When Your Clothes Don't Feel Like the Woman You're Becoming

You open your closet and nothing feels right. Everything fits, you have plenty of options, but somehow nothing feels like you. That feeling of disconnect? It's not because you're a bad shopper or your body is changing—you're simply outgrowing what used to work.

In this episode of The Visibility Shift, I'm diving deep into style dissonance and why it's actually a powerful indicator that you're evolving as a leader. You'll discover why shopping your way out of this feeling never works and learn the one question that will shift everything about how you approach your style transformation.

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2:48 – The real reason behind style dissonance and why it's not about your shopping skills 

5:33 – Why panic shopping keeps you stuck (and what to do instead) 

7:22 – Case study: How a C-suite finance leader broke free from blazer prison and found her authentic voice 

11:56 – The transformative question to ask before you buy another thing 

14:28 – How The Visibility Edit helps you align your style with who you're becoming

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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.

You know that moment when you open your closet and just nothing seems right. Everything works technically. Maybe some things fit, maybe some don't. Most likely, you have plenty of options. In fact, your closet may be absolutely stuffed full. But somehow, when you walk into your closet, nothing feels like you. There are plenty of options. There shouldn't be a problem. But why do you feel so out of sync with what you see in front of you? This episode is here to talk to you about why you're feeling this way and how we commonly attribute this feeling of nothing feels right to something being wrong with us.

Like, for example, "Maybe I'm just a bad shopper. I clearly can't control my shopping. There are so many things in here, but nothing feels right." Or maybe an excuse like, "My body's changing and now this is why nothing is working." But the reality is that this disconnect and this dissonance that you're feeling isn't about any of that. It's about growth. It's about the identity shifts that are happening, and your wardrobe just hasn't caught up yet.

So if you're sitting here feeling exactly this way, like your closet is out of sync, it's not because you've lost your sense of style, it's not because you're a bad shopper, it's not for any of those reasons. It's because you're evolving. You're evolving as a person, as a business owner, as a leader. Today, I want to help you reframe that feeling, not as a problem, but as a powerful signpost that you are ready to shift.

Let's talk about how this normally shows up. Let's give it a couple of scenarios. These are things that I commonly hear from my clients. Maybe you've been running your business for a while. You're a business owner, you're an entrepreneur. You've been in the game for a while. But you start to feel a shift in yourself and in your business. Perhaps you're feeling some big expansion. That may look like you are getting invited to speak on bigger stages. That may look like you're getting invited into new rooms that make you feel a little bit outside of your comfort zone because you know there are going to be other women there that are at that next level that you want to be at, that you're gunning for.

Maybe you're just getting more visible. You're recording video content, you're on social, you're in the meetings with the dream clients. There is just some expansion happening. And we can start to feel really uncomfortable, and this is when that shift starts to happen. So when we go into our closet, and we've got a calendar full of these big events, and we go into our closet and we're looking at the options that are in front of us, there are absolutely some fine options in your closet. Ones that worked for you in the past. But now when you put it on, somehow it just doesn't feel right. It doesn't feel big enough for these next bigger opportunities that are in front of you.

Or you might look in the mirror and say, "This just doesn't feel like this next little version of me that I can feel it shifting internally, it feels like this outfit just isn't catching up quick enough with where I'm going." You might feel guilty because you have all these clothes in front of you that could be just fine but you're really feeling this internal dissonance like, "What do I do with this feeling?"

You might just simply say, "I don't know what to do with this feeling where everything feels out of sync. I should be fine with it, but I'm not fine with it." Or you might just say, "I must be really bad at shopping. What's wrong with me? Because I can't find the right things that feel like they embody this next level version of myself." Or you might blame it even on your body changing. Because Lord knows—listen ladies—I'm in my mid-40s and I know all about my body changing and it can really throw us off our game. So we might be blaming the fact that our body is changing for why we don't feel right in our outfits.

But you guys, these are all just excuses. What's really happening underneath all these excuses is you've simply outgrown what used to work for you. You may be dressing the part. You may still even be getting compliments on the outfits you're wearing. But inside, it doesn't feel like you.

And so what can happen when we start to feel this dissonance, and we know the clothes aren't right, we know a shift needs to happen? This is the number one most common thing I see women do, is we start shopping. We do the panic shop. Don't tell me you haven't landed a really big opportunity and it's coming up on your calendar and you start scrolling socials, you start scrolling the internet looking for the perfect outfit. You go on a panic shopping trip. A lot of times how that pans out is we order up a bunch of things and we get it all into our home.

We try it on, and 99.9% of it goes back. Somehow, nothing is fitting, nothing is working. Or you might find yourself—if it's not for a specific event that you have coming up in your calendar—you might just find you're doing a lot of shopping. You feel the need to keep collecting and adding because maybe in the process of shopping, you'll figure it out. You'll find the perfect thing or you'll just eventually get to the answer that you've been looking for. These are all really common things and honestly, these are things that I've done before in the past too.

This shopping frenzy is really just not helping your problem. It's actually just keeping you more stuck because it's causing more confusion. What I'm here to tell you today is, if you're feeling this way, it's a sign that something bigger is going on and something like a shopping haul or subscribing to a shopping service or going to a store and working with a stylist there is going to solve a problem. It's not going to solve our problem.

