of the company that you work for.

But when you work for yourself, you have to make that for yourself. You have to make that idea of what success looks like. Some of us do it consciously. Most of us do it unconsciously, right?

Because most people in our life will not have the experience of having to do that, we will think that we're going to sort of be playing on default of these unexamined ideas of what success looks like in your business.

Now I also see the flip side happening, where women do consider what does success look like as a stylist when they have a family already, and they come to building a business. What they often do is build a very small view of success because their idea of motherhood is so all-consuming and also unconsidered.

They’ve also just fallen into the role of, like, “Oh well, I guess that being a successful mom means literally doing every single thing for my child, never asking anyone else for help, being super mom, being the one that always is the backup when things go wrong.”

And because my partner has historically made a significant amount of income or is the “breadwinner,” I will have my dreams fit in a very small box so that everybody else can continue to live in this way.

Of course, when we have partners and we have a family structure already, we have to have conversations with the people around us when we renegotiate, right? But that’s the thing many of us are afraid to do.

So I want to explicitly say that you will have to get other people on board, especially if you are coming from this where you already have a family and you’re now trying to figure out your role as a business owner within that existing structure.

But I’m saying right here—because I think it’s overlooked—especially when I see a lot of new client discovery call forms come in like, “Well, I don’t really need to make $100,000. I just need to make XYZ amount of money to make this worth it.”

What they really mean is, “I don’t want to make so much money that I have to re-figure out how to play the role of mother. I don’t want to upend and disturb the emotional balance of the family that I have. I want to meet some criteria for ‘successful’ in a way that makes everybody feel safe.”

But that will also make you tired. Because when you shrink to fit something that your soul and inner self knows is too small, you will get the message from the universe—and I know I don’t often talk like this, but I know it to be true—that you're tired. Things aren’t working because your dream is too small.

It’s not because this is so hard. It really will feel hard when you are trying to fit yourself into roles and molds that are not aligned with who you are meant to be and what you’re actually being called to do.

But if you stay in unconscious identity programming and you don’t look at who you’re being as a mother and who you really, truly do want to be as a business owner and stylist—not what you think you’re supposed to be because of all the other people that you’re following—but what you actually want, you’d be surprised how quickly the logistics figure themselves out. Because you’re being honest. You’re being truthful.

So when my daughter finally arrived and I was forced to choose between two businesses, my personal styling business, which I had at the time, and the styling consultancy, and motherhood, I had this moment of clarity.

Because at that point in my life, there was no question that I was going to continue my business. I had already become successful in the styling consultancy.

When I say “successful,” let me stop myself there. When I say “successful,” I mean I had already hit my goals. I knew how to have a business that met that “threshold of success,” right? Like, my minimum was I had to make six figures, because, honestly, and this was a decision I chose to bring with me, it’s something that I consciously chose for my old life, by this point in my life—in my 40s, when I had my daughter—people were already meeting six figures in my life. That’s what the expectation was in the world I was in, as an educated person: that I should be making that much money. Also, life is expensive, right? I mean, it just is. Six figures isn’t even that much when you do the math on it.

So that was how I would not just view being a mom, but that’s what I felt like I would have to do in order to make this worth it and not go work for someone else. By that point, I was never really living between "Do I become a full-time mom or a business owner?" It was always going to be the fact that I worked. That is just part of my identity.

And I had this moment of clarity: these two parts of me don’t need to fight. They don’t need to be a fight between how I will show up for my daughter and how I will build a business, which ended up being the styling consultancy, but they will need separate containers.

So when I was parsing through the two identities, what do I want to put in one container, and what do I want to put in the other? Those things, and the way I behaved and showed up in my life and business, became the identity that I have today. That act—that realization—of parsing between the two of them, almost like making a list: “What do I want on this side of my identity, and what do I want on this side of my identity?” It was a game changer.

Of course, it’s not that clean, right? But it made me have to be super aware of who I was being in each part of my life, to be successful according to terms I was now writing. And I don’t mean to say it’s something I don’t struggle with today. It means that I no longer expect one version of me to perform both roles perfectly at the same time, and that has freed up so much of my energy.

