Personal style is not just about the clothes you wear. Your choice of clothing can be a powerful expression of your inner beauty.
Here’s your question of the day. Are you showing up authentically? Do you look on the outside the same as you do on the inside? Keep listening, in today’s episode, I’m going to share four tips to help you bring your inner beauty to the outside so you can show up authentically as your true self every single day.
I am so excited today to talk about authenticity in your style, in your image, how you show up, and how you present yourself to the world around you. Have you ever met someone and maybe the outside just did not match the inside? Maybe it was the clothes they were wearing, or maybe it was their mannerisms or the way they talked.
Something was just incongruent in how they presented themselves and the person that you were getting to know on the inside. It creates a really jarring sensation to feel like there’s something off with somebody.
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As for you showing up in the world and being who you are, showing up, serving your family, serving your community, being a light right to the world, you don’t want to cause that feeling in other people. You don’t want other people to feel like there’s something disingenuous or dishonest about you because who you are on the outside isn’t lining up with who you are on the inside.
There’s just something off, incongruent, and inauthentic. This is hard for some of us. Some of us have spent our lives being so weird that we had to mask to feel like we were going to be accepted and to be loved. I just want to encourage you before we jump into these tips here, that you don’t have to be accepted and loved by everyone outside in the world around you.
You have to be loved and accepted by God. That feeling, that sensation, that acceptance will cover all of our mistakes or our weirdness or the things that make us just completely different from everybody else around us. When we’re secure in who we are and confident that the person that we are is in alignment with who God intends us to be and is planning us to be, the rest of it really just doesn’t matter quite as much.
However, if you want some tips on the rest of it – the outside stuff – I’ve got them for you today.
Table of Contents
Inner Beauty Tip #1: Wear Colors You Love
Let’s jump right into four tips to help you bring your inner beauty to the outside. The first thing on my list has to do with color. It’s always color with me, right? You should notice a trend because color is so powerful. You should wear colors that you love, and this somewhat seems like it might go against the idea of color analysis and wearing your best colors.
Hear me out here before you think I’m throwing the baby out with the bathwater because I promise you that I’m not. I want you to think about whether it’s seasonal color analysis or color harmony that I’ve talked about a little bit or even just the colors that you really like the most. The reason that we tend to like certain colors is typically one of two things.
Number one, they actually do look good on us because we’ve been experiencing a lifetime of positive feedback. When we wear those colors, they make us feel confident, they make us feel good, and we tend to get compliments. We tend to prefer to wear those colors because we know deep down inside that they’re pretty good for us.
The second reason we’re drawn to specific colors has to do with a little thing called essence, which is definitely not the topic of today’s podcast, but basically, this is the parts of you, your vibe, your personality that you give off that can be brought in into your clothing styles. This is a really deep conversation, but there is an element of colors and essence.
I have another podcast that I did with a client about this if you want to hear a small snippet. A lot of times the colors that we’re drawn to are because they embody certain feelings or aspects or parts of our personality that we’re trying to express. For example, one of the essences is called romantic. The colors that go with that are usually pinks, reds, and purples.
It’s usually because people that like those colors tend to have just a very, not romantic nature, but they tend to just be kind of passionate and fiery people. Those colors kind of pull those elements out of them and make them seem honest and in alignment with who they really are.
No matter what method you use, of course, I recommend color analysis, but if you don’t use that method, whatever method you use, wear colors that you actually love. Within the realm of color analysis, a color fan comes with something like 30 to 40 different colors. I can guarantee you that even if you are 100% sure about your color season and you’re all on board with color analysis, you don’t really like every single color family in your fan because nobody typically likes every single color.
Even if they do like them and recommend or recognize their beauty as a part of creation that doesn’t mean that we want to wear every color. There are colors that I just don’t want to wear. I stick to the ones that I actually really love and the color families that I actually love. No matter what method you choose, choose colors from the color families that you actually love, because that will definitely make you seem authentic and it will make you feel confident and make you feel great.
Inner Beauty Tip #2: Share Your Interests and Hobbies in Your Accessories
The second tip I have for you is to share your interests and hobbies in your accessories. Now, what do I mean by this? We all have different things that we’re interested in. We all have different hobbies and activities, and even things that go on in our daily lives. Let’s use the example of somebody who really loves music, because music’s a familiar part of my past, and I can easily translate this into different things.
Someone who loves music might choose earrings that have a treble clef on them. They might choose a scarf with composition paper and notes from a famous composition that they love. They could also choose shoes that have some musical elements on them. They could choose a handbag or another accessory.
Think about the things that you really love. Then bring this whimsy into your wardrobe, because the truth is accessories are pretty cheap for the most part. They’re easy things to buy to use to update your wardrobe. Granted, you could spend a lot of money on these, but these are great areas to bring your personality, your interests, your hobbies, and things you really love into your wardrobe.
They’re fun conversation pieces too. If you come across somebody who has no idea what a treble clef looks like, they might think that you’re wearing a cursive S for some reason. People are going to see these things and it’s going give you something to talk about. And even if it does not, it’s going to tell them something about you that they may not already know.
In doing this you are showing that you’re comfortable with the things that you love. You are happy to stand out and say this is a part of who I am. This is how God created me. I’m going to embrace that. I love this thing, and I am going to incorporate it into my style, and into my sense of communication as far as image goes. It’s going to make your outfits just a little bit more authentic.
