Glowing Up: The Business of Personal Image & Self Esteem

CYNDY PORTER: You know what, I didn’t. I was never creative. I was pretty much just a sad and lonely child that couldn’t find my way and I didn’t start to come into my own until I, I didn’t believe I was even smart enough, until I got into college and started to slowly believe in myself. When that happened, I started to turn things around. I think what we need is to start to see our self succeed at something. If you don’t believe in yourself and you’re not succeeding at anything you probably don’t want to put yourself out there because you just believe you’re going to fail at everything you try, right, when you really have low self-esteem.

When I started to believe that I was smart, I was capable, and I could get good grades I threw myself into college academically and then I took that and threw that into work. My first profession was not photography, but sales and marketing and I worked for HiTech for probably 18 years. What I tell people is in a way I was lucky I was not happy and so for me it was like my addiction of choice was work. It easily could’ve been a much more unhealthy addiction, but somehow I found work and I think I was trying to prove to myself and to the world that I was worthy and so I worked harder than everybody else.

PHYLLIS SMITH: You even describe yourself as a work-a-holic and if you had to choose an a-holic that was probably the best way to go. Did that play out in all relationships? When you’re a work-a-holic you don’t have time for any personal relationships. So how did that play out for you?

CYNDY PORTER: I got lucky that when I was in Colorado and I was in this abusive marriage I was given an opportunity to go across the country and go to work for what we now know as the internet, but at the time I had no idea what that thing was. There’s this thing called the internet and one day we’re all going to use it and advertise our companies on it and we have this startup and we want you to come work for us. I took about a 50k pay cut in order to leave the current job I had and go work for this thing called the internet and that small company got purchased by AOL and I was lucky enough to watch the stock split 8 times before I retired.

I probably would have burnt out, had a nervous breakdown, or something else unhealthy if I hadn’t landed with stock options and I didn’t have any good relationships. My friends were the people I worked with and when I “retired” at 38 I knew that what I needed to do was take time off to chill and I had still hoped that I could meet the right guy and have a child. I got super lucky that I met him quickly, that he wanted to have a child, and now I have this amazing husband that I consider a soul mate and he treats me like gold and I have this amazing now 14-year-old son who makes me happy every day. I feel really blessed that I was able to turn a negative situation into the life that I have now.

PHYLLIS SMITH: It’s incredible with what you went through, as horrible as it was, it gave you that drive. It’s so interesting to follow your journey, how this horrible – you work in sales and marketing and built this 18 year almost 2-decade career and then you suddenly become like rich at the age of 38 were you could retire and then you meet this guy. It’s like a Cinderella story almost but it’s a lot of hard work that got you there, to get you to this point. Do you think that without the work, all the therapy, learning and really understanding yourself, do you think that you would be able to have gotten to were you are now in a healthy marriage, in a healthy relationship with your son, and we’re going to talk more about your business, but also a thriving business?

CYNDY PORTER: Yeah, I do think that it was equal parts hard work and luck because I think you can – you know if I had met my current husband before I had done all that work I don’t think I would’ve been in a position to have been able to have the relationship. I remember when my therapist said to me quite a bit into our years of therapy, “The challenge now is whether you can accept happiness.” It sounds funny, but the truth is if you’ve known it it’s hard to trust and sometimes people sabotage themselves because we’re comfortable with what we know, and I think a lot of times people get stuck and can’t get unstuck because they’re just comfortable being uncomfortable.

It happens so often to so many women and so I started to put the pieces together and then I was kind of accidentally invited to go to this image and style weekend. It was like a Tupperware party for image. It was like this lightbulb went off inside of me that with everything I know I can do this. All my branding and sales and marketing experience it’s an easy jump into well everybody should have a personal brand, not just products and companies and if you study art you know that there are seven elements in art that we use in making a beautiful portrait, painting, a piece of jewelry or whatever and we could apply all of those to us personally. That’s where I said this is what I’m doing, and I found an amazing mentor out in California who I studied under and got certified as a dementia consultant and I created my own system of first personal branding and then also how to use art principles to look at ourselves and see ourselves as art so that we look our aesthetic best. 

PHYLLIS SMITH: What I ask you is to become an image consultant and stylist you talk about important – the thing you seem to love the most is helping women feel beautiful. How do you get them to feel that way but also on the inside?

CYNDY PORTER: That’s a good question and that’s hard right? If you’re used to telling yourself negative messages the approach that I take is, there are many, many people that work on the inside out. There’s therapist, coaches and all kinds of things. I basically take the approach of the outside in.

When we first start to talk about a personal brand the idea is it’s not about how you can look like the classic beautiful girl or woman that would be on a magazine cover. I don’t talk about that ever at all. I talk about how the ancient Greeks defined beauty, I talk about things that are math, art, and science related as it refers to beauty and then I teach them how to focus on what they love about themselves, what are their best features, how do we emphasize their best features, and if you happen to have sensitivities how do we learn to de-emphasize or conceal those a little bit, right?

What I found is that what happens is as you start to focus on what you love about yourself . You start to know what colors and what textures and what shapes make you look your best in and you look in the mirror and you see reflecting back at you somebody that you’re proud of, somebody that you admire, you know that you feel good about. Then you go into the world and whether it’s in an elevator, a classroom or an office and you hear people say, “Oh my gosh, I love that color on you.” or “You look so great today.” or “I love that color on you.” or “You’re glasses look awesome.” Doesn’t that boost you every time and gives you some self-confidence and it’s to bad that we rely upon the external world to make us feel better about ourselves, but it really does work and so I really focus on that. Like taking baby steps to who you are as a person, what does that look like, do you know that your most powerful communication tool is how you look. It happens in nano seconds. People judge us, and we judge ourselves. If we can start to put ourselves together in a way that we take baby steps toward looking in the mirror and learn what we love about ourselves then we carry that with us.

 ...you look in the mirror and you see reflecting back at you somebody that you’re proud of, somebody that you admire, you know that you feel good about.   

PHYLLIS SMITH: Describe it, what is a personal brand because you’re talking about looking at things you know, what do you love about yourself and then kind of work with that and accentuate that. Is that a personal brand or do you also help people sort of decide what that is.

CYNDY PORTER: Yeah, so when I work with my clients. We always start with personal brand because that’s the most important. I think if things aren’t like your best colors, shapes, patterns, or proportions but you are showing up being true to who you are authentically then that’s the first battle. Are you showing up in a way that you communicate who you are, right? In order to do that you have to know who you are. I take them through a series of questions, thought processes, exercises and I also do, you mentioned the exercise you did in your program, I do exercises so that they get feedback from each other and so it could be as simple as sometimes when I’m speaking in a group we have a stick it or a post it to put on their back and everybody will be given a pen and you walk up to them and say what is your first impression. There are always positive you know, pretty, gorgeous, creative, interesting, professional, lively, or whatever and then they get to pull that thing off their back and I usually have them think about number one how they see themselves and number two what they want to be written on their back.

So, I’ll often say if you were to get up and leave the room and we were all to say, Isn’t she blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.” What would you want that to be and it must be five or fewer adjectives, right? You can’t have twenty. Is it that you want to be edgy or is it that you want to be smart or is it that you want to be interesting or creative? What is it really that makes you, you? Then once we get to that core then how does that look? How does look in an outfit? How does that look in an earring? How does that look in hair cut? What make up is that? What eyewear is that? That’s the first step and then this other thing I was talking about with the aesthetics I all that owning your style and that’s more of using art elements to make you look your personal best on top of communicating your personal brand.