PODCAST SHOWNOTES

Nicole Otchy: I had a client who hired me to help her wear clothes. This client became incredibly wealthy, almost overnight, when her husband sold a company in tech. And she was in her 40s. She grew up in a single mother household, very poor, working since she was 10 or 11, I believe. And then one day, she herself had a big career. She stopped working, quit her job, moved into a luxury penthouse, because of how much money they had out overnight, all of a sudden had multiple nannies and spent what most people earn in a month in one order on Net-a-Porter and she was placing sometimes five of these orders a week. Like, she basically could have owned this company, it felt like, with how many orders were coming in. Boxes upon boxes would arrive. She would unbox them, hang everything up in this beautiful, massive walk-in closet. Everything was impeccable. She had great taste. Things that, when I saw them, I could not believe I was, like, touching in real life. Some of it was very famous vintage pieces. And then as I got further into the closet and started poking around, because this wasn't a closet edit on my first meeting, she paid me to just talk with her the first time to see if we would be a good fit.

And I had a lot of wealthy clients that had issues about making sure that I would sign an NDA, or keeping their information confidential or private, or not sharing about them. And so I thought that's what we were going to talk about, but it wasn't. She wanted to see my reaction to what she was going to show me, which is that every single piece of clothing hanging up, still had tags on it. She literally hired me, I realized at that moment, because she wanted me to help her wear the clothes she was ordering. They all fit her. Absolutely. She certainly had places to go, especially with the philanthropic work that her and her husband had taken on, since their acquired wealth. So, I thought I understood the assignment. I learned more about her life. I built her lookbooks that were for different contexts. I gave her assignments of what to wear to specific places. She agreed that she would start trying to take more risks and going to more events publicly with her husband. They weren't particularly famous. They were just in very lucrative circles. I thought that I was making it easy for her to not second guess herself or to know what went together.

Based on our first set of conversations and her intake form, everything kind of seemed like she was confused about all of this, but then it didn’t really make sense, because this woman clearly not only had good taste, but she understood like the history of fashion. Like she understood, you know, different designers from different houses at certain periods with the vintage she bought, like this was not somebody that didn't get things, right, didn't get aesthetic. You know how things work together, and it's not like she didn't have time to put it together, she admitted that. She was spending so much time and money ordering things and what was so interesting about it is that I gave her Voxer access with her package and said, like, let me know how things go. We, like, build out a calendar for the month. We, you know, set up the outfits. She would check in once in a while on Voxer. And then as we came to the end of the package, she was like super happy, this was great, but I never really understood if we had made any progress and you can't force people to change.

So the next summer, she goes to hire me again and I'm excited to see her. I walk into the closet and the closet has exponentially grown and everything still has tags on it, including some of the sneakers and the shoes that we had got at Barney's, the season before her. And I thought to myself, oh, nothing has changed here. I obviously know now that this was not an issue of her really needing me to help her wear the clothes. The problem was too deep. Finally, I would learn that she kept buying those clothes, because she wanted to see herself as the kind of woman who could pull them off. And she could pull them off, right? She looked beautiful in them. But she couldn't accept that she hadn't earned the life she was living. There was a part of her that loved having the ability to buy these things and to exercise her fashion knowledge that she had been building, since she was a young girl, reading magazines and following runway shows. But a bigger part of her felt bad about it, even though it wasn't logical. They hadn't done anything wrong in acquiring this money. She just didn't feel like she was allowed to take up as much space as she felt that she was taking up, when she was wearing clothes that were this expensive. And during that next summer update that she hired me for, we actually never went shopping. And I eventually told her that I thought that there was definitely something much bigger going on here and that she needed to go talk to a therapist. And she agreed. And she called me and thanked me for that honesty a while later.

