Episode 214: You're Allowed To Change Your Style

Your closet might not be “outdated” at all. It might be loyal to a version of you who had to survive a different season, with a different role, a different body, and a different set of priorities. Today I’m giving you the permission so many women never give themselves: you are allowed to change your style, on your timeline, for your life right now.

We start by pulling apart the most common trap I see: trying to fix an identity shift with more shopping. If you’ve been stuck rotating the same three outfits, saving endless Pinterest boards, or buying “wardrobe essentials” that never quite click, it’s not a taste problem. It’s the wrong question. “What still fits me?” keeps you in logistics. “Who am I?” finally gets you to personal style, confidence, and a wardrobe that supports your next chapter instead of fighting you every morning.

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Transcript

Welcome And The Big Permission

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to the Everyday Icon Step Podcast. A podcast that teaches you how to build support your personal friend and life chaos. I'm Tiffany. Let's get started. So we're gonna jump in right into today's episode. And I've been thinking about something over the past several days after seeing something online that didn't pertain to style, but it made me actually think a little bit about how it does pertain to style. And that is simply this. You're allowed to change your style. And I keep coming back to the word allow. And it's not you should update your look like everybody talks about on social media, whether they're style coaches, personal stylists, influencers, etc. It's not, oh guess what? This is the new season's trend, but allowed. And allowed is like it's permission. And we don't need permission to change our style. We can do it whenever we want. And I think that's the true barrier that many of you deal with and haven't considered. And it's not information that you absorb every day, it's not taste, it's not even about money. It's just having permission that you have never gave yourself. So I am going to give you permission today that it is okay and you are allowed to change your style.

Stop Shopping For Answers

SPEAKER_00 1:56

So let's start with the first question that you the first thing that you need to deal with. And that is you're asking the wrong questions. Now, if you've outgrown your style, and many of you listening know exactly what this feels like and looks like. And many times the first instinct is to fix everything by shopping. It's a new season, new pieces, you probably have a Pinterest board or two or three, and you probably have several 10 wardrobe essentials checklist. And none of it ever, ever works. Now you'll go ahead, you'll buy these pieces, and maybe if two, three months later, you're gonna come back to the same three outfits standing in the same fog when you get dressed. And here's what I've come to believe about why. Now you've been asking what still fits me when the real question is, who am I? When you talk about what still fits me, you're thinking about it not in the context of does this shirt fit me as far as like not as size, but not actually as, hmm, does this still fit the function that it is supposed to do? But more importantly, it should be, who am I? So the other question you can sit with is who am I? Now, of course, these are two completely different questions. One is about logistics, the other is about identity. We are looking for identity and not logistics. And you cannot answer an identity question by shopping harder. It will never work. You will have piles and piles of clothes that end up in your closet, and then maybe two, three, four years later, you're taking them all to the Goodwill, Salvation Army, the red, white, and blue. And depending on if you have designer pieces, you're gonna go to the real, real, trade-y, fashion foul, etc., to get rid of them. Now, I want you to really think about this because I don't think it gets said at all or even enough, but primarily at all. The wardrobe frustr frustration you feel isn't a taste when in reality you're treating the symptom, but not the actual problem that you have. So then this brings us to why your closet is actually frozen

Why Closets Get Stuck

SPEAKER_00 4:52

in time. Because if you're honest with yourself, your closet is stuck, I'd say anywhere between five to ten years in the past, max minimum. Five to ten years. Because I believe the why matters more than what you give it credit for, and we have to know why. Because we like to know why about everything else, but when it comes to how we dress and what we wear, we kind of don't ask why. We just say, huh, I'm just gonna go shopping or I'm gonna do X, Y, and Z, freshen up, whatever. But you never get to the root question of why. Now, at some point, it could have been in your late 20s, your 30s, you actually built a uniform, which is a system. And whatever got you through those particular chapters of your life, you were living, you were building a career, you were raising kids, you were holding a household together, you were just doing whatever you had to do in that chapter, and that system and that wardrobe that you had served you. And you built a wardrobe that lets you stop thinking about clothes, so you could think of so you could actually think about everything else that mattered more in that season. And I think that's where uniforms can tend to come come from because you're trying, you don't have time to think. So we have gotten so far off from thinking that we can't even figure out what our style actually is, what our personal style actually is. And that's why we have so many Pinterest boards and ideas that we have and why we go shopping, because in reality, you don't know because you haven't had to really truly think about it for years, some maybe even decades. Now, at the time, during particular chapters, that was actually smart because everybody's gonna have to do a uniform at some point. So you're the last most unimportant thing on your list is going to be what you wear. And it's not failure, it was actually efficiency, and the system served a real purpose for you during those times.

When Roles Change Grief Shows Up

SPEAKER_00 7:33

But I want you to think about it this way: a uniform is built for a role, and your roles have changed. Maybe you're becoming an empty nester now because your kids are out of the house. Maybe your career has shifted more visibly than you've ever thought it would be. Or maybe you're stepping into something entirely your own: retirement, entrepreneurship, even a career pivot, whatever that may be. Or maybe you're stepping out of a role that you've outgrown into something else a little bit less defined, which honestly might be even harder to dress for because there is no script or even a dress code per se. So your closet is still optimized for an old role. That's it, that's the whole mystery. Your closet supported you during past chapters, but it's not going to support you at this current chapter, no matter where you are currently in the chapter. And when this mishmatch doesn't feel like an inconvenience, it feels like grief. And it's looking in a mirror and not recognizing yourself, not because you look bad, but because you're looking at a woman from a chapter you've already lived through. And I want to touch on the grief for just a little bit. You're going to grieve a lot of things. You are grieving when it comes to this, you're grieving actually the past chapters. You're grieving what supported you up to this point because you have to let it go. And that is okay. Because as you go through the grief process of that, now everything else, your new chapter will begin to take flight. It'll be you'll be able to walk through it and go through it. And you can't ignore it. Because just like grief in any other situation, it will always catch up to you, find you, and you will have to eventually at some point deal with it. So it's also, and a lot of people might think this is a form of vanity, but it's not. Grief. Because if you don't deal with it, it will eventually deal with you. So what actually will fix this? Well, I'm glad you asked. Because again, shopping isn't the fix. Shopping isn't the fix. It never was. And we have to now think about it differently.

