You have a style. Everybody does. It shows up in what you wear and what you drive, sure. But it also shows up in how you enter a room, how you treat the server who got your order wrong, how you handle a Tuesday that falls apart before 9 a.m.
Style is expression. The outside telling a story about the inside.
So, in an issue devoted to style, it’s worth asking a deeper question: Is your style expressing who you are or constructing who you want people to think you are?
I know the difference because I spent years on the wrong side of it. I enlisted in the Marine Corps the day I turned 17 and, over the next three decades, I climbed from the infantry to the C-suite.
Along the way, I dressed myself in titles. Marine. School Teacher. Manager. Director. Executive. Each one fit for a season, and each one was earned.
Then one morning, I caught my reflection while knotting a tie for a meeting I no longer believed in, and I didn’t recognize the man wearing the suit. Somewhere in the climb, I had stopped expressing an identity and started constructing one. There is a word for what we wear when we perform. It’s called a costume. And costumes are exhausting.
Maybe you know the feeling. The image is polished, the calendar is full, and the life looks good from the street. Still, there is a gap between the person everyone sees and the person you know yourself to be. That gap always collects a toll, and we usually pay it in peace.
The good news is that real style, the kind people remember long after the outfit, grows from two things: clarity and alignment.
Clarity is knowing who you are. Not the version of you that lives in other people’s expectations but the actual you—your wiring, your gifts, your purpose, the convictions you would defend at cost.
You can’t express what you’ve never named, and most of us have never slowed down long enough to name it. In my coaching practice, Purpose & Principle-Driven (P2-Driven), the first movement is always the same: Get clear. See the real you. And, for people of faith, learn to see yourself the way God sees you.
Alignment is living like it’s True (that capital T matters). It's about closing the gap between what you say matters and how you spend your days, until your calendar, your money, your words, and your relationships all tell the same story.
You’ve felt misalignment before—that low hum of restlessness when life is technically working but doesn’t quite fit. Alignment is the opposite sensation. When who you are and how you express it finally match, something in you settles.
And when it settles, a recognizable style begins to show. Scripture gives it a name. A life rooted in love produces joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control (Galatians 5:22-23). Read the list slowly. It isn’t a moral checklist. It’s a style. It’s what an aligned life looks like when it gets dressed in the morning.
I’m sure you’ve met people who wear it well. Their peace holds steady when the room doesn’t. They keep a long fuse and a short memory for offenses. They are the same person on Sunday morning that they are in Monday morning traffic. We’re drawn to people like that, and we rarely think to ask what they’re wearing because their style was never about the fabric.
Now hear me. Buy the boots. Wear the hat. Enjoy every bit of the fall lineup because fashion is a gift and this town does it well. Just don’t ask fashion to do a job it was never designed to do. No outfit can cover a misaligned life for long, and no closet is big enough to hold a constructed identity together. The best-dressed person in the room can still be wearing a costume, while somebody in an old work shirt is wearing more style than the whole building.
So, this September, refresh the wardrobe if it needs it. Then do the deeper work. Get clear about who you are and why you’re here. Align your daily life with what you believe until the outside and the inside tell the same story. The style that shows up will never go out of season. It’ll look like joy on an ordinary Tuesday and patience in the school pickup line. It’ll look like you, finally, all the way through.
The Apostle Paul understood this 2,000 years before anyone printed a style issue. He told the Church at Colossae to clothe themselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience. Then he named the finishing piece. And over all these virtues put on love, which binds them all together in perfect unity (Colossians 3:12-14).
You already have a style. Make it the style of love.
P2Driven.com | Jesse.Hardy@P2Driven.com
Buy the boots. Wear the hat. Enjoy every bit of the fall lineup because fashion is a gift and this town does it well. Just don’t ask fashion to do a job it was never designed to do.