Inner Beauty Tip #3: Dress for Your Lifestyle
The third tip I have for you is to dress for your lifestyle. One of those style rules that I tend to hold onto a little bit strictly, is that you should dress for the occasion. Several years ago, right before I started my business, I did a 30-day dress challenge. It was a personal challenge to myself to not wear pants for 30 days because I was so frustrated with how I felt in my body.
I was postpartum. Nothing felt good. The only thing that felt good was dresses. I challenged myself to see if I could do this because I wasn’t really convicted about not wearing pants anymore. I’ve never actually been convicted about that. It’s just sort of been a thing that happened, and now I don’t want to wear pants.
During the middle of this challenge, my family had a trip scheduled to one of these fall festival farm-type places. They had the big slides, the swings, and they had all this other stuff. At the time I wasn’t comfortable enough really to wear a dress or a skirt. Obviously, this is part of my journey. Now, I would wear it and it would be totally fine. I would just hack it for who I am right now.
At the time, I really wasn’t comfortable doing that because I felt like I was going to accidentally expose something or show something, or it would inhibit me from climbing and chasing after my kids. At the time, I ended up wearing leggings and a tunic to that outing, and it was fine, and I didn’t feel any sense of negativity about it.
This brings up my point. When you go to something specifically that is active there are a lot of considerations. Not just the flashing people or the modesty aspect, or being able to move your body quickly, but tennis shoes as well. You want some shoes that have good traction of some sort on your feet.
I always say to dress for your lifestyle, dress for your activity, dress for what you’re actually doing because no one wants to show up at a fall festival farm place in a pair of heels and a miniskirt. I mean, maybe when I was 15, I would’ve done that because I was just ridiculous back then. But it doesn’t make sense. It’s not logical. And if I’m anything, I’ll tell you right now, I’m very, very, very logical.
I like things to make sense. So please dress for your lifestyle. If you’re a homesteader and you need overalls, buy the overalls and wear them. You wear them over your nicer clothes if you want to when you have to go do your chores. Don’t be afraid to own things in your closet and to wear things out in public, out in your life that fit your lifestyle, because that makes you look authentic.
It builds confidence too, because you are stating without saying a word that you’re comfortable enough in who you are, exactly how God made you, and living the life God gave you to show up authentically and to wear the clothes that you need to wear for the life that you’re actually living.
Inner Beauty Tip #4: Stay in the Word
My final tip is a mindset tip in a way, and it’s really probably the most important tip here. That is to stay in the word, stay in the Bible, and stay connected to God as you take this journey because he is always changing us. He is always doing new things in us and unraveling new pieces of who we are, revealing new things to us that we had never thought about before.
I’m going to give you a great example. I was in a Facebook group the other day and someone asked a question about head covering. They wanted to know from ladies that cover, why they chose to do it, etc. I thought through my answer, and then I went back and I added something to it because the reality is that I went to seminary school for three, or four years.
I took a break to have a baby. I have a master’s degree in biblical studies. And I studied this passage before on head covering, and it never hit me at all. As a matter of fact, I wore my hair really short chin length for the last decade, essentially. Even the part about long hair just didn’t hit me. God wasn’t working on me in that area then.
He had a bunch of other things apparently he needed to work on with me, but we weren’t there yet. For some people, you may never get there. God may be working on a bunch of different other things, and that may not be part of his plan for you. 10 years later, after graduating from seminary school is when this became something that God brought up in my own life about how I looked, how I presented myself, who I am, who he thinks I am, who he says I am, and who he expects me to be.
It’s funny because it started with me deciding to grow my hair out. Then a week later it was like, oh no, you’re going to cover actually. So stay in the word, stay connected to God, keep asking, keep seeking, keep searching, and keep letting him guide you down your style path down the path of the image that you’re presenting to the outside world.
As long as you keep refilling that cup and letting him dictate who you are, it’s going to seep through on the outside, it’s going to be obvious. People are going to see Christ in you, whatever he’s doing in you. The reason we care about how we look is because we care what other people think about us.
Even when we say that we don’t care what people think about us, we totally care what other people think about us. Typically because we want to be loved, we want to be accepted, we want to have friends, and we want to belong. We don’t want to stick out for all these different reasons. But it really comes down to the core of being loved and accepted for who we are.
Ironically, we often show up as who we are, not because we think that that is more acceptable to everybody else.
Final Thoughts on Inner Beauty
I want to encourage you today that you are enough just as you are right. You are enough as the person God created to show up authentically as you are and to be yourself. As long as you are loved and accepted by God, which you are, who you are is enough. You can show up, and you can be authentic and you can care just a tiny bit less about how the world is going to perceive you because you know what you’ve done in your heart, that God sees you.
Just like he said with Saul and David: do not look at the outside appearance because I have rejected him. God sees the heart. So let that heart that he sees and he loves, be the thing that you bring out of yourself and put on the outside to show the world around you.
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These 4 tips will help you express your inner beauty on the outside with your personal style choices.
Stacey is the owner and creator behind Radiantly Dressed. She is a certified image consultant and AICI member focusing on creating simplicity in wardrobes via color and style.