Identity Anchors And Emotional Audit

SPEAKER_00 10:56

And I use something I call identity anchors. And these are maybe just three to five pieces in your closet that unmistakably say, This is me, this is who I am. Not who you were in 2015, 2006, or 2008, not who some influencer says you should be, or even a personal stylist says you should wear, but who you really truly actually are. And the way I find these with clients is through something I like to call an emotional audit. And what this is, is you go through your closet piece by piece, and instead of asking, does this still fit? Is this in style? You now ask, when I put this on, do I feel like me? Or do I feel like I'm wearing a costume or uniform of someone I used to be, or who I think I should be? Because you have to keep that in mind too. You also have this idea in your head of who you think you will be down the road instead of who I am today. You can't skip that. And I'm here to be the first to tell you I have always been the type of person who is who am I going to be and not who am I right now. Once you answer that question and not skip over anything else, then you begin to unlock and tap into your style. And again, sometimes we have gone so far left because of we didn't have to think about what to wear because we had these uniforms and these systems in place. But now we have to actually do that is think about what does that actually look like for me? It's like bringing putting personal back into personal style. Now, most of the time when someone does this audit, honestly, almost nothing passes. But that's not a bad thing. And that used to surprise me, but it doesn't anymore. It's not because anyone has bad taste or bad style, it's because nothing in the closet was chosen for this chapter. It was all chosen from the last several chapters. Could be chapters one through 25, but just last chapters and previous chapters. So once you know your anchors, everything else gets built around those. And I call that the shop your life edit. So you're not shopping in a vacuum anymore because now every new piece either supports one of your anchors or it doesn't. Come home at all. And it's more of a filter, it makes every decision after that so much simpler and easier. And now when you get dressed, and now when you go shopping, you kind of have a game plan. And you don't have to do it all at one time. It could just be a piece here and a piece there and a piece everywhere, but it doesn't have to be like at one time.

Build A Wardrobe Filter

SPEAKER_00 14:16

And I also want you to remember this: it isn't about looking younger, it's not about chasing a trend built for a 25-year-old at all. It's that what changing your style has meant to you so far. So no wonder you have always resisted it because that version of change is asking you to erase yourself, not update yourself. And when we do and we see influencers and things like that, and I'm not saying you can't find inspiration because you most definitely can, but you begin to erase yourself when you're following after trends and you are looking and trying to recreate certain outfits because that's not who you are. You're trying to experiment, and that's great. But sometimes in the experimentation, you begin to erase yourself, and again, you're not thinking about your style, you're thinking about how this looks on somebody else or what somebody else suggests because we have never or we've lost how to think about style because at some point in our lives it was easier to do it that way. So, what I'm actually describing is literally the opposite of erasing yourself, it's making your outside catch up to what you already know is true on the inside, and you're not who you were 10 years ago. You've earned this next chapter, whatever it looks like for you. Your wardrobe should reflect that back to you every single day, not fight you every morning or every step of the way.

Midlife Body Changes New Freedom

SPEAKER_00 16:09

At this stage and point in the life, if you are, I would say 45 and older, you are entering a new phase and a new stage. We are all going through menopause, perimenopause, all the pauses, weight gain, weight loss, our whole lives are kind of like changing. And what I'm realizing is, especially when I turned 50, was that this is like a whole new day for us? It's a whole new way that I can do literally whatever I want to do. Like I can literally now think about and not worry about what other people think because we do that for a while, but also why not me? Why can't I build a style that's going to reflect me and not be cookie cutter and not be an aesthetic? Because you get to become your own aesthetic, and that's always putting personal back into the personal style.

Foundation Edit Invitation And Next Steps

SPEAKER_00 17:18

So if this conversation resonated with you and you had a couple aha moments or you nodded your head a few times, it may be the sign that you've outgrown your current style and you're ready for what's next. And I work with accomplished women such as yourself to align your wardrobe with your next chapter through what I like to call my foundation edit. And if you'd like to explore what that could look like for you, I'd love to have a conversation with you. So the link to schedule your discovery call for the foundation edit is in the description of this episode below. And I want to leave you with this. You at this point in your life get to be who you've always wanted to be. And I think somewhere along the way, we had to do things with the dress codes and doing all the things. But now what we are at 45, 50, 55, 60 is not what it was 10, 15, 20, 30 years ago. It's almost as if like we can literally rebuild our whole lives and what we look like and everything in between so that we can thrive again, so we could have joy again, so we can build the confidence again, and really just settle into who we are. And I would be more than happy and look forward to helping you with that. So here's what I want you to do. I'd love to know, and you can send me a message over on Instagram and tell me what chapter you're dressing for or in right now. And that will also be in the description box of this episode. And as always, stay healthy, stay safe, and I will talk to you next week in the next episode.