Stop Dressing for the Woman You’re Waiting to Become
There’s a dress in your closet you’re saving. You bought it on sale for an occasion that hasn’t happened yet. You’re waiting to feel thinner, or further along, or for your life to be a little less chaotic than the one you’re actually living. The dress still has its tags attached, and every morning you walk past it and reach for the easy thing instead, because today doesn’t feel like an occasion worth the good dress.
And hey, I’m with you. I’ve worked from home for 12 years, and most days I’m in sweatpants. When I get dressed in “real” clothes, there’s almost no thought behind it.
So when I sat down with image consultant and personal stylist Liza Vou Goje, I half-expected to feel a little out of my depth, because fashion is a bit of a stretch from what I usually talk about. What I found instead was someone describing the exact thing I see in my own work every day, just wearing different clothes (no pun intended).
Liza works with women who have let themselves disappear, who are waiting to transform into someone else, who are afraid to show up as themselves. Sound familiar? It’s basically the same as the work I do with my clients on their brands, just a different route to the same destination.
This conversation goes so much deeper than clothes. It’s about identity, reinvention, and what it takes to reclaim your own presence, even later in life.
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The waiting room is a place most of us live
I loved this line from Liza:
“Stop living in the waiting room.”
As it applies to clothes, that could mean waiting for the dress to go on sale or keeping an outfit in your closet for “someday.” But the waiting room is so much bigger than a closet. It’s a whole posture toward your own life, where the real you, the fully present and visible you, is something you’ll only let out once the conditions are finally right:
- Once you’ve lost the weight.
- Once the kids are older.
- Once the business is more established.
- Once you’ve earned it.
All that waiting trains you to see yourself as a rough draft that doesn’t merit the good dress, the real attention, or the space. And all the while, the conditions you’re waiting for may never show up at all, or if they do, you’ll just find something else to feed this habit of deferral.
Liza’s reframe cuts right through it:
You are the occasion. You are the event. Your life is the event. Why do you have to wait for something to happen for you to make yourself feel fabulous?
Instead of dressing for some future woman you hope to become, dress for the one who actually woke up this morning. Instead of waiting to show up as your full self in your business until you feel ready, help yourself feel ready by showing up now, as the person you are today.
“Comfortable” is usually a story we tell ourselves
I admitted to Liza that most days I default to sweatpants because they’re comfortable, and she pushed back in a way that’s stuck with me. Comfortable, she says, is usually a perception rather than a fact. There are plenty of things that are genuinely better for your body and your head than sweatpants. We just reach for what’s been sold to us as easy and label it as more comfortable without ever checking whether it’s true.
That distinction matters more than it sounds, because “I just want to be comfortable” is one of the most common ways we opt out of being seen. It sounds like self-care, but often, it’s just the opposite. It’s an internal decision not to take yourself seriously enough to find the thing that’s both comfortable and makes you feel like the person you are at your core. Liza’s point isn’t that comfort is the enemy. It’s that we’ve let one narrow, marketed version of comfort stand in for the real thing, but the real thing was available the whole time.
Why opening your closet is harder than therapy
One of the most striking things Liza said is that letting someone into your wardrobe can be harder than letting them peek into a counseling session with your therapist. When a woman opens her closet, she’s essentially saying here I am, look at me, because so much of our identity is bound up in how we look. Our clothes are a record of who you were vs. who you are, what you spent, the occasions you were waiting for, the versions of yourself you never became.
This is why a wardrobe edit isn’t really about clothes, and it’s the part of Liza’s work that overlaps most with mine. When she sorts a closet into yes, no, and maybe, what actually surfaces is attachment — the thing you’re keeping because of where you wore it, who gave it to you, what it cost. Pulling those apart comes down to deep identity work.
Liza’s instinct is never to send a woman out to buy more. It’s to go inside first, to cleanse before you accumulate, to see what’s already there before deciding anything is missing. That’s exactly the move I make with brand messaging. Before we build anything new, we figure out what’s already true about you and has been hiding in the back of the closet, so to speak.
She’s also quick to remind women that letting something go doesn’t mean throwing it away. You can gift it, sell it, or repurpose it. Letting go of who you were doesn’t mean discarding it. It can be remade into who you are now.
“Does this make me look fat?” is the wrong question
No surprise, Liza gets asked this constantly, but she has such a great reframe. The question itself assumes there’s a correct, smaller amount of space you’re supposed to occupy, and your job is to dress in a way that apologizes for any excess.
The real questions are whether you’re healthy, and on whose terms you decided your size was a problem in the first place. She points out that the “ideal” has lurched around for decades — thin, then curvy, then thin again — and that constant shifting tells you exactly what you need to know. If the standard keeps changing, that box simply wasn’t built for you.
