Inspired or Influenced? How to Tell the Difference and Protect Your Personal Brand

We’ve all fallen down the rabbit hole at some point. You discover and start obsessing over a woman whose style seems effortlessly magnetic. You save her posts, stalk her reels, even search for the exact pieces she’s wearing. Before you know it, your cart is full of outfits that look nothing like your own wardrobe or your life.

In this episode of The Visibility Shift, you’ll learn the subtle but powerful difference between being inspired by someone’s style and being influenced by it. I’ll help you come back to your center, reconnect to your own creative spark, and show up as the most magnetic version of you.

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1:29 – Personal example of how admiration recently turned into obsession

3:41 – First question that instantly reveals whether you’re being inspired or influenced

6:07 – Polka dot pants lesson: the difference between incorporation vs copy-and-paste

9:18 – What Taylor Swift’s latest album shows us about collective influence on style

13:45 – Three questions to help you stay aligned with your own authentic style when inspired by others

Mentioned In Inspired or Influenced? How to Tell the Difference and Protect Your Personal Brand

Jamie MacDonald on Instagram

Ann Taylor | Sézane

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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.

Have you ever run across a woman, maybe it was on Instagram, maybe it was a style influencer, maybe it was a celebrity, and you started obsessing over her style? You start saving her posts, you're screenshotting, you're watching her reels, you're scrolling, you're Googling everything about her. You’re starting to go down the rabbit hole of trying to find the actual links to outfits of what she’s wearing. Guess what? I’ve been there too.

In fact, this just happened to me last week. I had come across this woman. Her name is Jamie MacDonald. She’s a Christian artist. I had heard one of her songs for the first time. I loved her song. In this music video that I was watching, I was like, "Oh, her style is so freaking amazing." So I did what I just described. I immediately started Googling who is this woman? How could I see more of her? What does the rest of her style look like?

I landed on her Instagram. If anybody likes to have visuals while you're listening to a podcast, you can go find her at jamiemacdonaldmusic on Instagram. What I loved about her style and what inspired me so much about it was the way she took a very 70s-inspired wardrobe and made it modern. It was so cool but so vintage. There was a lot of denim. You guys know—maybe you don’t know—I love denim. Almost all of my outfits include denim.

There was just an edginess about it. There was a lot of pattern. There was a lot of color. I’m telling you what, I was down the rabbit hole. I was scheming about how I could start to look just like her and create outfits that looked just like hers. I caught myself in this obsessive little rabbit hole. Maybe you have found yourself in this rabbit hole and you came up for air and you’re thinking, “What am I doing?”

Maybe you’ve even gotten to the point of ordering things and you’re like, "Whoa, what just happened? I got totally carried away." For me, I realized I didn’t actually want to be Jamie. I wanted to capture the feeling her style gave me. It was bold. It was playful. It was vintage. It was good energy.

I’m telling you this story because I really believe there’s a fine line between being inspired and being influenced. One of those lines will help you build your iconic personal brand through your style. The other will make you lose it. It’ll actually dilute it. How can we actually tell the difference between when we’re being inspired by someone’s style and when we’re being influenced?

One way to decide really quickly is—do you feel like you can name your own personal style? Can you name it? This is actually one of the first things we do when I’m working with my clients in the intensive sessions. We have a whole first segment about their style vision. We work really hard. Yes, we go and source images. They create a Pinterest board and anywhere else that they find inspiration. We gather a bunch of images. That helps to form what is inspiring them.

I’ll ask them a number of questions. We get inspiration from other sources as well, including influencers or potentially celebrities. I’ll ask them to come up with a bunch of words that describe all of these images they’re pulling. After we’ve written down all these words, we go through an exercise and we whittle it down to ideally three to five words. Then, at the end, we definitely land on three words that they feel make up what feels like an authentic signature style for themselves that represents them and their personal brand.

What’s awesome about these style words—mine, by the way, are bold, feminine, and classic—is that they become the barometer for whatever outfit you’re creating. Whether it’s a big moment like a keynote or a low-key moment like going to brunch with friends or family on the weekend, if an outfit can hearken back to these three words, then you know you’re on the right track. If something feels off with your outfit, then you know maybe one of those three words isn’t represented.

