Wearing your personal brand with Renée Lindo

Written by Megan MacNeill

Wearing Your Brand With Renée Lindo
November 23, 2020

On the Personal Branding Exposed Podcast, I get to explore the many facets of what showing that best version of yourself entails, from various psychological, sociological, and professional points of view.

Recently, however, I got to discuss personal branding with a lovely twist towards fashion in my talk with the personal Stylist Renée Lindo.

Renée has an impressive track record of helping successful women around the world to express their true selves through what they wear. Since letting your true self shine through is what my podcast is all about, you can imagine this episode yielded some interesting takes. Here’s some of them:

Why Your Style Matters

The main theme that covered most of our conversation was about how we as human beings are visual creatures and how what we wear is important because it sends out a message before we utter even a word.

Renée put it wonderfully by saying: “So many times I’ve heard people say your style is just superficial, it’s not important, it should be about me, you know I’m a good person, I’m a hard worker, I am all of these fantastic things. But, what’s important is that people make decisions about us in the first seven seconds of meeting us, and I’m not saying it’s great to judge, but as humans, that is what we do.”

Within this short window of time, as she said, people will decide if you are worthy of their trust if you’re a serious professional and many other crucial things that make them want to work with you or not. So, nailing that first impression is crucial for success.

Telling A Story With Your Clothes

In order to help her clients to dress for success, Dr. Renée developed this wonderful thought process that she uses to help guide their thought process when deciding on a look:

“It’s just like any other story,” she says “You put all of the elements of any story and interpret that into your style in order to come up with a very consistent, confident, and clear story that is going to align with your brand.”

These elements she refers to are:

  • A scene: The scene part of your style story refers to your closet, where your story comes to life, where you can create the image that you want.
  • The Main Character: As you might expect, the main character of the story is you! And to fit this role, your clothes are going to have to fit you and complement your body.
  • Your Costuming: Have you ever paid attention to a movie how you can tell a lot about a character from what they are wearing? The same goes for real life.
  • Supporting cast: Just like the supporting characters of a play, these are pieces that add life and personality to your story. We’re talking jewelry, belts, purses, scarves, and everything in between.

Buying Tips

During our talk I happened to remark how it’s sad that so often clothes that we used to love no longer suit us, forcing us to rebuild our wardrobes, and used the opportunity to ask Renée for some tips on how to build a strong style when shopping.

She answered: “first of all, you want to look for things that you love, and when you are buying a piece, think of at least three ways that you can wear this item, not just a piece that you like, a collar or things that are on-trend […] because then you have versatility in your closet, it gives you options.”

She also touched on something that most people have a problem balancing that is the classics ( clothes that have something of a“timeless” quality about them), and things that are trending at the moment.

You don’t want to be constantly rebuilding your closet, but neither do you want it to be stagnated, so what Renée advises you to do is “You should invest in classics, and maybe one or two currently on-trend pieces that you love, because you want to feel current, nobody likes to feel outdated.”

Colors

At a certain point during a talk, I happened to mention that at a certain business breakfast I attend there was always something of a sea of navy and black suits, however, on that morning there was a lot of color coming at me.

This sparked the topic of color psychology in style, which yielded some fascinating insights such as: “When you are wearing the right color, it really brightens your face, you look alive, happy, your skin looks better, and it uplifts your mood. People receive you differently when you are wearing color.”

This especially applies to the color red, considered something of a “power color”, as it tends to denote passion, aggressiveness, and similar feelings that a woman in red can intimidate other women.

Men, on the other hand, tend to like women in red and Renée mentioned that a woman is more likely to wear it in a meeting of male majority.

Personal Branding and Style

During our talk, it was really clear to me all the areas in which personal branding and style converged not only on objectives but also in methods.

A clear example of this goes back to something mentioned at the beginning of this article where we talked about the importance of a first impression.

First impressions are important to the point where if there is a disparity between how people first perceive you in let’s say a picture is too different from what they see in person, a good degree of distrust is created. Nobody likes to be catfished.

Conclusion

One of the most important takeaways from my talk with Renée Lindo is the importance of using more than words to communicate your personal brand, there are many unspoken cues and messages that we send, and we have a better chance at getting results if we send them consciously.

If you liked our discussion and want to learn more about personal branding from the mouths of the people that do it best, feel free to tune in for the other episodes of the Personal Branding Exposed Podcast. And if you would like to become one of the people that nail personal branding, you can always hire my coaching services through this link.

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