What Consistency in Personal Branding Actually Looks Like
- emsteinbrink
- 2 days ago
- 17 min read
You already know consistency matters in branding. But when it comes to your personal style, most women interpret it as wearing one signature color or having a few dialed-in outfits for the big moments. That's not consistency. And it might be exactly why something still feels off.
Consistency isn't about being perfectly polished for the stage and forgettable everywhere else. It's about having the same energy in the big moments and the small ones, on camera and in the school pickup line, at a conference and at the grocery store. When those two versions of you don't match, people notice. More importantly, you feel it.
In this episode of The Visibility Shift, I'm wrapping up this three-part personal branding series by breaking down what consistency in your style actually looks like in practice. I talk about why performing in one area of your life and letting everything else slide is exhausting and unbelievable, how to use three personal style words as a filter across every area of your wardrobe, and why building one wardrobe that works everywhere beats managing three separate ones.
Subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Spotify
3:41 – What consistency does and doesn’t look like in your style
7:56 – Why it’s important to be consistent in your personal brand
10:43 – Why you should care about brand consistency in your style (at work and on the weekend)
13:29 – Building a wardrobe with both the big and small moments in mind
16:54 – A simple framework for deciding who you are at your core so that it shows up consistently in your style
22:28 – Why it’s important to ask for help
Mentioned In What Consistency in Personal Branding Actually Looks Like
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. Today, we're wrapping up our three-part series on how to create a strong personal brand from a style standpoint. So far, if you've been following along, we've covered two big pillars of personal branding, number one being authenticity, basically who you are, what makes you believable, and number two, differentiation, or I've also referred to it as uniqueness. So what makes you unique or what makes you stand out? And if you haven't heard those two episodes yet, I would encourage you to stop here, go and listen, because each episode is building on the other.
Today, what we're going to talk about is the third and a pretty critical element, I believe, when it comes to branding and your style, which is consistency. One thing we know just in our own personal experience with brands is that great brands are consistent from top to bottom. Not only do you know who it is even before they tell you, but your experience with someone in-store versus customer service or the experience you might have in a store with a sampling of a product, all of it is aligned. I think there are some really great brands that come to mind for me that do a great job of this, like when a commercial comes on and instantly you know the brand before the logo even appears. Target has been doing an incredible job of this. I've always said that. Perhaps you've noticed they don't even show any logos until the end of the commercial, but you still somehow know who it is just by the energy of the commercial, the colors, the happy vibes that are always there, the community.
Even my son has picked up on this at his young age of 11. We have Hulu for our cable service. When we're watching commercials, they often will show Hulu commercials and you can always spot them. They're animated. They're always really quirky, a little bit weird, if I'm honest. They are consistently making this statement that Hulu is not like traditional cable companies, and they do that through their visuals and through their music and through the way in which they portray themselves visually. That's what I mean when I talk about consistency, at least at a brand level.
I want to then whittle this down into how we can take some of what we know about consistency and what I know about consistency in my years of branding and dial it down into a style perspective. I think it can be a little bit trickier to parlay what we know from a branding perspective into our style. So let's dive in.
I want to start off with what consistency is not. So consistency isn't having great outfits, completely dialed-in outfits only for your big visibility moments, but not thinking at all about your low-visibility moments. It's not having just a few, maybe three or four or five outfits that are totally dialed in and then not thinking about the rest of your wardrobe. That's like seeing a brand promoted as one thing in a commercial, but then when you walk into a store, the reality isn't really in lineup with that commercial that you saw. In essence, what happens here, this disconnect that you feel as a consumer, that breaks trust.
Consistency also isn't having your clothes dialed in for work, your work life, but not thinking about other areas of your life like your casual attire or your social or going-out attire. Consistency also is not wearing only one color in every visible moment. And I know this is a place where people may want to argue with me a little bit, but I do not believe, when it comes to your style, that only wearing one color is the way to create consistency. I think there are other ways to do it. We'll talk about this.
This also fits another related category, is relying just on one signature item, like if you have a statement pair of glasses or a bold piece of jewelry that you always wear or sparkly sneakers or whatever it may be. I do not think that, yes, while that is an element of your consistency, it is not all of it.
Actually, if you want to go deeper into those particular topics about wearing one color, I do have an episode, I believe it was episode 21, that talked about just that one topic. These things can be helpful in building consistency, but they aren't the whole story. Your brand is more than just one color or a single piece of jewelry or just what your work wardrobe looks like.