Let me come back to how can I tell the difference between whether I’m inspired or influenced. The first would be—can you name your style? Because if you cannot name your style clearly, you will become a chameleon to everything around you. You won’t have a style. You will have a collection of everyone else’s styles. Why this is important is because if you are a personal brand, if you’re a business owner, you’re an entrepreneur, what makes you magical is that you differentiate yourself from everyone else around you. That’s how you become known.

What’s another question? How else can you decide—am I being inspired or am I being influenced? Does this outfit or style that you saw, or color, get you thinking about how you could incorporate it into your own style? Or do you feel the temptation to just copy and paste? Let me give you an example here.

Several months ago, I received a mailer from Ann Taylor. Raise your hand—does everyone still get mailers? I think we all do. But I’m just going to say I really miss getting catalogs in the mail, and I just wish that’s all I got because there’s something so special about looking at a catalog. Anyway, I got a little mailer from Ann Taylor, and inside this mailer, there were these fantastic cream pants with black polka dots.

They were wide-leg, high-rise, and I was like, "This pair of pants is it." I immediately fell in love. I went to their site. I was like, "I need these pants." But I gotta say, what inspired me about these pants was not how they had the model styled in them in the mailer. In fact, the woman was styled with a black sleek turtleneck and very polished shoes with it. No, no, no—that’s not how I would style it.

I would have had to do something more bold. That definitely played classic with a little pop of splash of fun, whereas my style is a little more eclectic. So that was an example of me being inspired by something I saw in a mailer and wanting to incorporate it into my own style as opposed to just wanting to copy and paste.

The same goes if you think about yourself shopping at an actual store or walking in a retail environment with multiple stores. You walk by a storefront and see a mannequin. Is it that you find yourself saying, “Oh, I want the whole thing. I want that entire outfit,” and then you just become what’s on the mannequin? Or is it that, “Oh, there’s an element of that that I feel would work with what I have”?

When I think about the inspiration I got with Jamie MacDonald, it was definitely the 70s-inspired, the vintage aspect of it. It was the boldness. It was the color. It was all of the things. After I was inspired by that, I came upon these pair of platform heels from Sézane. If you don’t know Sézane, it’s a really great French brand. It was this marigold and burgundy pattern platform-heeled sandal. I was like, "Yes, that is me."

That is a style that would be very Jamie MacDonald-esque. But how she would style it and how I would style it would probably be two totally different things. In fact, one of her signature pieces is this really cool hat. You just have to go look her up. She’s so cool. But that is not something that fits my own style. So that’s another way in which something inspired me, and I went toward “how can I incorporate it” versus copy and paste.

The final way I want you to evaluate the difference between "Is this something I’m inspired by versus influenced by" is do you find yourself wanting to be "just like her," almost an obsession. You almost feel like you want to emulate yourself into her, like this alter ego state, where it almost becomes performative.

I gotta say, before I was inspired by Jamie MacDonald, one of the reasons I wanted to record this episode was because the idea came to me when Taylor Swift’s new album was coming out. Of course, as we know, with her new album and her new outfits and things that were coming along with the debut, she was wearing orange. It was like immediately, I’m not kidding you, within a week of the announcement of her album, I was getting emails like “Orange is the new black.” I was getting emails with garments—anything in the color of orange.

I just had to sit back and laugh because I was thinking, "Oh my gosh, in my experience working with women, I have this part of the intake form about what colors you love to wear and what colors you hate to wear." I'm not kidding you, the number one color that women will say they hate wearing is orange. Now here we’ve got Taylor Swift looking amazing. How many of us were inspired to go and grab a color orange?

Seriously, I’m not kidding. A week after this came out, I saw a woman at my daughter’s school wearing all orange. I was like, "What is happening right now?" My mind was exploding. This is where you’ve got to ask yourself, "Okay, am I being inspired?" Take the Taylor Swift orange trend as an example. If you see it and you feel really inspired, you’re like, "Wow, that really makes me want to go try orange. Maybe I never considered that for myself," is that something you can translate into your own style? Or is it something where you literally went from hating it and now you’re like, "Well, I guess I can like it because if Taylor Swift can wear it, then that makes me cool. Then I should definitely be with the times if I wear that outfit or if I wear that color."

