The key elements of personal style are revealed through studying your personal coloring and how style is related to your personality and goals.  Managing the key elements of personal style can be tricky but very rewarding. If you’re not careful, your style could race along too fast or too slow.  Without having a language for understanding the key elements, you have clothes and a look with no context.

Here’s an example.  Last week I was thinking about the key elements of personal style while working with one of my clients.  She was really struggling with the image development process.  Even though she had properly completed her personal style profile self-assessment, and I had evaluated it accurately, seeing the results come to fruition was a bit shocking for my client.

So we had a couple of powerful meetings where we examined each of the personal style elements that come together to form her updated and authentic personal style.  By the end of the second session, she became totally clear and able to connect with her full and authentic personal style.

The key elements of personal style are the colors that you should wear and what they say about your essence, and the styles that help you to exude your personal brand.  These key elements of personal style must match to your goals and lifestyle.  When the key elements of personal style converge in the same place and at the right levels, your personal image will flow freely.

Looking back on why my client wasn’t was struggling with the swift changes happening to her personal image, I totally understand what happened.

We were working on a very tight deadline so that she would have a solid new wardrobe by a specific date.  From start to end, we had just two weeks.  During that time, we had to determine the key elements of personal style that would support her.  We had to evaluate and curate her existing clothes.  And then, I had to develop a new wardrobe for her that would be ready to go for her first of several events.

Why was she resisting some of this? She had the clothes she wanted.  But what she was lacking was the language of them.  I skipped a crucial step in order to meet our time demand, that I knew we would to come back to do together once the time crunch had passed.

So why is this language piece such a key element of personal style?

You can’t just have clothes without a context for them. The experience of looking at a wardrobe so different than what you have been used to wearing can be unsettling.  Did I really get the right things for my lifestyle, for my work style, for how I see myself going forward? Did I invest in the right items? Questioning your decisions as part of the highly evaluative process of image development is totally normal.  But if the context is lacking, that fast transformation will carry you away too quickly.

Through this experience, I surely was reminded of how special my process is and how well it works when it is followed step by step.  Sometimes life is just not as linear as we might like it to be.  But going through this experience with my client served as a great way to share with you how important the key elements of personal style really are.

As long as you know the power of your personal color and style – and the supporting language of these key elements and of the clothes – you will be in total control of each element that creates your personal style.

Joseph Rosenfeld helps successful Silicon Valley entrepreneurs transform their self-confidence by improving their personal style.  Get Joseph’s free report that helps you know which “7 Ways Your Image Is Leading to Low Performance” at josephrosenfeld.com.