So what is consistency then? Consistency in your style is having the same vibe in the big and the small moments in your business, so on your Instagram Reels when you're batching content or you're creating videos, on the stage, in the airport after you've just had a speaking gig, or at a school event for your kids. You might be thinking, "Really? I have to be thinking about all these different parts?"
But I have to tell you, I had a client last year who told me that she actually dreaded running into an audience member at the airport after she spoke because while she looked totally branded on stage, she would change her clothes and then go to the airport. A lot of women do that. There's no problem with that. But in doing so, she felt like a complete hot mess at the airport, which is, of course, when people would run into her and want to talk to her. And isn't that how it is?
Being an entrepreneur or business owner, I always seem to run into people at the grocery store or at a school activity or at a sporting event. Ironically, I've actually had clients tell me they hired me because they would see me in these different settings, whether it was in a business setting speaking or at the school pickup line. They noted that I was so consistent in how I showed up in all those areas of my life. So essentially what they were saying is I was believable.
So consistency is having this alignment not just in your work life. That is an aspect we can talk about today, but across those areas of your life, both personal and professional. It's understanding who you are first, what makes you unique. Okay, that's what we've been talking about in those first two pillars of authenticity and differentiation, and then showcasing that consistently in how you dress.
So when I talk about having a total alignment inside and out, you might hear this word alignment thrown around a lot. That's what I'm talking about. There's a consistent thread. I want to share some tips with you today, but before I do, I think it's worth just saying, why does it even matter? Because I can maybe hear you saying, "Really, why does it matter that when I'm at school picking up my kids that I'm totally dialed in with my outfit? Why does it really matter that when I'm working from home and I don't have any client meetings, why do I need to be thinking about consistency in my dress?"
Well, there are definitely some pretty strong business reasons for why you should pay attention to consistency in your brand. So I'm going to cover those, but I'm going to cover another one that I think is going to help you tie this all together in terms of the why.
For one, we know that consistency builds trust. I just came across this quote from James Clear. I'm a big fan of James Clear that says, "Trust follows consistency. The businesses that deliver a quality product every time earn the customer's trust. The person in the relationship who shows up reliably, who keeps promises, who responds with steadiness, earns the trust of the other. The pattern is the proof." Yes, right? The pattern is the proof.
I think the difference between a corporate brand and a personal brand is that you as a person are the brand, so your brand doesn't just turn on and off depending on where you're at. You are always the brand, which can feel like a lot of pressure, but I want to talk about some things today to make it feel like it's not so much pressure.
So we know that consistency builds trust amongst potentially people who would want to work with us. Secondly, consistency makes you more recognizable. I think this is so clearly demonstrated in corporate brands and we can really see it quickly like Coca-Cola or Subway. Their goal is really becoming recognizable so that people will grab their products off the shelf or they'll be the first restaurant to choose when they're searching for something at lunchtime driving down the road.
But it's important for your personal brand to be recognizable too, but in a slightly different way. You know you've really nailed the recognizable and consistency pillar when someone sends something to you like a piece of clothing or a pair of shoes or something, and they're like, "This is so you." Has anyone ever done that to you? That's when you know you've got it dialed in because who you are at your essence is just seeping out of you. Whether you're dressing up for stage, you're getting dressed for something on the weekend, your whole vibe, it's recognizable.
But let's go back to what I first was talking about, how this isn't just about your business results. Why does this really matter? Why should I care about having consistency between what I wear to work and what I'm wearing on the weekend? This really goes beyond the bottom line. It goes beyond just your numbers because when you're consistent from the inside out, you find yourself performing less, pleasing less. There actually becomes more realness in you. There's this allowing of yourself to be more you without needing to prove. There are not these two versions of you, like the on version and the off version. They're just one version.
I don't know about you, but my body can really tell when my alignment is off. When I'm performing a little bit too much in my work realm, I can feel that. I can feel that shift. I don't like it. Sometimes it comes in the form of stress or anxiety, like when I'm pushing too hard to try to become a version of myself in a work setting. But it has shown up in my life in a physical form too.
When you're polished and perfect at work but a complete hot mess everywhere else, I'm just saying those words because I hear that a lot from women and clients, that's not believable. Quite frankly, taking it out of the realm of how others perceive you, it's exhausting. Those are the times when we're working so hard to be polished and perfect in one area and we're not caring as much or we're just maybe being more of our real selves in a different setting. That's when you know there's a performative issue in your wardrobe. There's a performance going on.
