Why Playing It Safe With Style Keeps You Invisible as a Personal Brand

You’ve searched for trending outfits for the season and Googled “what to wear as a speaker.” You’ve scoped out how others in your industry are styling themselves before an event. You’ve even thought about downloading and trying out style templates and checklists you’ve come across.

These all seem like smart choices, but it’s really generic style content that doesn’t work and actually sabotages your personal brand. It’ll just fall flat for you if you try any of it on. So what’s an emerging thought leader like you to do instead?

In this episode of The Visibility Shift, you’ll discover the reasons why generic style advice tempts you and why you want to avoid following it, especially if you’re the face of your business. You’ll be reminded why personal alignment surpasses pre-selected solutions every time and shown what to do to show up fully as the magnetic, unique presence you are.

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5:11 – Four common reasons why you lean into style templates and checklists

12:48 – How generic style dilutes your personal brand

16:32 – The consequences of wearing misaligned outfits 

18:42 – How generic style content costs you time and money

20:52 – Powerful parallel between following the style crowd and generic health advice

23:22 – How using generic style content keeps you small

26:32 – The antidote to succumbing to templated styles and checklists

Mentioned In Why Playing It Safe With Style Keeps You Invisible as a Personal Brand

How Natala Shimerdla Broke Free From the Style Rules

The Compliment Trap and How to Reclaim Your Personal Style

Standout Style Kick-Starter

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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.

Welcome back to another episode of The Visibility Shift podcast. All right, I have a question for you. Let's be honest. Have you ever googled something like "The top five things every speaker needs to consider for their outfit?" Or "What are the best jeans for my body type?" Or "What are the top five things I need to be adding to my wardrobe this fall?"

Or maybe if it wasn't just googling something, you've looked around, maybe you have a conference coming up or an event or a stage appearance, and you're looking around and thinking, "Okay, what are other people in my industry wearing?" This then, whatever you Google or whatever you come up with as you're asking yourselves these questions, you think, "Okay, I'm just going to do that."

Listen, I'm here to tell you that I know that looking for a template for our style feels like a safe option. It feels like we're choosing a proven path. Like somebody else has already figured this out, so why would I need to reinvent the wheel? But here's the thing I want you to hear today. In fact, it reminds me of a recent example of a podcast I was listening to about women's hormones. Hello, I'm a perimenopausal woman, and this is my life. So if that's you, welcome.

It was really funny though, because as this hormones expert was talking, she kept getting questions from the hosts, "Should we be thinking more about estrogen or progesterone or about testosterone or estriol?" It's funny because these are the exact same things that I'm thinking in my head. When I'm having conversations with my friends who are in this same stage of life, we are looking for that golden nugget, that golden piece of advice that's just going to unlock everything and tell us what we need to do.

But the expert was almost like a broken record. She kept saying, "Well, it really depends. It depends on the individual woman and her body's needs." It was in that very moment that I had an aha moment in that I felt exactly like this expert. I have been asked time and time again in interviews, in submissions for article publications, as a guest on a podcast, I'm always getting these questions about what should we be buying? What should we be thinking about?

If you're a professional woman, what should you have in your wardrobe? If you're a speaker, what things should you be wearing and what you should be avoiding? I feel much like this expert in saying, "Well, it really depends." It feels like a cop-out. It feels like I'm not giving an answer. But the reality is it's the best answer.

Because if you're listening and you're a person who is building a personal brand, generic advice is just not all that helpful. It's actually hurting you, and it's diluting your brand. It's probably watering down your message. So whatever this bold message you've already established in your brand, that generic style advice is going to take away from what you've already built. And worse, this generic advice is going to keep you playing small.

So what I want to talk about today is why generic style advice doesn't work, why I never offer this up. You'll never see me offering up wardrobe checklists that I published generically on my website. If I get asked this question—in fact, just this week, I got asked this question on a podcast interview about asking for the five things we need to be thinking about for fall—I kind of stupidly was dumbfounded and said, "Well, it's really hard for me to answer."

So you're going to learn why I never offer this up. Seems like I'm avoiding the question. But more importantly, what to do instead if you're a personal brand wanting to stand out in creating a name, a unique name, and presence for yourself instead of blending in. But first, I want to step back and say, why do we engage in this behavior in the first place? Why do we feel like going after this generic style advice, looking for templates, is going to solve our problem? Essentially, why does it feel like a compelling option?