Examples of this are: I don’t expect anyone in my life, and I most certainly don’t expect me to perform business 24/7 to be successful. I am not on social media on the weekends unless I want to be. I try to be off my phone by 5:30 or 6:00, so that by the time my daughter and I walk in the door, it is very rare, I would say less than once a month that my computer is open at all while she’s awake.

I mean, it’s probably just like I made a mistake earlier in the day and I needed to fix it for the podcast to go out or something like that but it is no more than ten minutes.

Having those kinds of boundaries and those kinds of expectations—that I will not grow my business 24/7 and I will still be successful—has freed up so much energy. It’s also allowed me to be strategic in a way that now makes sense. The strategy fits my expectations of success, and I didn’t abandon my goals. It’s still growing. It’s incredibly profitable.

And the byproduct of us doing this work—I just want to say this because it has really been surprising to me—when I first started the styling consultancy, I started showing a little bit of behind the scenes of when I would shut down for the day to go get my daughter.

That has become harder because she is now almost four, and like, after-school behavior is not ideal. So I just really have to be all focused right after school. I’m sure that’ll be the case more and more as she gets older. I could do that when she was littler.

But I used to show this thing of me closing down for the day, and I would pull out a game and we would play together, and that’s how I would signal the afternoon. I would kind of take a picture, and then that would be when I would actually take Instagram off my phone for the night. I did that for a very long time in my marketing—and it was me showing a value that I have. So it was also me keeping myself accountable, which is something I often do that people don’t realize in my own marketing.

Later on, I would have a client who’s in her 20s, who is not a mom yet, tell me one of the reasons she wanted to work with me is because she was so excited to build a business and learn from someone who showed that part of her life and that boundary. That I was modeling for her that she didn’t need to be on 24/7, which was her expectation and her unexamined view of motherhood.

I hear that a lot from folks, which is one of the reasons why I do share a little bit about motherhood in my business. It’s not something I thought I would ever feel comfortable with. But when I think about this idea of what we are consciously rewriting, I’m showing people, through the way that I live for real, my values, and that it’s possible for them.

Because I was fed a lie, that it was going to be this seamless thing that all worked together, but I have pretty strong boundaries between my business and my daughter. Not that my daughter doesn’t see me work or know that I work—I talk about my work a lot, actually—but I don’t do the work in front of her so that I can focus on her. Because she’s in childcare, and so all the time my husband and I spend with her is focused on her. And for our family, that worked.

I’m not saying you have to do that. I’m not saying you have to separate your life the way I have. But it was in the decision to be conscious of that that I was able to let go of guilt putting her in daycare.

Also, she very much is going to be an only child and wanted that socialization, and her asking to go to school, very little, very much helped us. I'm not going to lie to you. It took away a lot of the guilt because she just wasn't getting enough of what she needed at home. So that made it really easy for me.

But I never thought I would do that. I never thought I'd send my kid to daycare. I never thought I'd be okay with that. But when I sat down and realized I was not the person, when I wrote my idea of motherhood back when I started my styling business, that I was by the time she came into the world when I was 40 and starting my second business. So I had to be conscious about that.

All of a sudden, the logistics and the guilt, it just fell away because I was consciously choosing. I knew why I was consciously choosing. It made me more intentional in my day-to-day life with her. It made my marriage better. It made my life better.

So when she finally arrived, it was a game-changer to become conscious of that identity. She doesn't need to be raised by or like a Fortune 500 executive. She doesn't need me to be modeling work for her all the time. But trust me, like in her early toddler years—like right as she went from baby to toddler—I definitely had spreadsheets and was definitely treating it a little bit like a business. I learned very quickly that nobody thrives.

So this idea that we're supposed to be integrating all of these parts of us into our life as entrepreneurs, I'm not against it. I'm not saying that I hide that I work. But there is a point where it's not as flexible as we think. So we have to be honest about that, especially when you're trying to figure out the business, you're trying to get to consistent income. You're going to try things. You're going to be frustrated.

That takes emotional labor from you. And children also take a lot of emotional labor. And guess what also takes a lot of emotional labor, styling clients, especially if you're not writing your identity as a stylist consciously.

