Turning Forty and Evolving Your Style

Forty Drinks

Turning Forty and Evolving Your Style

For image consultant Susan Osborne, a bizarre urge in her late thirties to buy a pair of old-school Birkenstocks eventually led to a full-scale evolution of how she presents herself to the world - and even where she lives. Returning to the things she loved as a child was key to ‘finding herself’ again. For 20 years, she has worked with people to uncover their true essence and translate that into a ‘style recipe’ that allows them to feel great about the way they look. Susan has facilitated all manner of evolution, from normal hormonal transition to something that changes how we live in our bodies.

Guest Bio

Susan Osborne coaches people to develop their own unique personal brand by claiming a clothing style that feels authentic and builds strategies to create an inspired wardrobe. A teacher at heart, Susan educates people how to get a polished, put-together look by choosing clothing styles and colors that best suit them, their body type, personality, career and lifestyle. Her dedication to teaching the power of image through self-discovery and authentic expression is the mission of her business, Be Image Consulting. She lives in the mountains of New Hampshire with her family.

Becoming an Image Consultant (1:20)

After following a corporate career path, and achieving the things she thought would make her really happy, she realized she was feeling flat and unsatisfied. So she opened Be Day Spa in 2003, which she owned for 10 years. Within that business, she started an image consulting business, which she has been doing for 20 years.

As an image consultant, Susan helps clients transform their appearance by expressing who they are on the inside in a way that makes them feel good about how they look. Her goal for her clients is that they can open their closet door and love most everything they see and find joy in dressing and expressing themself in that way. Many times, changing their appearance comes after someone experiences a transition of some sort, but sometimes changing how they dress is the catalyst for additional changes. Susan meets women at a place where they have surrendered to and accepted who they are and the reality of their body and then helps them decorate it. It’s a job she loves.

As part of her initial meeting with a client, Susan asks the person to write a story about a color. Then, during the first meeting, she asks the person to read that story aloud and exchange the name of the color for their own first name. It’s a profound exercise that has brought some of her clients (including me!) to tears.

One of Susan’s great talents is uncovering a client’s essence. She feels she has to. It’s easy to bring someone to a store and throw clothes on them and make them look great, but that’s not how she sees her work with clients. She wants to help her clients dig down to find out who they are at a deeper level and pull that out so they can dress in a way that’s fulfilling to themselves.

The difference between having a style and being stylish (7:07)

There’s a big difference between having a style and being stylish. During the years Susan owned the spa, Susan’s style was graceful, clean and professional. She’s also a creative person, so she found ways to express that with her hair, makeup and jewelry.

In her late 30s Susan kept having a bizarre attraction to Birkenstocks. Not the trendy, modern Birkenstock we see today. The old-school, dark brown, suede Arizona Birkenstock sandals. There was nothing about her life or style at the time that could make sense of the urge to go buy these shoes. Friends who saw them in her closet wondered what she was doing with them.

She bought the shoes anyway and wondered how she would wear them, since they didn’t go with anything in her closet. She knew there was something about the earthiness and naturalness of the shoes that she loved. She bought them and didn’t wear them for years, but she loved looking at them.

She didn’t know at the time, she was going through a transition of her own and thinking about having gray hair, but not knowing where these urges were coming.

She stopped coloring her hair in her late 30’s when she became pregnant. When she saw gray hair coming in, she thought, “that’s the real me.”

After having her baby, she colored her hair again, mostly as a way to have control over something in her life. At 42, though, she chose to stop coloring her hair for good and started to let her hair grow out again. This was long before the current trend of going gray and pandemic-induced interruption of coloring hair.

Susan says this was about letting the “real me” come out. The transition was enormous. She questioned herself every single day. Not only is growing your hair out visible and challenging, she’s an image consultant! She’s supposed to “look good”! She did a self-check in the mirror every day, reminding herself of her purpose and goals and encouraging herself to keep going. She got a lot of pushback from many people in her life, which was challenging.

