Your Personal Brand Isn't a Separate Wardrobe

There's a good chance you have two wardrobes. Not two closets necessarily, though sometimes that too. There's the work version, the one that's polished and intentional and built to signal that you belong in the room. And then there's everything else, the stuff you actually feel like yourself in. It seems practical. It might even feel responsible. But it's costing you more than you think it is.

The pressure to show up a certain way for work, to be the louder, more polished, more put-together version of yourself, is something we've all absorbed. It gets taught as professionalism. But when your work style is a performance, even a subtle one, it wears on you. And it actually works against the thing you're trying to build.

In this episode of The Visibility Shift, I'm closing out the personal branding series by making the case that your visual brand and your personal style are not two separate things. I talk about why performance-driven dressing keeps you from being truly magnetic, what it looks like to define one overarching style that works across every area of your life, and why alignment, not polish, is what actually builds authority.

2:00 – Why separating your work wardrobe from your personal style quietly creates two competing identities

4:46 – The hidden reason performative dressing can leave you feeling drained and disconnected

7:27 – The difference between dressing from the outside in versus expressing your identity from the inside out

10:27 – How a single overarching style can translate across every part of your life without becoming repetitive

16:56 – Why clarity in your style attracts more authority than dressing to reflect your target audience

18:30 – The simple but confronting questions that help uncover the personal style you may have lost along the way

22:35 – Wrapping up with key takeaways and why real alignment begins when your style reflects who you truly are

Mentioned In Your Personal Brand Isn't a Separate Wardrobe

What Authentic Personal Branding Actually Looks Like

What Differentiation in Personal Branding Actually Looks Like

What Consistency in Personal Branding Actually Looks Like

Samuel Ayobami on Instagram

The Style Mindset Reset Free Download

Standout Style Kick-Starter

Work With Ellie

Follow Ellie on Instagram and LinkedIn

Leave a rating and review

Transcript

Welcome to The Visibility Shift, the podcast where style becomes your most powerful strategy for being seen, standing out, and leading boldly. I'm Ellie Steinbrink, stylist and personal brand coach, and if you've ever thought, "My style just isn't working anymore," take this as your sign. You're ready for your next level. And instead of launching into a panicked shopping spree, what you really need is a strategy. A style strategy that reflects where you're headed, not who you used to be or who you think you need to be to fit in.

Because when your style aligns with your brand and your vision, everything shifts. You lead with more presence, you attract the right opportunities and clients, and you fully step into the woman you're becoming. Because showing up as yourself, that's the most strategic thing you can do. Now let's get visible.

Welcome back to another episode of The Visibility Shift. I wanted to do one more episode to wrap up this brand series that I've been doing, and that is to address a question I often get, which is, “Should my visual brand and my personal style be the same or different?”

So over the last few episodes, we've talked about the three pillars that make up a great personal brand. We've talked about authenticity. We talked about differentiation. The third pillar was consistency. Now I want to talk about an element that really ties all of this together, which is alignment.

So if you haven't yet listened to these three episodes that I'm talking about, I would encourage you to go back and do so, as this episode will be even richer once you've listened to the others. Also, you'll hear me reference back to these episodes and examples that I mentioned in those other episodes. So I would encourage you to go back and do that. However, if you're already caught up, let's go ahead and get started.

Are these two different things? Are they the same thing? How should we start to look at this? Well, I believe we think of our visual brand and our personal style as two separate things. I think that's just in general with the women that I've talked to and the women that I've worked with. Whether you want to say visual brand or work wardrobe or my personal style is what I wear in my own personal time or my casual wardrobe, I have definitely seen that women have a tendency to pull these two things apart, and in many cases they actually have two sections in their wardrobe for it.

Now I would say in general, visual brand, or how you show up in your work setting, tends to be more polished. It tends to be flashier. It tends to be more performative, sometimes a little more forced or big and flashy in some cases. Maybe not if you're working at a conservative corporation, but I definitely see that more in the entrepreneurial space.