First of all, there are four reasons I can think of. One would be it feels like a safe and proven option, doesn't it? Like why go back and redo the work and figure this out myself if somebody has already done the work, and I can just copy and paste? Why carve out a new path if one has already been established? Like when I think about speakers and all the rules that come around what speakers should and shouldn't wear, wouldn't you think, "Well, someone who has done this, who has walked the walk, who's been on the stages, they should know. So why would I not listen to them?"

Maybe in some regards, there are some things that are worth listening to, like don't wear something that's going to clunk, like a jewelry piece that's going to clunk against your mic pack. Yes, you do, in fact, have to have something to clip your mic to. But does it always mean you need to wear a blazer? No, there are lots of different options for you to be thinking about. But still, following advice that's tried and true, been proven, feels like a safe option. That's one reason.

Reason number two, I think we feel like this is going to solve our problem is because it avoids decision fatigue. A lot of my clients will tell me that they spend a lot of energy making decisions about their clothes, whether it's while they're out shopping or when they're in their own closets trying to figure out what to wear for a particular event. As busy entrepreneurs, speakers, business owners, this is the last thing we want to be filling our days with.

These decisions of what to wear, what to buy, feel like they're pulling us away from the primary focus, which is running the business, making money, making our clients happy, etc. When we feel like we have decision fatigue, it's so much easier for us to just fall into a rut with our dressing and resort to whatever our go-to is. I think we know that that's the danger zone.

So we know enough to say, "Okay, I probably shouldn't just fall back on whatever my go-to is. Maybe that's just a pair of leggings and a blazer." Maybe you're thinking, "Oh, that's perfect for me." But maybe for another woman, you know that that is not the thing. So finding a template or following the rules feels like a way to avoid that decision fatigue, so that we don't fall into our own traps.

What's another reason why we think following generic style advice is going to be the solution? Well, it saves time. This is a close cousin to what I just talked about with decision fatigue. But the idea of just copying and pasting what we know will work is a time saver. I don't have time to do anything else. So let's just do this, and it'll work.

When we're feeling overwhelmed by shopping online and all the options in front of us, we really just want the easy solution. That's smart. We've been taught as business owners, that's smart. Don't recreate the wheel. Take the easy path when—sometimes not always the easy path, but sometimes the easy path is fine to get you to where you need to go. That's reason number three.

What about the final reason, which I think honestly is a biggie? We feel like following these standards and templates—and this might be standards and templates within your industry. It might be standards and templates as a speaker. It might be standards and templates as a woman in your particular age range or your particular title—is because we feel like following those templates is going to give us the confidence that we will fit in.

I find this is especially true if you're sitting there and you've come from a corporate environment, and now you're off and running your own business. It is very tempting to borrow these templates from corporate because they gave us a lot of safety, feelings of safety. What I mean is that you knew that if you dressed in a certain way in your corporate world, that meant, and you might have gotten feedback—in fact, I had a client who gave her feedback—that wearing certain things was going to make her look more credible and be taken more seriously by her clients.

So of course, when you learn this early on in your career, you think this is a pretty good template to follow. A lot of my clients who come from corporate and are now running their own business will tell me things like, "Well, black is the safest color to wear. Not only is it just easy when you're needing to go travel because it works with everything, but also I've been told that that makes me seem like I'm more serious and I'm more professional."

I remember one particular client, she was a guest on this show earlier in my first season, Natalie. She talked about adopting those corporate rules and knowing that wearing black and keeping things very subdued in her wardrobe was not the right thing for her. She knew that. But even when she went out on her own, it was like she couldn't escape from it.

It was because of all these beliefs around, "This gives me credibility. This makes me look like I know my shit. It makes me look like I'm serious, like I'm serious about taking my work seriously," she couldn't get away from it because she really believed that if she went and ran in her own direction with her own style—which by the way, happened to be very girly, happened to be very frilly, bows, florals, all of it—she worried that doing her own thing would actually not work. It would work in the opposite direction.

So we think again, by following these corporate rules or industry rules and templating what we learn from those environments, is going to give us a safe result. With these four examples here, I can see why it feels like the right decision to follow templated advice, to search up generic templates, and then copy and paste. I really do. But I want to talk about five reasons why this might actually be working against you, why it might not actually be solving your problem. Even bigger of a concern, it might be watering down your brand.