Have you ever felt this pressure to be on all the time? I know I have. I'm someone who's been in client service my whole working career. I secretly hope I wouldn't run into someone I know while running an errand, which I mentioned earlier in this episode happens to me all the time. I think this exhaustion around being on really comes down to it feels exhausting because you don't want to pretend. You just want to be real. You want to be you.
And this makes me wonder, and I'm hoping it's also making you curious about what kind of face you're putting forward that makes it so hard to sustain in all these different areas of my life. And above anything else that we've talked about here, this is why paying attention to consistency matters because being consistent just simply feels better in your body energetically.
I want to leave you with a few tips that you can put into practice so that you can become more consistent in your style presence.
First, I want you to think about building a wardrobe with both the big and the small moments in mind. Notice I didn't say just build a wardrobe around the big moments, because I think that's what we tend to do. Honestly, as working women, whether you're a leader, you're working with a company, or you're running your own thing, I think this is really just how we've been trained to think. We put a lot of time and energy into our work wardrobes.
As a result, we tend to compartmentalize our wardrobes. It's something I've always hated about, it's a consistent theme I see in my clients' wardrobes, is that we tend to put our clothes in different compartments. So we have basically not one wardrobe, but separate wardrobes for our work life, then another wardrobe for our weekend or casual life, then yet another wardrobe for our going-out life or social life. It's like we have different personalities. It's like a personality disorder in our wardrobe, right? Because different versions come out in different settings. Like I'm the businesswoman over here, and then I'm the party girl over here. It's just all over the place.
But life doesn't really work that way, at least it doesn't in my mind. So this is one thing I've worked really hard with my clients and showed them how we don't need to have these separate parts of our wardrobe. We can have one wardrobe that works in different ways by how we style it in different areas of our life. But I do get why we've gotten here because there is, in fact, a direct relationship between our clothing investment and how we show up in our presence, in our outcomes in business. So of course our tendency is to want to focus on those three to five outfits we're going to need for the high-visibility moments.
But what about those lower-visibility moments? What about the day-to-day office attire or the working attire when there are no meetings? What about the work-from-home days? And if that's you as an entrepreneur who works from home, that's every day. What about those casual coffee meetings when maybe it isn't a client? Maybe it's just a connection. What about when you record a Reel for Instagram? What about when you're on a podcast? What about when you're batching content?
These may not be the moments we plan for. A lot of my clients are speakers or they have presentations or conferences they're going to, and those tend to be the focus. Don't get me wrong, those matter too. But we have to think about the moments where we're not as seen or it doesn't feel as big because we know we're going to be photographed or we know those images or video are going to be plastered all over your social accounts. Because being yourself in all of those moments matters, big and small, for creating believability and for creating authenticity.
So the first tip, again, is to remember we're not just building a style and a presence just for these high-visibility moments. We're also thinking about all the different moments in our life so that we can be more authentic and believable.
The second tip would be to understand who you are at your core. This is really what we've been talking about in the first couple episodes, right? Authenticity is, "Who am I? What am I all about?" Differentiation is, "What makes me different from everyone else?" But when you're different versions of yourself in these different settings, it's just not believable to others or to you.
So when I work with my clients, whether I'm in a one-on-one or a group setting, I focus on defining who you are at your core, what makes you unique, not just who you are as a businesswoman or leader. One of the helpful tools I use with my clients to stay rooted and to really clearly define who you are in all areas of your life is defining your three personal style words.
Now, these three words are defined in the beginning of the groundwork I do with my clients before we ever start shopping. They're developed in a section I call Style Vision. What we're doing with our Style Vision, outside of naming these three style words, is we're getting honest about who we are, what we like, what we want for our style, how we want to be seen, not what the world tells us we want or how we think we should show up, but an actual true reflection of who you are.
So there are a number of exercises we do to help us determine and get to these three personal style words. But then from there, we use these three style words as a filter, like a measuring stick, I guess is another way to say it, for every single outfit that we would then create together or that you would put together on your own.
So for example, mine are bold, feminine, and classic. I like to think of the three style words as working all in tandem, not separately. So I would never create an outfit that only highlights the feminine word because that would feel really off for me. When I think feminine, I think frills, pastels, tulle, bows, which I do like those elements, but then it totally negates my desire for being bold and also leaning into classic pieces. So they all have to work together. Having an understanding that they work together, they don't work separately, then I ask, how can these words be represented in all situations I find myself in?