Think of the outfit that you wear on a big shoot day or when you're batching a bunch of content or when you're speaking or when you have a conference to go to versus personal style or maybe that part of our closet that we think about as our casual wardrobe.

It feels more relaxed, right? It feels maybe not quite as fancy, not as impressive, not as pulled together. What you wear on your downtime, maybe a little bit less effort is put into it.

Also because oftentimes when I'm working with women, the first priority is like, “I need to look good for work,” right? And then, yeah, it would be nice to look nice in my personal time too. But I think there's definitely more emphasis put into our work or the visual brand.

Here's the deal. This way of thinking about your wardrobe, I think, creates two personalities. Sometimes those two personalities are conflicting, aren't they? But I don't see it this way. I see it actually as one and the same.

I actually build women's closets in this way too. That's one of the things I love doing, is helping women see how they don't need these separate wardrobes. They actually just need pieces that represent them. Then I teach them how to style those pieces in the different scenarios for their life or wherever they need to go.

So if authenticity is really your goal, and I think deep down, even if we can't verbalize that—you know, people don't come to me and say, “I want to be authentic.” That is something that comes out in our conversations as we go along. But I think deep down we want to show up as who we are, right?

If that is your goal, these two aspects of your style have to become one. What I would say is the downside of having separate wardrobes, especially where the visual brand or your work wardrobe maybe is a little bit more performative, the downside of that is that you're more susceptible to burnout.

Now that might sound like a big leap I'm making here. We're just talking about a work wardrobe and now you're telling me it's leading to burnout? So why would I say this?

Simply because it's more work and effort that you put into it. Not to mention that, let's just be honest, sometimes it's slightly an act.

When you are working so hard to keep up an appearance, it can leave you feeling drained, like feeling like you're always on and desiring to be “off.” It can leave you losing yourself. It's why so many women will come to me and say, “I'm not even sure what my style is,” because in the process of performing, we lose touch with ourselves.

Actually, I saw this really great post on Instagram by an influencer. He was talking about what makes up a great personal brand. I'll drop the handle in the show notes. I'm probably pronouncing it wrong, but it's @thebami_.

What he said, I think, was so interesting that relates here to what we're talking about, this more performative visual aspect of our style and then our personal style.

He said, “You think attention equals authority.” So we have a tendency to focus on being louder, bolder, more on. Then he leaves this mic drop that says, “People don't follow the loudest brands. They follow the clearest ones.”

Man, do I love this. I love it because what he's saying here is what I'm saying, is that people follow brands that are true, that are clear.

It's not the performative, loud, flashy aspect that draws people in. It's the real aspect that draws people in.

So when your style feels like a performance—even if you're like, “I don't think of my style as a performance”—if you're dressing to follow suit or dressing to fit a code or dressing in a way that you think will be acceptable, that's performance.

Or if you feel like you always have to be on, or that the work brand of you or the visual brand of you is a slightly more polished, more put together version of you, that is your sign that you're drifting away from what is true.

I think it's ironic because we don't think of it this way, but to become more magnetic in your brand, it doesn't come from performance. It actually comes from alignment.

So let's talk about what we think we need to do when it comes to our visual brand. These are all things that I hear from women, whether you're an entrepreneur, whether you're a speaker, whether you're a leader in a company. There is this tendency to focus on whatever will help us look like what we're trying to achieve.

“I want to be a seven-figure business owner. I want to be a boss babe.” Okay, that is a look. So you start to dress in a way that emulates whatever you think that is.

“I want to be respected. I want to be credible. I want to be professional.” So what do we do? We dress in a way that gives us an output that we think will create that for us.

We have all these clues around us telling us how to look these ways, like how to get the outcome we want. There are even fashion psychology books written, articles written about how to achieve a certain perception of yourself based on how you dress. I have one here in my office.

I'm not discounting that that is not true. I think we can dress in a way that helps people think of us in a certain way.

