“I just don’t have a creative bone in my body when it comes to clothes.”
I hear some version of this constantly, usually from women who are clever, capable and creative in every other part of their life. They’ll happily design and plant a gorgeous garden, talk someone through a complicated work problem, or throw together a dinner party from three random things in the fridge. Then they get to their wardrobe and go completely blank.
They think that they need to be born with a style gene to know how to put an outfit togehter (you don’t). You may think that there is something in your taste that’s lacking, so you try copying other people’s outfits yet still feel styleless and bland.
It’s tempting to call this a taste problem or even a lack of creativity. It isn’t. It’s a fear problem, and once you see it, you’ll spot it everywhere.
Creativity and Fear Share a Wardrobe
Here’s something creativity researchers have found again and again, in art, in writing, in business. Being creative and taking a social risk are, for all practical purposes, the same act. The moment you try something original, you’re accepting that someone might not love it.Bonetto, Pichot, Pavani and Adam-Troïan, who study exactly this, found that creativity consistently goes hand in hand with social risk-taking. They also found something more useful: the more confident people felt in their own creative ability, the less afraid they were of being judged for it.
Notice what that means. Confidence doesn’t arrive first and creativity second. It’s the other way round. You build the confidence by doing the small creative thing, not by waiting to feel brave enough to attempt it.
Which brings us to the outfit you didn’t wear today because you talked yourself out of it at the last minute.
I would never have been brave enough to wear these pants before I figured out my personal style. They may not be a garment I reach for everyday, but whenever I wear them, they start a conversation.
The Perfectionism Trap (and Why “Just Lower Your Standards” Is the Wrong Advice)
The second creativity killer is one I’d bet almost every reader recognises. The belief that an outfit has to be right, or there’s no point attempting it at all.
Researchers studying perfectionism have found something genuinely useful here. They now separate “perfectionism,” rigid, fear-driven, all-or-nothing standards, from “excellencism,” high standards that stay open to trying, adjusting and improving. Perfectionism is consistently linked to lower creative thinking. Excellencism supports it.
That distinction matters, because it means the answer isn’t to care less about how you look. It’s to stop treating each outfit as a single pass-or-fail exam. An outfit you tweak, learn from and wear anyway is doing exactly what creative thinking is meant to do. An outfit you never attempt because it might not be perfect isn’t cautious; it’s the fear talking, dressed up as high standards.
As I always say, as did French philosopher Voltaire:
Perfectionism is the enemy of action
And without action, you’ll never improve your style. You have to experiment and try some different things; that’s how you improve. Movement creates change.
Why This Hits Harder for Women
Nobody needs a research citation to tell them that women get more scrutiny for what they wear than men do, at work, in photos, walking into a room. You only have to turn on social media or your news feed and you’ll see that women are criticised way more frequently for what they wear and how they look than men are. That scrutiny is real, and it’s exhausting. But it also means the fear of judgement has more fuel to work with, which makes the small, brave, imperfect outfit choice a genuinely bigger deal than it looks from the outside.
I want to be clear that this isn’t a personal failing. It’s a completely understandable response to a completely real pressure. The goal isn’t to stop caring what people think. It’s to stop letting that fear be the only voice in the room when you get dressed.
Fear can stop you from trying something different. It can make you feel like you need to “blend in” to the point where you lose yourself and your personality. It can make you follow fashion because you don’t want to look out of place, even if that fashion trend doesn’t work for you. That desire to blend in has the opposite effect of what they wanted.
Yet, when talking to my clients, they share how when they dress in a way that expresses their personality, in a way that feels more creative (small c-creative like we talked about here) to them, wearing something that’s a signature, or more personal, they find that they get better reactions from others. In fact, by not following current fashion slavishly, or by being brave enough to wear a favourite hero garment or accessory, they share the delights of their individual personality, and it’s admired and frequently complimented.
Practising Bravery Somewhere Safe
This is exactly why 7 Steps to Style is built the way it is. Every “Take Action” exercise in the program happens in private, working out your Style Recipe, testing which colours and shapes feel like you, trying combinations, before any of it meets a single other person’s opinion. You get to practise the creative risk-taking part first, in a room with an audience of one, so it’s not so overwhelming the day it actually matters.
Evolve Your Style, the 31-day challenge program, works on the same principle in an even smaller dose. One tiny experiment a day. Not a makeover. Not a new wardrobe. Just enough repetition that the fear gets smaller each time, the way any fear does when you keep gently proving it wrong.
Seven Small Brave Risks for This Week
Courage, like creativity, works best in small, repeatable doses. Pick one of these each day and treat it as practice, not performance.
- Wear the item you’ve been “saving.” The one kept for a perfect occasion that never quite arrives. Wear it today, for no reason at all.
- Take the risk somewhere low-stakes first. Wear something slightly bolder than usual to the school pickup or the supermarket, somewhere the “audience” barely knows you, before you try it somewhere that feels higher stakes.
- Give yourself a two-minute cap. Choose an outfit, set a timer, and commit when it goes off. No fourth outfit change. Good enough, on time, beats perfect, eventually.
- Wear an accessory that you’d normally only wear out at night or to a special event – it could be a shoe, belt, necklace, earrings, cocktail ring… even a small item that feels different and bold will help you start thinking about your style in a new way
- Wear the colour or colour combination you’ve talked yourself out of. The one you love but have decided is “too much.” Wear it once and notice whether the reaction matches the fear.
- Let one outfit be imperfect on purpose. Wear it anyway, out loud, without apologising for it or explaining it to anyone.
- Allow yourself exactly one edit. Pick your outfit, make one single change if you want to, then stop adjusting. Practise deciding rather than endlessly refining.
None of these is about becoming fearless. They’re about proving, in small, low-risk ways, that the fear is bigger than the actual consequence.
Your Next Step
If you want a structured, private place to practise this before it ever meets an audience, that’s exactly what Evolve Your Style was designed to do: take small guided style actions every day and in only 31 days your style will have evolved, and the fear factor will have diminished significantly!