When I kind of realized that by consciously writing these two identities, I would have to give up behaviors that I was bringing between them. Like my clients, they don't need me to mother them. They need leadership, clarity, presence, me not coming to their appointments and to their calls like a frazzled, outrun mom.

Not just because it doesn't make me a good coach, it doesn't make me a good consultant, it doesn't make me a good strategist, but because it's not a good example of motherhood for them. That would be my own things I had to handle.

I want to model that this is absolutely possible for people. You cannot model for people or tell people they can have an identity, they can have a lifestyle, they can have a business, they can have style, they can have whatever, and have them believe you and be in integrity, if you don't model the other things around it that need to happen.

So you can't say, "Oh, I'm going to help you get a very high-end, high-quality wardrobe," and not also share the labor that goes into taking care of your clothes. This is what it means to live in alignment. This is what it means to live your positioning. This is what it means to live your values.

Because when you don't untangle these identities, you end up doing weird things. You end up doing weird things in your marketing. You end up doing weird things with your clients. You end up doing weird things with your kids. You're just kind of living unconsciously.

You're over-functioning for your clients emotionally because you feel bad that you're not available 24/7 for them because you're with your kids. Then when you're with your kids, you feel bad because you're not fully there for them either.

The part that I really wish someone had told me years ago, so that I could have stopped performing this mental gymnastics in my head before I even had a kid, is that most of us will naturally feel stronger in one identity over the other.

That's not wrong. It's just reality. But if we're not aware of that, then we will not take responsibility fully in the other area of our life.

I see this all the time. I see people that came to their business as moms that have a lot of responsibilities. They have to bring their kids to a million activities. They have to do those things. But they have to decide that they're choosing that at the expense of their business.

They come to me and they say, "I want all of it. I don't know why I'm not making $100,000. I don't know why I'm not marketing."

It's because every single time you have anything on your kid's calendar, you ditch your plans, you ditch your promises to yourself in your business, and you get what you get.

That doesn't mean that you can't be there for your kids. It just might mean you have to wake up an hour earlier and do your marketing before you go to the field trip. Or it might mean you have to stay up later. Or it might mean that your partner has to go to the field trip. Or it might mean that your parents have to come over for an afternoon while you, on Sunday, do your marketing.

But you can't pretend like the reason that you're not getting a result in one place is because you're hiding in another place. You just have to decide that you're going to do both and figure out the logistics.

It's when you choose to not look at them both and not be honest about the fact that you're favoring one identity and saying you want both that you'll have logistics problems. I know that sounds harsh, but it's true. I wish somebody told me that.

If I could go back and start this journey, somebody telling me that would have made the difference between me shame spiraling and beating myself up, and probably would have sped up the seven years it took me to hit six figures because I would have understood what I was wrongly prioritizing on a day-to-day basis that would get in the way of me being a mom.

Because these unspoken rules were handed to us about how to be a good mom and how we should act as women, both in general, like in business and in motherhood, we will put ourselves last as just like the default, right? Or we'll favor other things and act like we had no choice.

But to be a successful entrepreneur, we also have to be able to seize opportunities. We have to show up visibly. We have to make hard decisions. No one's going to give you a manual for the days when those two expectations of being there for everyone all the time in your family and having to show up when opportunity presents itself, which may be not at the best time.

"Like how are we supposed to manage those expectations colliding and not feel ripped in half? How are we supposed to do that?" Let me tell you what's helped me and what I really hope helps you. Defining this specifically. What doing it all means to me?

For me, spoiler alert, it doesn't mean doing all the things all the time by myself without help. That's just not how I've chosen to define my success as a woman in any area of my life. So that is the underlying sort of foundation for me, the value that I've taken up into both motherhood and owning a business and running it.

For me, being successful means building a life that reflects all the parts of me without burning out in the process, which is why I will set boundaries on social media. I will only take calls certain days of the week. I will build the business in accordance to my values.

Sometimes on like a random Sunday, when I'm in the middle of a project or a launch, I will take a few hours to deal with that so that my week doesn't feel as hard. So it means I do take time away from my family sometimes, but I know why I'm doing it. I know what the purpose is for the business. It's not the default.