However, what I want to say is that is outside-in dressing. That's also where principles like “dress for success” come into play. That's outside-in dressing.

I've mentioned my client before. Her name is Erin in previous episodes, who really believed because she worked in a financial industry that she had to wear a blazer for every single appearance where she was visible. That was simply expected in her world. That was thought to give the perception of ultimate professionalism and credibility.

However—and she even said it to me—that was a performance. That always-on presence is what becomes so hard to uphold over time.

We might believe that our visual brand has to be big and flashy. That's what that influencer's post on Instagram was talking about. Like there has to be sparkles. We have to go bigger, over the top. There has to be statement pieces. It has to be eye-catching.

But when we have this perception of what a visual brand should be versus what your real style is, it creates these two personalities. There's the one that's the “on” me, and then there's the real me.

If you're sitting here thinking, “Gosh, I feel really called out right now,” in your defense, I think this is always how we've been taught to dress.

Work has always been more performative, more perception-driven. Think about how they teach you to dress for an interview. It's like, “Well, wear something that will make them think you're serious or you're credible or you're professional or whatever, or you look older.”

There are all these tricks and tips that we've been taught, right? So it's no surprise to me that if you feel this way about your work wardrobe, our culture is teaching us this.

But I want to share a different perspective that will get us away from this very disjointed Frankenstein way of building a closet. So what should we be focusing on?

Instead, what I want you to think about is developing one overarching style for yourself. Then within that overarching style—if you guys like charts, it's like a chart, okay? You have the one vision at the top, and then you have all of your different outputs of that vision, the way you're going to achieve it below.

So you've got your one overarching style, and you've got underneath it different levels of dress depending on where you're going, depending on the setting.

When we think of our styles as two separate things, what you have is two separate flowcharts. You have one for your visual brand and then you have another for your personal style, and they are not related at all. Like I said before, they're sometimes competing.

So I'm asking you to get rid of the two different flowcharts. We're having one chart. I'm asking you to think of your closet as one style. Then again, as I said, we dress to the level of the event or the situation that is required.

So whether that's speaking on stage, that's one version of your overarching vision, or whether you're getting groceries at Costco, that is another version of your overarching style.

You might be thinking, “This sounds great, Ellie. I'm totally on board, but how the heck do I achieve this?”

And I will say that this is where many women get stuck. It's because it's like, one, I haven't even thought about what my overarching style is. That's one problem. But two, then how to translate that into various different aspects of my life, that also feels challenging. So I'm just going to acknowledge that.

But I'm going to give you a few ways to start to put these pieces together in a way that might offer some clarity. So what is a way that you can start to define this one overarching style?

Well, first, I want you to think about what makes you you, or what style might represent who you are becoming. Or maybe you just start with, “Who am I becoming?”

And then when you get to the point of answering, “Who is it that I am in this season of my life?” or “Who am I when I think about myself as a leader or the owner of this business or an entrepreneur or speaker? Who do I think of myself as?”

And then I think the questions that come from this, when it relates to your style—as if that question isn't big enough. I understand that. What I'm asking is big—but the next question that follows that would be like, “Well, what do I actually like?”

Remember, I said not what the world likes, not what other people want from me, not what's expected of me, but what do I actually like? What feels true for me?

And this is actually—when I'm working with my clients—this is the vision work we do. It can really be hard for them to extract themselves from what others or their work environments or the industries or the circles they run in, what is demanded of them from those areas, or maybe subtly expected, and to truly listen to what feels good to them, what feels like a representation of who they are.

So get curious. What is it about you? What makes you you? And that is going to be different from the entrepreneur next to you, the speaker next to you. That will be different, and it should be different.

That leads me to my second question, which is, “What makes you different?” Now, I didn't say what is going to make you the craziest or loudest or most awe-inspiring dresser or that makes the biggest statement when you walk in the room. That's not what I said.

What about me and my brand makes me different?