Now, I just want to make a side note here. I am talking to women right now. If you are a personal brand, meaning you are the face of your business, you run your own business, you are the face, you are the face and brand of your business, or maybe you're a speaker, you're on the stage, and your message is very aligned with who you are and how you show up, this is who I'm talking to right now.

If you're not a personal brand and you're not trying to differentiate yourself in the market against your competitors, then maybe finding the five best things to add to your wardrobe for fall is not that big of a deal. Maybe that advice works just perfectly fine for you. But I want to be clear who I'm talking to right now. If you're a personal brand, then following this generic style advice is actually going to become your worst enemy. Biggest concern, number one concern I see, is that generic equals a diluted brand.

Now remember, you guys, my whole life, feels like my whole life, 20 years of my life of my career, was spent in marketing where I was consulting with brands about their brand, creating strategies for their brand so that they could be differentiated in the market, they could gain more clients, all the things. The cornerstone of branding is differentiation. Being different is king.

So when my clients would come to me and ask, "How can I stand out?" never once did I say, "We need to sound and look more like your competitors. Let's just copy and paste what company XYZ is doing over here. Let's do that for ourselves. Let's just hope that our clients, our customers, figure out how we're actually different once they start working with us."

I think I experienced this too when I went from marketing a company. My whole job was marketing my clients, whether that was a Fortune 500 company or a small family-run business, my job was to market them and help them be differentiated. So when I left that space and started this business, guess what? I became the brand, much like many of you listening. Maybe you had the same experience.

So when you think about differentiation, when you're thinking about a company like Target or any of your favorite brands you can think of right now, that sounds exciting and fun. Then when it comes to you as a person, being different, standing out feels a lot scarier, doesn't it?

It's harder for us to think in that way because our whole life we've been trained to fit in, especially when it comes with our style. But we have this tendency, this gravitational pull towards fitting in. So it feels almost like the opposite of what we're trying to do. It feels safe to fit in and blend with the crowd. But at the end of the day, settling for generic means you're muting your personality and probably muting your personal style, which is a reflection of your brand.

So mimicking these trends, mimicking influencers, mimicking other speakers we see in our industry, mimicking other leaders in our industry, really does us no good. It actually undermines your differentiation in the sense of being more memorable, being more magnetic, being more visible.

Natalie's story, which I was just talking about before, is a perfect illustration of this. She kept getting told, "Tone it down" when it came to her corporate life. Be less distracting, blend in, look acceptable. But the reality is that a template, following that template for her, was diluting her own brand, which was bold, vibrant. Her business name is Natalie Gets Shit Done. That doesn't read blend in corporate wearing black. That just doesn't. That's a bold name. She needs a bold style to reflect this brand she's created.

What I want you to remember about this particular piece is that generic will dilute your brand. If your brand looks like everyone else's, you're going to be harder to remember. It's going to be harder for people to recommend you. If you're charging premium prices, it's going to be harder for people to pay those premium prices for you because it seems like you're just like everyone else.

A second reason why you don't want to lean into generic is because it creates misaligned energy. You might feel this in those tiny moments in your closet. Like when you go to put on an outfit that you're like, "This works. For the place I'm going, for the appearance I have, for the networking event, it works." But somewhere deep inside it just doesn't feel right. You know inside there is a misalignment that it's like it fits the bill but it doesn't feel like me.

When I hear my clients talk to me about this, they'll just say something's off. This is something you really want to pay attention to. I don't know about you guys, but I can really even feel this when I'm at a conference, I'm sitting at a conference or I'm in meetings and I'm watching women up on stage, and whatever their outfit is, I can really tell if they are embodied in their clothes. I just can.

I can tell when the clothes feel performative. I don't know how I know. I just know. If you're listening, I bet you know too. So this is the danger zone we want to avoid because I think what can happen is when we follow these generic templates, generic style advice, or even acceptable advice for what to wear within our industry or within our space, it can almost feel performative.

We all know when we're in a performative space or we're putting on clothes because we know it checks the box, that is a different energy than an outfit you put on because you love it and you feel aligned and you feel most alive.

This is like when I talk about in previous episodes, the closet effect, when you put on clothes that are just meh, and how brain science shows that changes your energy versus putting on an outfit that is like, "This is a freaking home run," how that changes your energy. It's subtle, but it's important. Your audiences, your clients, your listeners on social, they won't know why, but they will feel it when you're misaligned. It's so subtle, but it's so important to pay attention to.