But the truth was there was absolutely nothing I was going to put into a lookbook that was going to close this gap. There was not any amount of assignments that I could give her to wear these looks, or any specific encouragement I could give her, because the problem was too deep. The clothes were not going to turn her into a person who would wear them, if she didn't do the work to feel worthy of them first. So I came in solving the wrong problem. Rightfully so, right? Like, I don't blame myself for that. But the reality was, it was what I would call a decoy problem. Like, she made it seem like in our initial conversations, like, she was confused. Like, this was overwhelming. Like, oh, I'm in a new world now and I don't know how to put it together. But again, it didn't really make sense with her, clearly her taste level and like her eye and her understanding of fashion through, you know, what she had been cultivating with knowledge over the years. And the reason I'm telling you this and sharing this story is because personal stylists create the same exact scenarios for themselves in their business. They create decoy problems to solve that gets them into a situation, where they don't have to look at the real problem in their business. And that is exactly what we are going to talk about today.

This is The Six Figure Personal Style Podcast. I'm Nicole Otchy and this is the show for personal stylists building world-class businesses and setting the standard in their industry. We're talking all things profitable growth, thought leadership and real client transformations. Because the best stylists don't just edit closets, they shape culture.

So here's what this often looks like in a personal styling business. A stylist isn't getting enough clients, so she decides the problem is that her prices are too high. This is literally a scenario I see almost every week on calls. So she starts to have this mental conversation with herself about lowering them. A significant amount of time and mental energy goes into the idea that this pricing is the root of her slow season. It is the root of the problem. But here's what I want you to notice about that story. If nobody is getting on a sales call with her, she has no data on whether it is the price. In almost every case like this, the stylist I'm talking to who believes that the reason no one's buying is because of their price, even in situations where I point out, your prices aren't even on your website, nine times out of ten, has actually never gotten during that slow period, a price objection. Nobody has said your prices are too high. That is not why no one is booking. Because in fact, nobody has even gotten on a sales call with them at all. Not once.

But it's easy to convince yourself that that is the reason anyways. Because the alternative, the reality of when you look at that problem is that something in the marketing, before people get on a sales call, isn't working. Because if it was, people would get on the sales call and then we would have data about what the biggest objection was. When someone hasn't figured out what makes their specific client or buyer actually move, that is a much harder problem to solve than it is to just decide that your price is too high and you should lower it. Because you have control over that. When you have to test your marketing to see what is going to get people to respond to you, you have to go through the discomfort of people, in some cases, not responding to you. You have to show up in a way that doesn't feel safe to you yet. So in cases like this, I know exactly where this is going. That person's brain hands them a pricing story, because it feels analytical and even responsible. She's going to take action and at least she is doing something. But that is what lets her do something, while still staying completely still in a business that is not creating any sales, because we don't have a problem about the price. We have a problem that we're not creating enough value in our marketing to get somebody on a call, in order to even give us a price objection.

What happens is that our brains pick up substitute problems or decoy problems, as I used at the top of the episode and they do this for a very specific reason. And I see this so consistently that it functions almost like a universal human behavior, specifically in a case about the pricing. This probably is the most common one that I see. No sales calls means the price is too high. But that actually doesn't make any sense. Because your brain will find the problem that feels safe to solve. Something that is external enough that you can work on it, without it feeling overly personal. And I say this because oftentimes I will hear a lot about how the economy is so bad, how no one is buying from these stylists. But when I explain that the data actually isn't showing that in the economy as someone that looks at it, they don't really have anything to go on. Because again, no one said your prices are too high. And there's a name for this decoy problem phenomenon. It was found in the 1990s by a psychologist named Ziva Kundra who published research on something called “motivated reasoning”. And I am fascinated by this. What she found is that people don't reason towards the truth or to trying to get to the truth. They start with the conclusion that they want and then they build a very logical looking path to get there.

This is also true about how people buy, but we'll get into that in a sec. Her most well-known example was smokers evaluating cancer research when she and her team showed the exact same study to two different groups, people who were smokers and people who were non-smokers. The smokers were dramatically more likely to find problems with the study and the data than non-smokers were. And it's not that they were making up the problems. They genuinely did see flaws, because every scientific experiment has flaws. But their brain went looking for those flaws and overinflated them relative to the positive parts of the study. Because accepting the study would have required them to do something that some people say is one of the hardest things you will ever do, quit smoking. And that is exactly what happens in pricing stories with my clients. That's what is happening every time someone finds a very logical reason, like the economy, even though I can show you nine other stylists, who are selling packages eight times the price that this person thinks is too expensive, I can find examples of it. They decide to double down on this logical reason. There's, you know, part of society is having an economic, you know, downturn right now. Not everybody, they know that, but enough people that it's impacting their business. And so that has to be the issue. The economy is bad. Summer is always slow. Instagram reach is down. Those things are real enough in specific contexts, but that doesn't mean that they are the reason that you're experiencing the problem you're having in your business. And the reality is you can find data to make any fact sound credible. But that doesn't mean that it is the reason for the problem that you have in your business. And as long as you treat the wrong thing as the reason, you will stay very busy and very stuck at the same time.

