How to Stop Wasting Time Deciding What to Wear Every Day

I’m sure you’ve been there: staring into a closet full of clothes, yet feeling like you’ve got nothing to wear…especially if you’re styling for an important event. But even on a “normal” day, this isn't just a minor inconvenience. It’s the price you pay for not being taught how to intentionally shop for yourself. 

Yet, the expensive price tag it comes with impacts more than just your daily routine. It significantly drains your mental focus, confidence, and energy as well. So how do you stop wasting time and energy on deciding what to wear and transform your relationship with your wardrobe so you can start dressing like the leader you are?

In this episode of The Visibility Shift, you'll learn how to go clothes shopping in a way that’s intentional and that actually works for your life. I’ll discuss why the notion that you have nothing to wear is a myth, the sneaky ways your closet can drain you before you’re ready to start your day, and how to address this so you can reclaim your time, energy, and presence when you need it most.

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Spotify

3:21 – What’s really behind that feeling of having nothing to wear

6:49 – How you’re influenced to shop incorrectly (and who benefits)

8:21 – The deeper impact of wardrobe misalignment and how it diverts from more impactful activities

11:32 – Three key areas that cause you to go through cycles of feeling like you have nothing to wear

14:36 – The bigger impact of your style on you as a person

17:05 - What it looks like to create a clear and honest style strategy

20:59 – The price of indecision, the impact of taking small steps, and how you can start today

Mentioned In How to Stop Wasting Time Deciding What to Wear Every Day

Stop Panic Shopping and Start Building Your Style Strategy

Apply for The Visibility Edit

Work With Ellie

Follow Ellie on Instagram and LinkedIn

Leave a rating and review

Full 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 podcast. Let me ask you something. Have you ever landed a big gig or had an opportunity or a big event coming up in your calendar, and you wanted to make a good impression, so you went to your closet to figure out what you're going to wear, and you found yourself underwhelmed and asking, how is it possible that I feel like I have nothing to wear? And yet, we all know you've got plenty of clothes, probably too many clothes.

A lot of my clients say they have multiple closets, tags still on many of them, you know, stuff full you can barely fit another hanger in. We've got fancy dresses for the galas we never attend. There are plenty of options, if we're being real.

Here's what I want to share with you today. This time we waste in our closets deciding what to wear, it isn't just a time suck. It's draining your mental focus and your confidence and your energy.

I like to think of it like an invisible tax of decision fatigue. So every day, we're paying for it. We're paying this invisible tax of decision-making.

And in this time that you're deciding on what to wear, you could be spent pitching a dream client, you could be helping solve problems for your team or for your clients, you could be showing up being really dynamic and pouring into others and into yourself. Or you could just start your day without feeling like you already failed. Here's the deal, you guys, nobody ever taught us how to do this differently.

We were not taught how to buy clothes in a way that's intentional, and in a way that actually works for our life. So no wonder it's causing us stress. Today, what I want to talk about in this episode is how we can actually change that.

And I'm going to break down what's really behind that feeling of nothing to wear. We're going to talk about the sneaky ways your closet is draining you before you even get out the door. And of course, I want to talk about how can we fix this so that you have a style roadmap that gives you back your time, your energy and your presence when you need it most.

Because one thing I know for sure is we're not here to waste all of your magic on indecision. Let's talk about what it feels like to constantly go into your closet and have this feeling of I've got nothing to wear. And this always reminds me of shopping.

I sometimes will relate it to going shopping at the grocery store without a plan. When you think about it, if you're a person who does not make a meal plan, I now do. I've been doing it for 10 years.

But before I decided to change the way I was planning my meals and have a plan going into the grocery store, before I did that, I would walk into the store willy-nilly and let myself be influenced by this and that and sales and what sounded good on that particular day. But almost always when I would come home, I wouldn't actually have everything I would need to make a meal. Or maybe I would have enough to make a meal for one night, but not for the next five nights for me and my family.

So guess what? Then I had to go back to the store and fill in little ingredients to complete that meal and make it all work. Has anybody else done this before? And hence why I got fed up with it and I got tired of wasting all my time. And I decided to put a plan in place so that every week I knew exactly what I was shopping for and I could know with confidence that I had meals that would feed my family for the most part.

You know, with a little bit of wiggle room for failure here and there. But this is exactly what I see so many of us doing with our own closets. So we'll let ourselves be caught up in trends or sales.

We keep clothes in our closet that don't really fit or maybe that we're going to hope to fit into one day. We will shop for like a fantasy version of ourselves. I'm raising my hand right now because one of my most favorite things to buy is fancy occasion clothes.

