I Paid £180 for a 'Presence Coach' to Rebrand My Wardrobe as a Leadership Strategy and HR Got Involved Before Lunch
I want to be clear that I am a rational person. I have a solid job, a functioning flat, and opinions about interest rates that I can express without crying. I do not, as a rule, make large financial decisions based on Instagram carousel posts featuring motivational text over blurry photos of sunrises. I want that on the record before I tell you about Cassandra.
How It Started, As These Things Always Do, on LinkedIn
Cassandra describes herself as a 'Corporate Presence Strategist and Embodied Leadership Facilitator,' which I have now learned is a sentence that means 'I will charge you £180 to tell you your cardigan is holding you back.'
I found her profile at 11pm on a Wednesday, during the specific type of mid-week despair that makes a woman click 'Book a Discovery Call' on websites she would absolutely not visit in daylight. Her testimonials included phrases like 'Cassandra helped me realise I was dressing from a place of fear' and 'I went from invisible to magnetic in six sessions, starting with my coat.' One woman said her promotion had come 'directly as a result of updating my visibility palette.' She worked in procurement.
I booked the session. I would like to say I felt immediate regret. I did not. I felt hopeful, which in hindsight was the more alarming response.
The Session Itself, Which Lasted Ninety Minutes and Aged Me By Several Years
Cassandra conducted our consultation via Zoom from what appeared to be a room containing only one white orchid and a great deal of ambient lighting. She was wearing a burnt sienna wrap dress that she would later tell me represented her 'intentional frequency output.' I was wearing a navy blazer over a cream blouse, which she clocked within approximately four seconds.
'You're dressing defensively,' she said, with the calm certainty of someone diagnosing a structural fault in a building. 'Navy is a hiding colour. It says: please don't look at me too hard.'
I considered pointing out that navy is also the colour worn by the Royal Navy, most of the legal profession, and a significant portion of the British workforce without apparent professional consequence. I did not point this out. I nodded.
Over the following ninety minutes, Cassandra dismantled my entire wardrobe using a framework she called the 'Authentic Executive Frequency Spectrum,' which appeared to involve sorting colours into categories called 'Suppression Tones,' 'Neutral Deflectors,' and 'Visibility Activators.' Beige, she informed me, was not a neutral. Beige was 'a boundary violation against your future self.' Grey was 'energetic withdrawal.' Black was 'acceptable in limited doses but spiritually exhausting for those around you.'
Tangerine, she said, was my colour. Tangerine was my frequency. Tangerine was, apparently, the shade in which my authentic leadership self had been patiently waiting to be expressed.
'You need to wear it to your next team meeting,' she said. 'Own the room before you've said a word.'
I bought tangerine linen trousers and a matching oversized shirt from a brand Cassandra recommended that cost, combined, £214. This was in addition to the £180 session fee. I would like to pause here and acknowledge that I am, again, a rational person.
Tuesday Morning: The Visibility Strategy Deploys
I arrived at the office at 8:47am in full tangerine. Head to toe. The linen was, I will grant it this, extremely well-cut. I looked, objectively, like a very expensive traffic cone.
By 9:15am, my colleague Darren had asked if I was 'going somewhere after work.' By 9:40am, the woman from accounts who sits near the window had come over on the pretence of asking about a spreadsheet but was clearly just getting a closer look. By 10:00am, I had been asked three times if I was 'alright' in the specific tone British people reserve for situations involving minor medical events.
The team meeting began at 10:30am. There were eleven people in the room. I was, as Cassandra had promised, impossible to ignore. This was not, it turned out, the unambiguous professional asset she had presented it as.
My line manager, Keith, opened the meeting by asking if the heating was broken. He was looking directly at me when he said it. I told him I was 'dressing with intention.' He wrote something down.
The HR Situation, Which I Maintain Was an Overreaction
I won't go into extensive detail because some of it is still technically under review, but the formal concerns raised by three colleagues centred on what was described in the documentation as 'a pattern of increasingly disruptive self-expression in professional settings.' This was apparently not the first time my recent wardrobe choices had caused comment — Cassandra had also guided me, the previous week, to replace my standard meeting-room demeanour with something she called 'embodied confidence posture,' which involved sitting significantly further back from the table than normal and making sustained eye contact during presentations.
Combined with the tangerine, this had apparently created what my colleague Priya described as 'an unsettling amount of presence for a budget review.'
HR were, in fairness, very kind about it. The woman who handled the meeting said she'd seen 'similar situations arising from coaching engagements' and that I wasn't the first person to have arrived to work dressed like a statement piece after paying someone to tell them their neutral palette was spiritually bankrupt.
She was wearing beige trousers. I did not mention Cassandra's views on this.
What I Have Learned, For £394 All-In
Cassandra, when I emailed her about the HR development, replied within the hour to say this was 'resistance from your environment responding to your expansion' and offered me a follow-up session at a 10% discount to 'anchor the transformation.'
I declined. I am back in navy. Keith has stopped writing things down when I speak.
The tangerine linen is hanging in my wardrobe. It is genuinely a lovely colour. I might wear it at the weekend, somewhere with no formal complaints procedure.
My frequency, Cassandra assured me in her final email, remains activated. I have chosen not to reply.