So another reason you want to avoid generic is it's wasted time and money. Now, I think this feels counterintuitive because at the beginning of this episode, we talked about how going generic and following templates feels like a way to save us time and money. But I got to tell you guys, my lived experience with my clients is that they will tell me, "I just keep shopping and I find pieces that I think are okay, but somehow they just don't land." So then they sit there in my closet, or "I find pieces that I think are going to be right, but then they sit in my closet, tags still on, never used. Because once I got it home, I realized it wasn't just the right thing or I didn't know how to put it together with everything else I had."

It feels like we're making progress when we shop. Like it will eventually lead us to clarity. We haven't quite found the thing, but it's close enough. So let's just add it to the closet. But generic is never going to work. Your closet is going to continue to be stuffed with what people told you to wear, what you think you should wear. It's going to continue to go out of control. You're still going to have this feeling of it's not quite right.

I think we know this, but it's hard to really come to terms with it. It's hard to come to terms with "maybe if I just keep trying, it'll work." I know I'm a person who's stubborn. So I'm like, "Maybe by the fifth time, it'll feel right," and it just never does. I have clients tell me all the time, "I spend money on things that never see the light of day," or "I spend money on things and they look like really loud misses later when I see myself photographed in it."

I see it time and time again. So I know the way in which we think to solve our problems is not actually solving our problems. It's actually that we just need to lean into what we like.

Lean into what is going to amplify our brand and amplify our personality. So that's a big one. Generic is actually going to waste your time and money. Because when you just get real and honest about what makes you different, and you start to lean into that, that's where you're going to feel more satisfied with your wardrobe.

Let's talk about a fourth one, why generic is costing you. I think this is a pretty big one. There's a loss of self-trust that happens when we're following other people's templates. If you've been listening for a while, you know I'm pretty health-conscious. So I'm big into working out. I'm big into my eating routine and really dialing in my nutrition. I've been on many a workout plan.

I have this tendency to want to follow what I think is right. So I'm like, "I'm going to trust the experts. I'm going to do what they say is going to get me my desired results, whether that's being stronger, leaner, whatever my goals are." So I follow this workout plan. Something is telling me it's off. I've gotten better about this, but I discard that nudge.

I discard it. I think, "Okay, well, maybe if I just keep trying, it'll come together. It'll work out like I think it's going to work out."

But it's not until I have to get real honest with myself that, hey, this is just not right for me. Maybe it works for somebody else, but it's not right for my particular body. I just had this experience last spring with CrossFit. I tried CrossFit, had so many friends that were like, "This is amazing." Dang, I tried hard. I tried, tried, tried hard. My body was just like, "Nope, this isn't it."

I decided, okay, I got to let this go. I had to trust myself that I knew better than the experts. Yes, it's important to get the information, but you got to start to sort through it and find out what works for you. The more we outsource that decision to "somebody else knows better," instead of saying, "Hey, this is what I know is true for me," the further we get away from ourselves and the more we erode that self-trust. I think the even scarier thing I've learned is that I noticed for myself this was a pattern. It was a muscle I needed to build.

It's a muscle I had to learn, especially as I became a business owner, about trusting myself in these decisions. Even though people were telling me this is the right way to do it, that's the right way to do it, avoid this, don't do that, I had to make some decisions for myself and trust that it was on the right path. This is the same with your style.

Yes, maybe some of this advice will be helpful, but at the end of the day, you have to say, "Is this an alignment or is it not? Does this feel right for my brand, or does it not?" That is your call. The final thing I want to say about generic, the final cost that maybe you're not thinking about, is that it keeps you playing small. This is another one of those internal costs, like this one, the last one I just talked about is more of an internal cost, this lack of self-trust. Playing small is a danger zone because when we're following these rules, we feel like it's going to keep us safe. But in doing so, that's going to keep you from the very thing you actually want, which is being magnetic. That is going to draw on the right clients, the right opportunities, the right stages.

I mean, how many times have you deferred to a proven path instead of just letting yourself shine because you were afraid? It's in those moments where you choose something else over yourself that you're actually playing small. It reminds me of a client I worked with who was working in finance, worked in finance her whole life. In one of her jobs, she had a big breakthrough.

She realized that the way in which the finance industry had always talked about giving financial advice was very cumbersome. It was very complicated. It almost felt threatening. She started on her own terms in her work with clients, just started adopting her own way of explaining things in a really simplified way with common words that made sense to her and made it feel like we were all on a level playing field.