Then in reality I don't have many places to wear those things. So they're cluttering up my closet, but there's not a whole lot of use for that in my real day-to-day life. Or, you know, we may stick to shopping for what's easy for us. I think this is another really big trap I see women falling into is that I get it. There are certain pieces that are more difficult to find. There are fit issues.

Then we always bring it back to blaming our body. That's a whole other episode that you can refer to. But whatever's easiest for us to buy is what we like to buy a lot of.

Okay, so like think about how easy is it to buy shoes? How easy is it to buy another pair of black leggings? And we do that because it's easy and you feel like you're satisfying a need but then when you go to your closet, you've got all these holes. And you got a whole lot of leggings and shoes but like nothing else. And then another one I see is that when we shop, we tend to want to shop in a way that will eventually make us look like how we see others showing up in our industry or in our space.

So, you know, if you're a speaker there's definitely a certain look. There's kind of a code that's been set. Hello, sparkly sneakers, anyone? You know, if you're in a corporate environment that's a whole other look.

A lot of neutrals, a lot of business suits. There's just a code no matter where you go. So, I mean, you can see how our closets with all these different examples that I just described, you can see how crazy our closets can become. Full of stuff that's mismatched based on fear of missing out, based on trends, based on conforming to certain looks, based on flash sales. And honestly, retailers know exactly how to hook us on this, right? I'm a marketer at heart and even I get hooked into this.

They thrive honestly on us buying more. And for us to learn how to buy better, to buy with more intention, to buy with more strategy, they don't want that. So, of course, they're not going to promote anything that would lead us to shop in that way.

So, of course, no one ever taught us how to shop with a strategy and for that strategy to be aligned with where you're going and who you're becoming. And honestly, no one can answer that but you. So, when you go to work with a stylist at Nordstrom or you set up a subscription for Stitch Fix, those can be helpful but if you still don't have the compass, the map of where you're going and who you're becoming, none of those become helpful sources.

And when you think about you running your business, you're building a brand, you're growing into a bigger version of yourself, that this missing strategy, this missing navigation operation system, is costing you way more money than you think. Not to mention other costs other than money. Like I said, it's not just the time and the money, you know.

I mean, when you when I just described all those examples, it's the time you spend shopping, it's the money you spent on the clothes, it's the space that you no longer have in your closet. But don't forget, it's also the guilt you feel about spending money on things that you never wear. Maybe you feel shameful because you have clothes in your closet that don't fit.

Maybe you bought pieces that didn't work out for you but then you never took the time to return it. A lot of women will tell me, "I'm really bad at returns, they just don't take it." So there's a lot of not only this fatigue of making a decision but then there's also a layer of judgment that sneaks in.

Like when you're trying on the sixth outfit before that speaking gig and wonder if you're ever going to nail the look that you're hoping for, like, is there any hope for me? Imagine what you could be doing with all of that time that's being sucked, that mental energy that's being taken away from you, where you could be spending that. The energy could be put into writing a pitch that you're going to send to be in a publication or on a podcast.

The energy could be put into content you could be creating or the room that you need to be walking into, like shoulders back, feeling confident and in your energy. And I'd like to tell you that I do this perfectly but I don't and that's why I'm here walking alongside you doing this work. This sort of time suck, energy suck that happens with clothes, it's happened to me too.

And in fact, it happened to me not that long ago as I was preparing to go on a business trip and this trip was really important to me. I was going to be going to events where I really wanted to level up and stand in a new next-level version of myself. And I had that same feeling of looking at my closet and loving the outfits that I had but they just didn't feel big enough.

So then I ended up in the weeks leading up to this event, I was scrambling around buying up tons of options, returning them, sending some to the tailor. I mean honestly, you guys, it's embarrassing how much time and energy I went into getting dressed for this. And so you know, I get on the plane and I'm exhausted.

No wonder because not only am I trying to prepare to be out of town for many days, but I'm now adding this layer of stress over what I'm wearing. I could have been thinking instead of using that time to getting about getting dressed, I could have been thinking about the kind of connections I want to make or looking in advance to say I really want to meet this person. I could be thinking about how I was using my time or how I wanted to show up and be engaged in the experience, what my goals were for this trip but I wasn't. I hate to admit that but I just want to be real here.

I'm in this with you. Honestly, the reason I'm in this is because I'm experiencing a shift in myself, too. And so I'm having another one of these cycles with my style in my closet, where things feel out of sync. It's inviting me at this time to go back into this work and reassess and recreate a strategy just like I'm asking you to do.