Who said that was the standard? I have my style. I love my style. But it’s my style. It’s not for everybody.
What clicked for me in the conversation is that taking up space has almost nothing to do with the size of your body. A runway model can take up space. So can a woman who’s a size 16 and completely at home in herself. The space isn’t physical. It’s the willingness to be fully, unmistakably yourself in a room, and that’s available at any size, in any body, the moment you stop trying to make yourself smaller.
We’ve been conditioned to hear “take up space” as a body-size conversation, but it’s really about permission to own your identity.
The battle is within, and it starts young
Liza spoke about the particular load Black women carry around appearance, coming from every direction at once — professional norms, beauty standards built to exclude them, messaging that’s global rather than just Western.
With her older clients, much of that conditioning has already loosened; they’re done caring what anyone thinks. With younger women and the teenagers she mentors, the work is harder and more urgent, because the messaging is relentless and starts early. She talked about her own daughter saying she wanted pink skin, wanted to be white, and the gut-punch of trying to teach grown women to love themselves while a small child has already absorbed that she shouldn’t.
Her approach comes down to modeling. She shows up with her natural hair, her dark brown skin, the scars she used to hide, and she refuses to apologize for any of it.
Liza’s image for the cost of self-rejection is so powerful:
Trying to be someone you’re not is like driving a car on three tires.
You will never perform at your best as a worse copy of someone else. You have a unique fingerprint for a reason. You don’t need to love every part of your body (I don’t personally know anyone who’s that evolved), but you do need to know it well enough to dress it, style it, and stop fighting it.
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The people who don’t get you are doing you a favor by leaving
Liza talked about wearing something some people will love and some people will hate. The only thing that changes is who’s judging the outfit.
I coach entrepreneurs through the same thing in their marketing all the time. They panic about whether they’ll scare people off if they start showing up as their full selves. And I always tell them that’s exactly the point.
The people who fall away when you stop blurring yourself were never your people, and their leaving is what makes room for the ones who are. When you show up so unmistakably as yourself that there’s no confusing you for anyone else, the right people recognize you faster. Liza describes it as sending out a signal, and the people meant for you find you, but only if you’re clear and deliberate enough to actually send it. Vagueness attracts no one in particular, which is its own kind of invisibility.
Don’t lose yourself in service to others
I asked Liza how she’s built a multifaceted career while raising five kids. In simple terms, she doesn’t believe in balance, and frankly, neither do I. It’s a fiction that makes women feel like failures for not achieving a thing that doesn’t exist. What Liza believes in strongly is not disappearing into the role.
Being a mother, she said, is an enormous responsibility and an incredible job, but it is not your identity. She lost herself in it for a while, became a bit of a martyr about it, and started resenting the very people she was sacrificing for. Then one of her kids reminded her: we didn’t choose that.
The sacrifices she thought she’d been making on their behalf was something she’d actually been doing for her own idea of being a good mother. Recognizing and owning that gave her (and her kids) the freedom to just be.
The thread running through all of it
Style, brand, body, motherhood, identity: Liza and I kept circling the same center from different directions.
We’re both all about expressing the self that’s actually yours, rather than trying to fit yourself into someone else’s box. Liza helps her clients get there through what they wear and how they carry themselves. I do it through how you talk about your work and who you say it’s for. But the end goal is identical, and so is the catch she named: knowing who you are isn’t enough. If you know it but you’re not comfortable with it, it still comes out as performance, because you’re performing for everyone but yourself. And you, she said, are the biggest audience you’ll ever have.
So here’s the question I’m taking from this conversation, and the one I’d leave with you. When was the last time you got dressed or showed up, or wrote the post, or described what you do, and felt like that was 100% you? If you can’t remember, you might be living in the waiting room. The good news is the same as it’s always been: You ARE the occasion, so you can stop waiting today.
Work With Liza
If this hit close to home and the thing you’ve let fade is how you actually show up in the world, Liza offers complimentary style consultations for women over 40 who feel disconnected from their wardrobes or unsure how to dress for the woman they are now. From there, if it’s a fit, she introduces her Signature Style Presence Protocol — five styling packages to choose from, whether you want her for a single event or as your personal stylist for a full year. She has something for wherever you are.
LINKS & RESOURCES MENTIONED
- Connect with Liza: send her a DM on LinkedIn and ask about a complimentary style consultation.
- NeetoCal — The calendar booking tool I use to keep my business running smoothly
- Not sure how your own voice wants to show up? Take the free Content Marketing Power Type Quiz to find the approach your brain is already built for
- Want to show up fully in your brand? Set up a free vibe check to see how I can help