I want to tell you about a client of mine who really found herself squarely in the middle of this exact same scenario. This client is a C-suite leader in the finance industry. For years—if anybody here has been in the finance industry or you've been in a very conservative industry—there's something you know to be true about dress code and that is that there is a very set dress code. You wear suits, you wear neutrals, black is king, everyone knows this. She knew this, too. For years and years and years, she played along. She followed the rules. She had made a career change and moved to a little bit more of a progressive company within the finance space.

She found herself starting to play with her voice. She was one who was frequently on stage. She was creating content. She was creating a lot of video content. She found herself in networking opportunities. She was highly visible within the company. As she got more and more in tune with how she wanted to show up as a leader, she started to change how she was speaking. This became sort of a brand for her, a personal brand for how she started to speak within the finance industry. It was a very easy-to-understand way to talk about finance and she even said to me as we were working together, "The more I started to speak like myself, the more people listened."

The irony for her at that time was you think that if you play by all the rules and you talk like how you think you're supposed to talk, that that will equal success. And then she had this experience where she let herself come into her own voice and speak in a way that made sense to her and that she knew intimately would make sense to those who were listening. And guess what happened? People started listening. She said to me, "When I was in this zone of really finding my own voice, I had this realization that there was a dissonance, just like what we're talking about here. I had a dissonance between how I was speaking and showing up in a more authentic way, but I was still dressing in a way that looked the part. Like I was dressing in a costume, and I felt uncomfortable in it."

For her, what that meant, what she told me, is, "I had this rule in my head that anytime I spoke, anytime I was on camera, anytime I was in a big meeting, I felt like I needed to wear a blazer. It was as if the blazer gave her credibility."

The blazer would be the thing that would make people listen when she was on stage. And she said to me, “You know what, Ellie? I hate blazers. I hate wearing them. I just don't like them.” One of the things she really wanted for herself and for her style was she wanted to feel one way on the inside and also feel that same way on the outside.

Before we started working together, she had admitted, “I felt this dissonance.” And what I started to do was I got subscribed to a number of different style subscription services. None of them worked out great for her. She started working with a stylist at the Nordstrom store that would help her pick out things and ultimately, none of these things really were helping. See, the fact is she was doing shopping, she was trying to solve her problem, but none of those avenues were panning out for her. She still was feeling this dissonance.

And it wasn't until we started working together and we started to address that there was a disconnect, there was a misalignment between her authentic version of herself and her voice that was showing up and how she was dressed that she didn't even realize she was hanging onto these rules about her style. That was keeping her from showing up in her most aligned self, in her most powerful presence.

And I cannot tell you how common this is. Where women that I work with, women that I talk to, they are feeling this shift and they don't really know what to do with it. They think that by shopping and just trying to kind of put a quick fix on this bigger shift that's happening in them, that this is going to solve the problem. They find out time and time again that it's just not working.

What I want to tell you guys today is that if you're feeling this change inside of you, if you're feeling like you walk into your closet and things are just not making sense and you want more for yourself, you don't know what the answer is, and you're feeling that panicked feeling of wanting to do something about it right, right, right now, “I want to fix it right now,” I'm telling you that none of this is about being a better shopper, about learning how to be more stylish, about changing your body, it's about reconnecting with who you're becoming.

It's doing the inside work first to then start to begin to be honest with what you want on the outside. Listen, if you're still sitting here thinking, “Well, I still think that I'm going to find clarity if I just go start shopping and I look around and I just keep up with the shopping and the returns and the shopping and the returns, eventually something's going to be clarified.”

But I want to ask you, how is that working for you? I'm going to guess, given what I know about most women's closets, they're pretty stuffed full of these shopping hauls that we think are going to fix what we think the issue is, what we think the problem is. We think it's going to fix it.

That's why I'm inviting you to start to look, let's just call it "problem" we have with our style, to start to look at it from a different angle, an angle which is going to give you a much more real and powerful transformation that I know you are looking for, that I know is going to help you get to whatever that next level is you're trying to reach for. That next level that you want to embody.

This is why when a woman comes to me and she says, “I'm ready. I'm feeling ready. I'm having these feelings in my closet. I'm ready for a reinvention. Let's do this,” that's why I say the first thing they think they should do is to go shopping, but in reality what you need to ask yourself is, “Who is this woman that I'm becoming?” Let's start with that question. Let's dive into that question and let's see what kind of powerful clarity can come from that when we're honest with ourselves before we ever step foot into a store, virtual or real.

If you guys are sitting here and feeling like, “Man, I feel ready. I feel ready for a different kind of approach to my next level style. I feel like this is the direction I want to go,” I want to invite you guys to a brand new group experience that I've created called The Visibility Edit.

The Visibility Edit is the thing that is going to get you to your next level style. It is the thing that is going to prepare you mentally, energetically, to step into that next version of yourself, to step into her, whatever that looks like.

This is the thing that is required in order to make the shift. We think the thing is to start shopping and figure it out as we go. The thing is to dig in and start asking questions—thoughtful questions with intention—and then watch how it actually changes you. So if this sounds like something you are so game for and so ready for because you are sick and tired of the way in which you've been approaching it to date and it not panning out, I would love to invite you to apply. With that, I will see you guys on 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.