So it is this fine line between inspired being, “How can I translate this and make it into my own?” versus influence, “How can I copy this exactly?” I’m really sorry if you’re out there and you’re feeling called out. I’m really not trying to call you out. I’m really trying to help you think critically about this experience that we all have, which is that we all get inspired. In fact, I love being inspired. I think it’s great. It’s a great way to expand and evolve your own style.

It’s why, while I will talk about trends often, about how I don’t want people to be trend chasers, I do think trends are fun. They’re a great way to help you expand, to play, to take risks, and try things on and see—does it fit or does it not fit? However, when we get to the point of idolizing someone else’s style, it’s usually because we’ve lost clarity in our own style, or maybe we haven’t named our own style.

Without a clear style direction, you’ll become a chameleon to everything around you. And if you’re a personal brand, then it becomes an even greater problem because the key to any great brand is differentiation. When we get to the place of mimicry, that is not a great brand. Another way I like to think about it is inspired is a sign that something is expanding or evolving you. Influenced is when it erases you, when you merge into that other person.

So really this episode is a wake-up call. It’s a wake-up call to know when you’re feeling inspired, where is my true north? Can I take that inspiration and bring it back and bring it alongside my true north, that being your style strategy? Or does it totally take over, and now my strategy is shifting, and I’m now somebody else? And that’s wishy-washy.

I want to leave you with a few questions you can ask yourself when you feel inspired. I wish I could go back a couple of weeks, when I first found this woman and say, "Okay, sit down, before you go down this rabbit hole, let’s answer these few questions." So I’m giving this gift to you.

When you feel inspired, what questions can you ask to stay in alignment? First, what about this style excites me? And just write adjectives, write down feelings. For me, when I discovered Jamie, I would have written down the boldness, the playfulness, the color, the courage. Because it took a lot of courage—she’s got these big, bold glasses that she wears. She’s got this cool hat. I would have written down something about it harkens to vintage, a vintage aspect, which I love. I love that 70s-era vintage.

So that’s one question—what about this style excites me? Just write down some adjectives. Second question, how can I translate that element into my own wardrobe in my own way, in a way that amplifies my own style, not copy and pasting?

One of the ways that I allowed Jamie to inspire or amplify my own style is it made me realize that I used to shop vintage and secondhand stores all the time. It was something, I don’t know, probably along the way of having kids and getting busy with life that I just put aside. It was just easier to buy new or buy online. Of course, I know secondhand is huge now online. It’s so much easier now than it was 20 years ago.

But it was something that I used to love—the discovery, the uniqueness, the vintage aspect that you can only find in a secondhand store. It was something I really had gotten away from. So that was one of the pieces I literally took into and actually, I went and did a secondhand store shopping afternoon. It was great. It reconnected me back to something that felt really true to my style.

So that’s another question—how can I translate the element that I’m inspired by, that piece or that outfit, into my own wardrobe in my own way? Third question, a reality check: Am I wanting to be just like them? Or am I allowing that style, that person, to further expand who I am?

Answer those three questions. Think on them. If the inspiration emboldens who you are, that’s where it becomes magnetic. If it diminishes who you are—aka you’re merging into someone else so you can’t tell what’s them versus you—that’s mimicking. The danger, you guys, is people can spot that a mile away. They can sniff that out. They know when authenticity isn’t there.

So stay true to yourself. If you’re feeling even more curious now than ever—what is my style? Or when I asked that question earlier in this segment, “Do I have a style?” and you’re saying, "Well, I think so, but now I’m not sure"—I would love to invite you to take a step with me. You can either work with me one-to-one or in my group program called The Visibility Edit.

There’s a waitlist right now for 2026. In either of those two ways of working with me, this style vision piece and defining what your style strategy is is a huge part of the foundational work we do because it’s your north star. It’s the thing that guides all your outfits that come forward, and it’s done in a way where the inside comes first.

It’s an inside-out transformation, meaning we look at you—what makes you authentic, what makes you special, what makes your brand different—and then that becomes the guiding point as opposed to external becoming the guiding point. If that sounds like something you want to dig into, look in the show notes. You can find out how to work with me one-to-one, or you can get on the waitlist for my group program coming up in 2026.

With that, I just want you guys to remember, give yourself some grace. All of this conversation we have on this podcast is always about awareness and then allowing yourself to not only become aware but then, now that you know better, you can do better. You can become more intentional with your style, and that’s always what I’m going for here. So with all my love, I say I will 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.

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.