Piece by piece, things started to shift. She started wearing her Birkenstocks occasionally. Every time she wears them, a little piece of her heart that feels happy. Which made her wonder why she was all glammed up in the first place? When she thought about it, she realized that she loves denim.

Everything old is new again (15:30)

Susan finds now that she’s drawn to things she loved as a child. She loves things with texture. She loves denim and earthy textures like suede and wooden jewelry. Those things make her heart sing. So now she looks to incorporate those things into her style. But it was important to her as an image consultant that she continue to appear approachable to her clients. The image consulting industry can be intimidating for some people to access.

There's power behind feeling good about the way that you look. It’s different for every person. That’s what Susan loves about working with different people. The style recipe is entirely different depending on the person.

Susan’s style in recent years is much softer and gentler and unique than the years she owned the day spa. Her style recipe now is indecipherable because it’s so unique to her; it couldn’t be replicated by anyone else.

In her late 30s Susan experienced a shedding - of masks and previous experiences that affected how she shows up in the world. And she sees it with her clients, too. Whether you actively bring it on yourself, or not, you do through this. You peel back the layers of who you are in order to meet yourself where you are. Not where you thought you’d be or wish you were, but your real, inner, true self.

How to surrender to yourself so you’re making wise purchases and investments. Pay attention to things you love and showcasing yourself for who you really are, not hiding behind a mask. There’s something really freeing about doing that. When you release that fear, it all works out. We get so tense in fear that our world is going to fall apart, but it’s quite the opposite.

Once we do that shedding, we birth our true self again. With that comes so much confidence that allows us to make choices that may seem outside the mainstream.

Who cares? (22:46)

As we get older, we care a lot less about what other people think. Susan heard that her entire life, but didn’t truly believe it until she got there herself.

Susan feels rewarded by working with clients who are going through transitions and moving into the next phase of their lives. Helping them work through the challenges they carry in their minds, getting them out of a negative way of thinking, and their hang ups about their bodies, and moving them to a more positive way of approaching themselves is extraordinary. She loves to watch the lightbulb come on in their minds when they look in the mirror and see what Susan sees, versus zeroing in on problem areas.

Susan helps her clients find your own “it factor.” Copying someone else’s “it factor” is easy but it’s not long lasting.

The wisdom of comfortable clothes (30:24)

It’s wild to notice how our external look changes over time. As younger women, you see older women wearing flat shoes and comfortable clothing and think you’re never going to do that. But then you arrive at the station and realize the wisdom of flat shoes and comfortable clothes.

Susan still has some things in her closet that she wants to wear, but doesn’t. She’s gotten extra picky about the way clothes feel on her body. About the fabric feeling good and the fit. Which means that her clothes are more expensive than the ones she wore in earlier decades. Now she purchases fewer pieces that are better quality.

Our bodies change over the years and we get caught up in the fact that the size we wear changes or that a certain style no longer works on our body type. Instead of accepting that and looking for different types of clothes, many women just tend to feel bad about their clothes. You have to accept, surrender - don’t give in! - and have loving compassion while you find a new answer.

When Susan works with corporate clients, she teaches them to ‘package’ themselves in the way they want to be seen, which can be a powerful tool. You have complete control over how you look, which impacts how others perceive you. In business, it helps when your appearance is in alignment with what you’re communicating.

Into the woods (40:38)

Several years ago, Susan moved to a rural area of New Hampshire, which turned out to be connected to her transition.

She and her husband had bought a vacation home in the White Mountains. They were there every weekend and loved it; they loved hiking. Susan discovered a piece of her true self, something that brought her back to her childhood and who she really is. She loves nature.

Moving to the mountains full time was a huge decision for her family but now they have hiking trails in their backyard. That’s where Susan’s heart is. She feels most fulfilled when she’s outside in nature.

The Forty Drinks Podcast is presented by Savoir Faire Marketing/Communications

Find Susan online: www.beimageconsulting.com

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