How do these three words, bold, feminine, and classic, come together in a work setting when I'm meeting with my clients or I'm on a podcast interview or on stage? How does that come together on the weekend when I want to dress more comfortably and casually? I might be running errands or I might be sitting in the hot sun in the stands of a softball game. Or how about even just a date night with my husband?
Let me give you another illustration of how this could work, how these words have worked for a particular client. So I had a client, Jessie, who you've heard here on the podcast, who defined her three style words as vibrant, sophisticated, and surprising. Okay, so that was the initial work we did where she got clear on not how she thought she needed to show up, but how she actually wanted to show up to show more of herself to the world, to her clients.
We found that balance in her work wardrobe for her client meetings and the conferences she was attending, the speaking engagements. It involved amping up a lot more color because one thing for her, you might remember from our conversation, was that she had this belief about staying humble, being quiet, not ruffling too many feathers that stemmed from her childhood about not drawing attention to herself. So we did lean into wearing brighter colors and doing more interesting and surprising color combinations instead of just doing the expected.
But in her casual wardrobe, I knew it was going to be all too easy for her to defer to old ways of basic colors and solid pieces. Honestly, I think a lot of women just defer to buying black or white pieces or navy. It's no surprise. I think it's because we don't know what else to do, but sometimes I think it's hidden in some of these rules we've created for ourselves. It's actually why black is most often purchased over any other color. But I knew that would be her tendency.
Navy, she had navy as her power color, which we could work with, but we needed to find a way for it to not be so basic, even in her casual wardrobe. So we found really playful prints that aligned with that vibrant and surprising, those two style words. We had this really feminine-looking top that had a heart print. It was a blouse that she would pair with jeans. We found this really cool Kelly green sweater that had this dog print all over it. So those were really interesting and surprising and vibrant. We also leaned into interesting color combinations, yes, even when she was just running errands for the weekend, and even playfulness in the silhouettes of the pieces we chose.
So that's just one example of how better understanding who you are at your core can really inform how we need to dress in these different areas of our life, not just one area of our life.
I can understand that as you're listening to this, it might feel a bit overwhelming. I've always said that I believe the whole idea of style and fashion feels very complex. That's why I named my company Style Decoded. It is complex. I think branding is complex too from a personal branding standpoint, which is why my third and final tip for you is to ask for help.
I'm just going to say up front that I know this is going to sound like a sales pitch, but I'm speaking from experience here and from the realization that as an entrepreneur myself who is running my business all by myself, no other employees, I'm a solopreneur, I recognize that at some point you realize you simply can't do it all alone. It's exhausting. It takes up way too much mental energy that you don't have in the first place, and it would require you to figure out a bunch of things and acquire entirely new skill sets that you don't have time for and really would take your eyes off the game of what you're trying to do.
I see women struggle to get their work wardrobe in order, and then to think about not only getting your work wardrobe in order but then also figuring out how that parlays into your casual wardrobe, that feels completely impossible. It's why I love helping women build their closets with the mindset of finding pieces that work across all areas of your life, styled differently for different moments in different situations and not having these separate wardrobes for separate purposes, but helping them find pieces that can work hard for them, serve multiple purposes just by the way in which we style them.
And that, in itself, approaching style in that way, makes this whole idea of consistency and alignment so much easier. That's when your closet starts to feel easier because you're not managing three separate wardrobes. It feels more aligned. It feels more you.
So if you're someone who is fairly independent and likes learning and wants guidelines and structure to help you define your personal style, but then you feel really confident implementing it yourself, I have a group program for that. Or if you're someone who wants to have more individualized help defining your vision and then actually taking that vision and putting it into real life in your closet, I can help you with that as well.
What I want you to leave with in this episode is to see that clothes are so much more than fashion or trends or maybe even just a necessary evil. This is about living into a version of you that feels believable. Style just happens to be a vehicle in which you do that. It's about living in alignment with who you are. When you can achieve that, you feel different. There's a different energy that radiates out of you, and people will notice it. You become magnetic without even trying so hard. That's what I want for you. That's what this whole series has been about.
If something in this episode stuck out to you, I'd love to hear from you. Message me on the platform you're listening on or message me on your favorite social platform. I'm most active on Instagram and LinkedIn, so reach out. I'd love to hear from you. With that, 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. Let's make it visible.
Comments