So before you try to hack your calendar or optimize your schedule for summer, I want you to challenge yourself to ask a much more important question. "What are the images that I am carrying in my head and in my heart about what it means to be a good mom and what it means to be a successful business owner? Where did these images come from? Do I want to keep them the way they are written now?"

Because if you don't integrate the source material of those two identities, you're going to end up trying to meet standards that were never yours to begin with. Or they're outdated versions of who you're not anymore.

It's going to take a little bit of work. You may have to unfollow people. You may have to seek out new examples of these types of women that you want to be. You're going to have to rebuild your own internal board of directors to curate examples of motherhood that will help you recreate and rebuild the identity that you want, not the default that you have now.

That is what I had to do, and it's what I keep doing as my business evolves and my experience of motherhood. For me, online, when I'm not working, like in the sense of I'm not on my actual Instagram account to build the styling consultancy, almost all of my social media has been curated to be examples of womanhood and motherhood and businesshood, if you will, that I want to embody.

For example, I follow a lot of creators that are over 40. I follow examples of people that are not mompreneurs, in the sense that that is the forefront of their business, but people that talk about motherhood in a way that's realistic, and they talk about being very ambitious without apology and also loving being a mom.

That's really important for me to see those examples. And I've hired coaches that had that, and it's been really transformational for me. Because once I did this, everything started to click.

Because you are not just building a business or a six-figure business, and you're not just raising a family. You are building a life. And it's the only one you get, as far as I've heard. Could be wrong on that, but that's what I'm hearing.

It should be a life that leaves a mark, not because you nailed every checkbox of societal expectations, but because you chose to live it fully and aware of who you were being when you were building that life. Even when it got messy, and even when it didn't fit the mold or the expectations of the people that we grew up with or the societal beliefs that we inherited.

Because your kids are going to remember how you made them feel, not just what you did. Your clients are going to remember how you showed up energetically for them, not just the service you delivered.

Sometimes our strategy doesn't work because we're not taking responsibility for that part of the equation. The thing that I didn't hear enough, and so maybe you've not heard enough, is that we think being endlessly available to our kids, never missing a moment, always being on call for them, is what makes us a good mom. At least that's what I used to think.

But what if the thing that sticks with them most is not our constant presence, but the example that we were consistent with, and we showed them? What if what shapes them more deeply is watching us navigate uncertainty and our business with honesty? Trying something new, even when it's a little bit scary to us. Celebrating our wins publicly and unapologetically instead of shrinking to fit somebody else's mold.

Or instead of them seeing us trying to downplay our brilliance, our success, to make other people in our lives comfortable. Because that is what they will take from us, not whether we could play Magna-Tiles with them for 19 hours straight. What if these are the moments that make them grow up and say, “My mom was a force of nature and I had a great childhood”?

What if sharing those lessons from your professional world is actually what strengthens your relationship with your kids long term? Not as their mom only in the early years where you made everything better, and you kissed their boo-boos, and you fought off imaginary monsters, but as a guide through their whole life. Their real life. The parts of their older life that will shape their character.

They will come to you knowing, because they saw it, not because we told them, that you can be a guide for them to show up for themselves bigger, to try new things. Not because we were endlessly available, but because we modeled that for them. Because that's what I want for my daughter.

That's really what I believe is possible when we stop trying to earn our worthiness through martyrdom and instead start showing our kids what it looks like to believe in themselves, and build something that makes a difference, and to share that process with them so that it becomes integrated into our life in that way.

When you lead in a way that honors all of who you are, meaning you're not shrinking yourself down so you can fit into the preexisting mold of your family and have your business, but you start to develop both of them to work together by maybe rewriting some things, you're going to give everyone around you permission to be bigger in your life. Your kids, your partner, your clients.

Some people will take that permission and some won't, because it's not their journey. But that is not your business. Your business is to live the life you want in both areas, the way you want it.

Anyways, that's it for today. We will dive into the tactical stuff—schedule, child care systems—in an upcoming episode as we head into summer. But just know, these things are only going to work when we build a foundation on a clear identity. That's the version of you that we're going to be leading from. I will talk to you on the next episode.

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