But here's what I want you to see, because you already know this pattern. You see it in your clients. It's just harder to see it in ourselves. The client who keeps buying new clothes, but never wears them, is not telling you that she has a shopping problem. She's telling you, without telling you, that something about how she sees herself isn't right. She's pointing to the wrong solution at the same time and in the same way, a stylist points to her prices and says that it's the economy. And as a transformational stylist, if that's how you identify, your job is to see past that, to get under the decoy problem to the real one. And that is the whole foundation of the identity-led styling method. So much of it isn't about you having to come in and read the room, like some psychological like whiz kid, right? It's about you being able to ask clients the questions that are actually going to get underneath the hood of what is going on. It's a way of telling the truth in the interaction that's actually going to help people get to the root of the problem, because that's what they're paying for, right? That's what people pay for when they hire an expert.

But the question is, are you willing to do that for your clients? And are you willing to do it for yourself in your business? Because this decoy problem, right, this motivated reasoning that we tend to go towards, when we don't want to see the hard thing that we need to do, is always going to show up in a very specific way to allow you to see why it is there. And is going to show up in a way that you'll be able to recognize, because it will always be more comfortable than the real reason, or the real thing you need to fix. Always. Because your brain has evolved, everyone's has, to keep you safe. And it's very good at making safety sound like a strategy or legitimacy. And you can stay there for a really long time. And some people stay there forever. But I also have been in this game long enough to see stylists finally get sick of screwing around with their decoy problem in their business. And I'm going to be honest, it's often around marketing. And it usually looks like, oh, I got to change my prices. You know, the platform I'm on isn't good enough. I don't have enough reach there, or whatever. But they also can't tell me like how many clients they would even need to make the amount of money they want. So the math isn't really mapping.

And that frantic energy around what platform to have, if the offer is right, you know, if the website is perfect, what's not working, starts to just sort of quiet down. And it's not because all of the problems in their business are suddenly solved. It's because they're stopped trying to solve fake problems. Because fake problems come with a level of franticness that just keeps you distracted enough. And they start looking at real issues that they have true control over, that will truly make a difference in their business. And like my client who wouldn't wear those clothes, despite the fact that she could afford them, they fit her and they were hanging in her closet, there is usually something behind this. Like it is easier and safer for a lot of the stylists I work with, when they first start working with me, to tell themselves the story that, you know, it's not fair for the prices to be high, they couldn't afford these prices, people are struggling, but people have always been struggling, right? And if someone is truly struggling, right, let's just look at this logically, they're probably not going to be in a position to hire you. Even if, you know, your prices were lower, because they need other basic things and their bandwidth is not available for something like styling. Styling isn't a basic need. You all know that. I've talked about it before. Everyone needs clothes, but they don't need to have, you know, a certain type of style to survive. And in fact, the more you are in survival, the harder it is to access the parts of you that are even going to create a kind of style that you're going to feel comfortable with, because you are so dysregulated.

And so that's where that pricing story just becomes ridiculous, because those people were never your clients in the first place. But it's safer to sometimes have no clients than it is to get on the Internet and market in a way that isn't people pleasing, for lack of a better phrase. So, again, it's easier to think it's the prices than it is that what you're saying isn't getting people on sales calls, because a lot of people don't know what to say to get people on sales calls. So instead of thinking, maybe I need to figure this out, they think it has to be the economy. The reality is that things that are important in business require two things, consistency and time. It's boring. And consistently doing something that may make you uncomfortable, especially if it is, in the case of marketing, public facing. Instead of doing the thing that you can quietly privately do on your website, without anybody really noticing, means that you're going to have to consistently show up in a way that doesn't feel safe to you. So you're willing to shrink and earn less, even if you're not doing it consciously, rather than fix the actual problem, because it feels safer. This is not a character flaw in you. This is a developmental species wide issue.