Now, Julie is a client of mine who I've talked about here on the show. She's a fully booked keynote speaker and an author. She's a great example of this because when we met, I learned quickly she has a bold message. She flips the concept of networking from something cringeworthy into something actually enjoyable and exciting. Imagine that.

When we met, though, she admittedly said, “My outfits don't meet the level of this message. I'm not fully embodying this.”

I mean, she did have sparkly shoes at that point with every outfit, but the outfit itself really didn't match that bigness that made her so interesting, that made her so different.

So we changed all that. We aligned her style to more accurately reflect this brand that she had created. When I say brand, I mean her. She is the brand. She is unique. Her approach to this topic is unique. So her style should not be bland and boring. See what I mean?

And I can even give you an example of myself. I don't believe, when I think about the work I do, I don't believe personal style is created by following trends or by compliments—this outside-in approach that I've been talking about. It's created by doing inside work.

I often think of this approach as being sort of upside down. It's different and opposite to the ways in which we were always taught to get dressed.

That means the way in which I run my business, my process isn't rushed versus all these overnight transformations that are so commonly seen everywhere in the media and on shows. It means it's identity work, not working to garner certain impressions or perceptions.

It's inside-out versus outside-in. Style really becomes an external expression of the work we do internally.

Okay, so that's my platform that I'm on. So in my own personal style, which again is the same as my visual brand, I'm intentional. I don't follow trends without finding a way to make it my own.

I keep asking, “Am I seeking to fit in, or am I wearing something that truly reflects this upside-down approach that I have to style?”

And if you've ever seen me or you see what I wear through watching me online, this often comes about in wearing unexpected color combinations or putting two pieces together that you wouldn't expect to go together. I often will flip the script.

However, I'm just going to pause and be completely honest, because I didn't always dress with this kind of alignment.

In fact, a few years ago, earlier in my business, I started working with women in the C-suite. I felt like the way I needed to dress had to change to reflect this target audience I was working with.

I felt like I needed to be wearing suits. I needed to be uber polished, maybe even subdued—that old-money look, if you're into that aesthetic, if you know what that looks like.

I felt like I needed to be buying high-end brands and labels that they were wearing, because I was getting caught up in this whole lie, really, that if I didn't do this, how would they ever see me as credible? That the way in which I like to show up—which is often creative, it's unexpected, like I said, it's sometimes really bright—that way of dressing just wouldn't be respected.

Luckily, not too far into this lie, I caught myself and realized the reality is that they're not hiring me because I look like them or I dress like them or because I buy the brands that they buy.

They hired me because of my nontraditional approach, because of my skill set, because of my ability to see them and bring their vision into reality, to bring what is special and unique about them to life. That's why they hired me, not because I was wearing a polished brand-name suit.

So as you're listening and absorbing all of this information and thinking about your own life and your own closet and the concept of aligning your personal style and your visual brand, I can hear you saying and thinking about some objections.

One of them might sound like, “Yeah, but I don't think I have a personal style. I don't know what to do with that. Where do I go from here?”

Well, to you I would say this is your opportunity to get curious. Actually, many of my clients start in this very place. Ask yourself, “What do I actually like? What excites me? What makes me different?”

All these questions that we've been discussing in this episode—these are the questions that will become your foundation. Start there.

Don't start in a store. Don't start with finding your favorite influencer and buying up whatever they're buying. No, that's the wrong way. You're going to get confused that way. So get curious. “What do I like?” Don't let the world define that for you.

Or maybe one of your objections is, “What if I work for a company where I don't define the visual brand? I'm not in control of that. What do I do?”

Well, I can tell you, because I haven't always been my own boss. I've only been my own boss for five years. I worked for an employer all those other years, and I have worn my fair share of polos and company-branded items.

And I can tell you I didn't like it, but I always found my own way to bring those pieces into my style.

