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Looking for some inspiration for discovering your Style Statement? Our friend Stephanie Lillegard from the Recollected Life blog, shares her illuminating — if a teensy bit “horrifying” — experiencing of finding her two words.

A friend told me about the book, and on her recommendation I got a copy of it for myself. I am always up for another self-definition, self-examination, self-knowledge tool, although most such books are either stunningly simplistic or just plain silly. This book, though, turned out to be a kind of unifying bridge between the diagnostic science of inner work found in Jungian personality types and the best of the outer, personalized, and helpfully specific clothing and style books that crop up every once in awhile.

And it was a horrifying, terrifying, disturbing experience to use it! It is one thing to answer a series of multiple choice questions in a fluffy women’s magazine’s Find Your Style type of quiz, or to figure out whether I had blue or pink undertones in my skin. But Carrie and Danielle’s Style Statement didn’t let me get away with that kind of detached observation. This book had the temerity to ask me to face my most real self, call her by her real name … and then introduce her to the rest of the world like that! I was a little shocked at how much emotional baggage fell out of my inner closet when I answered the questions in the book – and I am not exactly a stranger to the processes of self-examination.

Once I got past my initial defensiveness, though, I practically lived with my old, battered thesaurus. I took it to bed with me instead of the book I was reading, and I tried out my ideas on the two or three people who really know me. I followed words from one list to another and tried the new words on for fit. When I found my words, I knew them. Or, perhaps, they knew me.

My Style Statement is Genuine Dynamic, and it was the “Dynamic” part that drove me crazy. All my life I have been admired and reprimanded, applauded and attacked, praised and belittled my dramatic or enthusiastic expression. Other people seem to love that part of me – until it disturbs or threatens something in them. When that happened (happens), the hostility is instant and fierce. For years, this has made me completely conflicted about the part of me that is “enthusiastic.” Seeing it as a Creative Edge was the key for me. The explanation of the interplay between Foundation and Creative Edge (on pp. 58 and 59) clicked the whole thing into place for me.

What does your Style Statement mean to you? How do you interpret your first and second words?
I am so in love with the words that I made a computer desktop of them!
Genuine is about sincerity and authenticity. It has “a knack for taking the best and leaving the rest,” and does not suffer fools gladly, and it is what it is. No one ever wonders whether Genuine meant what she said because she doesn’t talk unless she means to say something. Genuine is true and honest and real. It sounds like a knock on good hardwood and clear tones of song. Genuine is the opposite of things like fake or phony, and it has nothing to do with presentation. The presentation is in the Creative Edge for me. Genuine is the Foundation, and although it is not always polished up and ready for display, it is real all the way through.
Dynamic can be about the movement from one word to the next or the energy in a room full of people debating a policy. It has everything to do with perception and the life’s energy in changing perceptions. For me, it is lightning quick, often a few steps ahead, and it is a thing of beauty. Dynamic “just knows” how to decorate with fire for Michaelmas and when to smile knowingly. Admitting to this kind of vivid and electric power has felt to me exactly like daring at last to hold my own wand and wield my own power. It feels like magic.

Read more about Stephanie’s Style Statement journey on her Profile of the Week page!