She told me that when I realized that leaning into my own voice started, it started working. When she started speaking like herself, she said people started listening. It was the oddest thing. It was like the more she leaned into what felt intuitive for her and on brand for her, the more it worked.

I feel this way about our style too. I feel like we're wanting to stay with what is known because it feels like it's the safer option. But it is actually keeping you from your next level. Because who knows what could happen when you stop playing it safe, you stop playing it small, and you actually lean into what feels right. That might actually be the key that unlocks everything.

We've talked about a lot today, and I hope some of this is clicking with you and you're realizing that while generic may seem easier, it may not be the best for you, especially if you're building a personal brand. Here's what I want you to remember. Generic advice might be getting you dressed just fine. Literally dressed. It might feel like you're making progress in solving your problems, but it will not get you remembered. It is diluting your brand. It's creating misaligned energy, and people can feel that. Beyond that, it's wasting your time and energy. It's chipping away at your self-trust.

You know how passionate I am about style is so much more than just fashion. This is what I mean. Because style can be the thing that opens you up to a bigger playing field. So I want to give you a few, as we close out here, a few tactical things you can do to just maybe give yourself a little bit of a self-assessment and take some next steps towards being less generic. So the first thing I want you to do is take a little audit. I want you to think about the brand and the voice and the essence of your brand. What have you created for yourself. I want you to ask yourself this question: "Do my outfits right now reflect the brand I've created and the woman I'm becoming? Or are they a watered-down version of every other person that is in my own industry in my space?"

That might take a little bit of time to reflect and journal on that. Just be real honest with yourself because honesty is always the pivotal point for change. Secondly, if you don't feel like the answers from this first question are coming out the way you want them to, I want you to think about "How can I get better alignment between my inside and my outside?" When I'm working with my clients one-to-one, what that looks like is we're starting to identify their signature style words that are a reflection of their internal selves and their brand. We're defining power colors. We're defining signature silhouettes, color combinations, things that only they can own that are a reflection of the unique brand that they've built.

So that's a little sneak peek in like if we were going to work together, that's where I would start. But those are some things you can start to think about. So the third thing I want you to do is take an action. I'm sure you have something big coming up. It's fall after all. There are speaking events, there are conferences, there are networking events, the very busy season. I want you to think about taking one thing you've learned from these reflection questions and put it into play. Just give it a try. Just do something different. See how it feels.

This isn't really about getting a reaction. It's not about getting compliments. I did a whole podcast on that. So refer back to that if you want to hear about style by compliments. This is about how you feel and if your alignment is right. Take a chance. What's one thing you could do with your style that would make you feel like your brand and your style are in better alignment?

It doesn't have to be the biggest risk-taking thing. It can be, but as long as it's aligned, these little steps, and then the next time do something different or build upon it or take a little bit of a bigger risk. Guess what? Over time, that's how you build the muscle. That's how you learn that it's not as scary as you think it is. It's how you learn you can play bigger.

All right, I hope there's something here that you guys are grabbing onto. I really do. This is why I'm hosting this. It's because, you guys, I want you to start to look at style in a completely different way. I want you to be able to use style as a way to feel more aligned, but also to create something for yourself and for your brand that really is different, that dares you to stand out, that dares you to take a stand, that dares you to be bold and courageous because we don't need more sameness. We need more women willing to stand out and show why you're different and why you're valuable.

If this sounds like something you would love to do right now, I do have a program, one-to-one, where we would work just you and me, that would help you start to put all of this into paper. It would help you define what your brand that you've created could look like in the form of style. We do some foundational work at the beginning and then we actually go shop and style outfits that represent your brand. I'm telling you, this is so much fun because women are shocked that what we come up with is so much bigger than just wearing your brand color, or wearing one statement piece of jewelry, or wearing one sneaker in your brand color. It's so much more than that.

It's so fun to just see the possibilities and the ways in which, if you're willing to bet on yourself, what that can look like. I have a program called Standout Style Kickstarter Program, where we do just that. If it's something you're interested in, you can click the link in the show notes. You'll learn more about it. You can also book a discovery call to talk with me about it and see if it's the right fit. Or you can always just DM me on LinkedIn or Instagram too. I love hearing from you guys. So any of those ways, reach out to me and we can talk about getting started.

But for today, remember that generic is not getting you anywhere. Start to say this over and over and remember it. With that, I'll 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.