I remember one time I was wearing a company-mandated polo shirt, and I layered a chambray button-up shirt under it, and then I tucked it in and paired it with a full skirt. That's very me. If you know me, that's very me.

Or if I had to wear a company-branded T-shirt, I would add a blazer, put on some wide-leg denim jeans, and pointed-toe heels. There you go. That's my go-to outfit.

So there is always room for a through line, even if you find yourself in another company with their own defined brand.

Or maybe for you, you keep thinking, “Ellie, I just don't see how my personal style can work for my work style.” I want to just stop here and say, okay, that's not the right question.

I'm not asking you to wear what you wear on a weekend to work. Because of course we're not dressing the same way for a family birthday party as we are for a speaking engagement.

But the question I want you to ask is, “What is the through line?” Remember, we're defining one overarching style, and that informs then all of these different areas where you need to get dressed.

So maybe when you start to get curious about what style do I like for myself, what is my one overarching style, maybe you discover that you really like vibrant color.

So let that show up in both your personal and your work life. Don't default to wearing only black athleisure. Add some color in there. Don't default to only wearing black and navy and neutral colors in your work life. Let color come through in that aspect too.

Or maybe when you work on your style and you think about your style, you love this old-money aesthetic, which is very sleek and it's monochrome and it's neutrals and it's rich neutrals and metals and it's working with textures. That can work and that can come to life in an outfit that you wear to the grocery store that's very comfortable, and it can work when you're on stage or when you're doing video.

There's always a way to bring that overarching feel into your outfits. And the key here is the alignment, the consistency.

So as we wrap up today, I want you to remember first—I'm going to say this again. I'm going to say it ad nauseam—your visual brand and your personal style are not two separate things. They are one and the same.

Secondly, let's stop thinking about our visual brand as a costume. I know that takes it a little far to say a costume, because maybe it doesn't feel like a costume to you.

But if you feel like you're having to perform, like it's a slightly louder, shinier, more polished version of you that you can't wait to take off, that's a clue that it's not aligned. Really, this is all just under one umbrella of your personal style, and it's expressed at the level that the room requires.

If this conversation has been a wake-up call or provided clarity and now you feel an urge to create more alignment in your closet, that's good. Don't see it as a crisis. That's actually a really great thing.

Hopefully it makes your shoulders relax a little. Like, “Oh, thank God, I don't need to keep up these two personalities.”

If you're sitting there wondering how your visual brand and your personal brand can be one and the same, you're still like, “I just don't see how this can work,” get curious about why. Why is holding you back from adopting this belief?

If I had to guess, it probably means that in one area of your life, you're not being completely honest about how you're showing up.

So I invite you to get honest. As I say, awareness is always the first step towards change. If you don't do anything else, just get aware. That's what we're doing here.

If you feel burned out from being “on” in your visual brand or in your work life, let it be a sign that something's got to give.

If you get tired of the pressure to be that polished, sleek version you've created for your visual brand, ask where you can get more real or more honest. And question that if you do get more real and honest in how you show up, people are not going to like you anymore.

Remember what that influencer on Instagram said: getting attention is not the same as having authority. So let's not exhaust ourselves trying to do so.

I get that it can be scary and vulnerable to ask these questions, so know that I'm doing this work right alongside you.

As always, I'm up for hearing from you. So message me on whatever platform you're listening to, or message me over on Instagram and LinkedIn where I am most active. I'd love to hear from you.

If you're looking to take all of this one step further and enlist more support with your style, this is the work I do. I work both in one-on-one and group settings, and I'm actually right now accepting one-on-one clients for the spring and summer.

So reach out if you're interested in that. There's also a link in the show notes, or you can get on the waitlist for my group program happening this year. With that, thank you so much for tuning in. I hope to see you in the next episode.

Thanks for joining me on The Visibility Shift. If something in today's episode made you pause, rethink, or gave you permission to stop playing small, it would mean so much to me if you'd leave a review at ratethispodcast.com/visibilityshift. Let's make it visible.