I want to talk about there's really some key things that happen that cause this nothing-to-wear loop that we find ourselves on. And again as I said, it's not really about the quantity of clothes you have in your closet. It's that the clothes that end up in your closet are really mismatched and misaligned and they're not really telling a cohesive story about where you're going. They might be fragments of who you were in the past, but it's definitely not a cohesive story of where you're going and who you want to be.

So I see three big areas of misalignment. So one would be clothes that really just don't represent you anymore. This is what I was just talking about with my business trip.

These clothes could be totally wonderful. They could be amazing clothes but all of a sudden, they just feel like it's an old version of you that doesn't seem to work moving forward. And what once worked now doesn't feel like it's going to work for this next level version you're tapping into.

Another area of misalignment is that clothes that actually don't fit your real life. I was talking about this earlier when I said I love buying clothes that are fancy and for all getting dressed up and then in reality, my life is not that. I have a tendency to want to shop, and maybe you do too.

But I have a tendency to want to shop what is fun but not always like the most practical thing. So I've had to learn and teach myself how to not just buy for the fun dopamine hit things, but also for the things I actually need. You know,w like sitting on the sidelines of my kids' games or a top that's going to be great in a Zoom call.

I hate that honestly, side note, I really hate that we now have to shop for Zoom-worthy tops. Oh, let's just collectively take a sigh of how frustrating that is. Having a closet full of things that don't actually reflect where you're going or what you're doing can be another way that it feels out of alignment.

And then another area where it can feel out of alignment is where clothes that feel easy to buy, but they're really not helping you piece together a full outfit. So when I was talking about it's easy to buy leggings or it's easy to buy shoes. For me I love blazers and I have a plethora of blazers in my wardrobe that I do use, but again,n like what are we going to wear with the blazers?

But maybe we struggle to buy the jeans because those are difficult to fit or we struggle to find other pieces and so they just don't exist and that makes it really difficult. That also feeds into this "I actually have nothing to wear." And it's no wonder that we wear 20% of our closet 80% of the time.

Again this is an exercise not only of being clear on who you are and how that woman dresses moving forward but also understanding how to build a wardrobe that actually fits the life of that woman. I think even beyond what I've been talking about in terms of decision fatigue, there really is a much bigger impact to all of this, this decision making in our closets, I'll often say this when I speak, when we think about it, deciding what to wear every day seems like such an insignificant decision doesn't it?

I mean it's been said that we make 35,000 decisions in a day and honestly, how can deciding what to wear be that important when we're making decisions for our family, we're making decisions for our businesses, we're making tons of really important decisions in a day. It just seems like this one should not be that important. The reality is, though, that what you wear really does change you.

It changes how you walk into the world how you show up in the world and there's an energy there and I've talked about this in other episodes about the impact of what you wear and there's real brain science behind the clothes you put in your body and the feeling that it gives you in your closet and then how you then act and behave in your day as a result of that feeling that you have and then obviously you're going to have results based on how you're moving through your day.

This is what I think is the bigger impact is it's not just you don't have enough space in your closet or you spent too much money, it really does impact how you show up when you're on a call with a client and you want to be doing your best or when you have a new business call or when you're on stage or just when you're with your family. This changes you.

Starting your day in a way where it feels like you've already failed or you're frustrated just doesn't launch you in the same way. So, as you're sitting here thinking, "Well, what am I supposed to do about this?" the knee-jerk reaction is always, "If I just keep shopping, I'll find the clarity." It'll eventually come to me, but I gotta tell you that shopping without a strategy, like how we've been taught to do, is like pouring water into a leaky bucket.

Sure, it might feel like we're making progress in the moment, like we're getting those oh man those dopamine hits, they are so good, aren't they? But then we will never get away from this nothing to wear feeling. You really cannot shop your way out of a lack of alignment. You have to build a really clear and honest strategy first.

So, what does it look like to create a style strategy? Well, this is actually something you know, should you join me in The Visibility Edit? Our next round starts in September. Should you join me? These are the kind of things you can expect that are going to help you put a strategy in place that will then allow you to shop with more intention to actually have a closet that works for you and to have less decision fatigue. First of all, we're going to get clear on what your style identity is so that you're not reinventing this every single morning.