That's why I'm sharing this today, because when someone is finally ready to drop the decoy problem in their business, what happens becomes very specific. In the same way that I see the same pattern play out with the same like faulty logic in the pricing example, I see the same type of development and growth happen when a client decides to let it go. But you can't force people to let the problem go, before they're ready, because often there's other stuff under it. And there are many times that just like when I've told my styling client, maybe we need therapy, or maybe we need something else, I will tell my coaching clients that. I am not above it. I've been to therapy. I think it's great. And I think that often there are just things that are out of our line of sight that are protective, that we needed in our life, up to a certain point, that we don't need anymore. And it gets conflated in our businesses. I see it all the time. And sometimes it's not that. Sometimes it's much simpler. And it's like, oh, actually, your prices are too low for your market. Cut that out. And they're like, oh, OK, no problem. But it's when the person can't move. And I keep seeing the problem come back and come back that I know there's something else going on here, right? And that's true for your clients as well. I know a lot of you are thinking, well, I'm not just going to start, you know, handing out cards to therapy.

But when you see that things are not changing, and you're giving people different ways of looking at the problem, it is now out of your hands. And I say this because I hope that relieves some of you of feeling the pressure, right? What happens is that when you're willing to give up your decoy problem, you get a lot more clear. Like you don't sit in this feeling of being confused. And that is important, because it doesn't mean that it's comfortable, but it's a lot less exhausting to be clear than it is to be confused, even when you have the answer. Because you ever had a situation where like someone's explaining something to you and you know that it's logical, but like you can't access it, right? That's when you have to look at like, why am I looking at a decoy problem? Because intellectually I know that, you know, I don't need a new website, for example. I probably need to be more consistent in my marketing, but I really want that new website and I really think that will cause relief, even though I know that I'm still going to have to market. I'm still going to have to do the thing I'm avoiding when I get a new website, right? It's because you're kicking the can down the road, so you don't have to deal with it.

What's really important about this is that you get that there are only three or four things in your business that you ever need to be doing to keep the business healthy. And when you learn how to prioritize that, marketing is one of them. Understanding your ideal client and starting with them in your messaging is another one of them. Building relationships in a network that will eventually pay off with time is another one. And then obviously, you know, providing the services in a way that is impeccable to your clients, is it. That's all you have to do to build a business. Now are there other parts, yeah, of course, but you can outsource them. But if I had to get down to the bottom line, it's those. So if you are afraid of any of those things and you are actively moving away from them, or you're doing them, but you're not trying to get better at them, because those are the key things you're always going to need, then you have to ask yourself why and what other problems are you playing around with, over here or over there, to distract you. And the reality is that it's almost never as big of a deal, once you accept that you're no longer available for the decoy problem anymore and you just get down to it. And that is when the ease starts to unlock in your business. And again, this is not magic. I'm not saying you're never going to have a bad day.

But as someone who consistently does the things I need to do, I find that I just have a lot less drama in my head. I have a lot less back and forth, a lot less like doubt and questioning everything. I just do the action and then I keep it moving. And I know that it's because even if I don't do it perfectly, I'm at least spending my time doing the right thing. There's not a lot of second guessing. And that is like not having a million tabs open at once and not being sure where the thing you were working on last was, right? It's just so clean. And so I'm going to leave you with one question. What action have you known that you need to take, in the last 60 or 90 days? Because you probably have an answer to that question before I even finished asking it. Almost everyone I talk to does. The knowing is almost always there, just like it is for your clients with their style. Your brain has just been really busy finding somewhere else to look, to keep you safe. So the answer to that question is what you should put on your to-do list and nothing else for this week, except for serve your clients well. I promise you if you do that, for the next three or four weeks, you will A) trust yourself more in your business and you will see how much time you were wasting and how not big of a deal it was.

Thank you for being here. I'll talk to you next week.

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.