When people enquire on our website to attend one of our training courses we always ask for a phone number, actually unless you give us a number to contact you on the enquiry form doesn’t reach us. Why do we ask for your phone number? It’s because we want to speak to you! Not only to get to know your requirements but essentially to gage if a career in personal styling is actually for you. If we feel it’s not, we promise not to waste your time (and money) giving you false hopes that you’d be great at it.
So how do we know if you’ll be any good at it? Well the clue is in the title: Personal Stylist.
The biggest requisite is to be a people’s person, if you’re not and just have a passion for clothes and styling then a career as a Fashion Stylist is probably more suited to you and there’s no shame in admitting that. As a Personal Stylist you need to have empathy and compassion for you clients. 8 out of 10 times the reason why someone books in a session with a personal stylist is because behind their existing choice of clothes there is some form of low self esteem going on and as I tell all of my delegates very rarely will your client tell you upfront she is struggling with low self esteem. Maybe they’re going through a difficult divorce, maybe they’ve been divorced for years and until now haven’t been ready to get back out there again. Maybe they’ve been replaced by a younger sexier version of themselves not only in relationships but in the workplace too.
People who book a Personal Stylist don’t just half heartedly book a session, sometimes its taken months if not years to come to that decision to actually take the 1st step and what they want on the other side is someone who can not only greet them with compassion and kindness but someone to actually see them differently… to look at them with eyes of potential and hope, to see their assets not their shortcomings and although this is what we train you to do on the training it sure does help if you instinctively are one of those people who brings out the best in people.
I honestly believe the reason why I became successful as a personal stylist is because it was my mission to help people. I knew the power of what dressing in your most flattering colours and styles could do to your self worth and self confidence and I so desperately wanted woman and men to feel good about themselves and no matter who my client was or what kind of day I was having the moment I was with my client, it was all about making them feel amazing but what I soon realised was when I was making others feel great in return I’d feel great and whatever was bugging me prior to meeting them became insignificant so by helping others I was actually helping myself…
So how do you bring out the best in someone? You look for their assets, whatever makes their body shape great and you focus on that; you compliment, you encourage, you become their cheerleader… Most of the time women in particular hide their great figures in layers of ill-shaped clothing that hides their assets and instead highlights their flaws. You the personal stylist have to have the eye to see beneath all that and bring them out of their shell with the right choice of clothes (and underwear) and it’s when you do that that you inevitably build their trust! This is when they’ll open up to you about what’s really been going on with them personally and once you know this you can really step up and rescue them, taking them out of their comfort zone to get the dream new career, new man, new lifestyle whatever it is they’re craving to achieve..
Look at beautiful Julie pictured above in her before photo she camouflaged herself in a world of print, the wrong colours and wrong styles but when she started to trust me, she opened up and I realised she was hiding her pain of not only a horrible divorce, a serious illness and looking after both her ill parents…I didn’t want to see her as a victim though, I wanted to show her just how beautiful she is so that if she did ever bump into her ex husband he’d kick himself as to what he let go… What do you reckon happened? Did our transformation work? You bet it did!