This kind of reminds me also of sitting down to write my marketing content or writing my social posts. I will just raise my hand and say that I've totally been there where I didn't spend the time to make a plan for my content for let's say three, six months, or whatever and so then I sit down on my computer and I'm sitting there thinking, "I don't know what I'm going to write today." I think we've all been there, right? We've been in business long enough where we've had those moments where we're just trying to work off the fly, and it's so much harder.

But when you have a clear style strategy, what are the things I actually like to wear? What are the colors, the silhouettes, the styles that actually feel like me? We're getting clear about those before we ever have to like "Qe can't make all these decisions in our closet every single morning." We want to think about them in advance. Let them sit.

Let us feel how they feel before we have to like actually take action. And I think the other thing that comes along with your style strategy is understanding where you're ready to break some rules. Where you're giving yourself permission to leave old expectations, old standards behind.

Because ultimately, those rules stop you in your closet too. Those rules are the one where you know in that moment where you're thinking, "Oh, man I would love to wear this," and then that little sneaky thought pops in your head and says, "Oh, but wait, I'm pretty sure everyone at this event is going to be wearing this."

Or, "I probably shouldn't wear that because I'm talking to a group of people who are in a corporate environment and I wonder how they might perceive me if I wear this really fun dress that's in a bright color." So we get stuck in our own thinking about how to be appropriate, about how to fit in, and it really just keeps us playing small. That does not empower us in our wardrobe, in our closet. It keeps us stuck.

These pieces that we're going to be going through in The Visibility Edit that I will teach you really do give you a clear path for how to move forward. And once you have that strategy in place, once you have that clarity, things like cleaning out your closet becomes so much easier.

Shopping in a more intentional and grounded way is just like the thing to do. You don't feel as tempted. And finally putting together outfits it just makes so much more sense because we don't have all this other clutter jamming up our decision.

This is really the heart of what we're going to do in The Visibility Edit and if it's something that sounds refreshing to you I would love for you to go down in the show notes and apply to join because this is your pathway to more freedom. This is your pathway to more empowerment and your pathway to creating a really dynamic presence for yourself that's not about fitting in but it's about creating something differentiated that only you can own.

So before we wrap up I just want to remind you that we all know this. We all know that indecision is expensive but have you thought that indecision in your closet is also expensive? You're just too darn successful and amazing to keep paying that price that you're paying in your closet. I mean imagine walking into your closet tomorrow and there are not things there that you don't want there.

There are only things hung up in there that make you feel amazing, that make you feel powerful, that make you feel like you're walking into this next chapter. Nothing is reminding you of old ways. Nothing is making you feel guilty.

Nothing is making you feel like you should. It's just energizing. What would that feel like? I mean seriously how would that change how you move through the world? What kind of decisions or bold moves would you make with that kind of energy? What kind of pitches would you make in that kind of energy? What kind of networking? Who would you go and introduce yourself with that kind of energy? Now if you're thinking, "I want to do something about this right now," I love that. If you're also thinking, "I'd love to join The Visibility Edit," I also love that but for your today's task, this is where you can start.

Go into your closet right now and I can bet maybe as I've been talking, you've been thinking about one or two pieces that you know just don't belong anymore. I would love for you to go take that piece or pieces out of your closet. I would love for you to donate it.

I would love for you to throw it in the garbage if it's torn apart. I would love for you to pack it away maybe if it's a size you don't fit in today so that it's not continuing to taunt you in your closet and I would just like you to take that little step for yourself that little bit of empowerment that reminds you that you can do this. You can have a closet that feels better and you can do it right now.

I always think we feel like we have to do these massive closet edits but it really doesn't have to be big sweeping moves. It can be little steps and then tomorrow when you walk into your closet and you know that that piece or those few pieces are not there I want you to just notice how it makes you feel and this little feeling that you will have tomorrow or the next day when you do this small little task, this is just a glimpse into how you can feel when you go through this process with me. Again this is not about more and more and more.

It's about better. It's about intentionality. It's about self-trust and the only way to get to the next level of version of you really when you think about inside-out alignment is this:

If you are done wasting your time and your energy and all the other things I described on what you wear, I would invite you to join me in The Visibility Edit because we're going to change how you think about your closet for good. Go to the show notes, reclaim your time, reclaim your energy, get that confidence back and start dressing like the leader that you are. All right I love you all. I'm so glad you joined me for this and I can't wait to talk to 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.

If you're ready to stop second-guessing and start showing up as the leader you are from the inside out, The Visibility Edit is where that shift begins. Head to elliesteinbrink.com to learn more and join the next round. Because the next version of you, she's not waiting for permission. She's waiting for you. Let's make it visible.