The Wardrobe Within

How Courtney Lussenhop Learned That Style Starts With Self

Before we get into books, wardrobes, and the beautiful mess of becoming who you are, let’s start with a little bit of background on Courtney Lussenhop.

Courtney grew up as a military kid, an Air Force brat who spent her formative years in the American Southeast before attending high school in Germany because of her father’s service. That sort of childhood, says Courtney, does something specific to a person. You learn to read a room fast. You become fluent in first impressions because you’re always the new kid, always arriving somewhere unfamiliar, always watching how people size each other up before a single word is exchanged.

She saw the power of the uniform early. Not in a superficial way, but in a visceral, lived way. A uniform commands a room. It signals authority and trust before anyone speaks. That observation planted a seed that would take decades to fully bloom as it traveled with her through each new base, each new school, each new city.

Colorado eventually became home. She met her husband, a Fort Collins native, and planted roots in a state that suited her spirit. Nine years in, she found herself at a local co-working space called Kiln, drawn there because something in her was missing. Working from home had its comforts, but Courtney is a connector at her core. Community is not a preference for her. It’s a necessity. At Kiln, she found her people.

Books as Refuge, Books as Record

Long before Kiln, long before Fort Collins, long before the career in nonprofit fundraising and the VP title at the Community Impact Fund, there were books. Always books.

Courtney describes her relationship with reading as a kind of refuge. When you move every two or three years, when friendships have a built-in expiration date, books are stable companions. They don’t get transferred to another base. They don’t need you to explain yourself.

As a child, she was drawn to series with strong female characters: Betsy-Tacy, and Tib. The American Girl books. The Babysitter’s Club. Stories about girls navigating complicated worlds with agency and friendship.

That early reading life evolved in every direction. Historical fiction with bold female leads. Cookbooks collected not just for recipes but as cultural artifacts, each one a time capsule of how women were expected to show up in domestic life.

She particularly loves old cooking books, especially the ones where the foreword of the book addresses the housewife directly and the cooking advice blurs into lifestyle instruction. There’s something she finds both fascinating and a little wry about that, the way those books were trying to teach women not just to feed people but to perform a version of themselves.

Now she reads differently. Now she writes in the margins.

The Annotated Life

Here is one of the most distinctive things about the way Courtney reads: she uses different colored pens. Not just one color for underlining and notes, but multiple colors, each representing a different reading of the same book at a different point in her life. Blue for the first pass. Red for the second. Green for a third, years later. That color-coded record is a living document of how her thinking has changed, what she missed the first time, what hit differently after a loss or a transition or a new beginning.

She calls it wanting to see the process, wanting to see the evolution of her mind. There is something deeply moving about that practice. Most of us treat books as static objects, finished once we close the cover. Courtney treats them as ongoing conversations. The book talks to her. She talks back. The margins become a dialogue across time.

The cookbooks she actually uses are the most written-in of all, with recipe adjustments scrawled in the margins and notes about what worked and what she changed. The cookbooks with clean, untouched pages are the ones she ends up giving away. The unmarked ones, she says, had nothing in them that was meaningful. That observation says something profound about reading, and about living. In other words, engagement leaves traces.

Her Thrift Store Find That Changed Everything

The book at the center of Courtney’s reading life right now, the one she carried into the conversation, is slender and unassuming. The cover is missing. She found it at a Goodwill. It was published in 1971. It is called How to Be Your Own Best Friend.

The authors are Mildred Newman and Bernard Berkowitz, a married couple who were both practicing psychoanalysts in Manhattan. The book is a recorded conversation with a third voice, a questioner named Gene Owen, who poses the kinds of questions most people are afraid to ask about themselves out loud. The format, a dialogue rather than a lecture, gives the book a warmth and accessibility that self-help literature doesn’t always manage.

Courtney found it when she was already thinking hard about the world around her, about what it means to love yourself first, about what that phrase actually requires. The title resonated immediately. So did the content.

The Full Cup Philosophy

The takeaway she keeps returning to from Newman and Berkowitz is deceptively simple and endlessly demanding. You have probably heard the story about the full cup, namely, you cannot pour from an empty one. But Courtney has pushed that metaphor somewhere more specific and more honest.

She talks about bringing a full cup into relationships, not to fill a void, not to be filled by the other person, but to overflow. Two full cups overflowing in each other’s direction. That’s the kind of friendship, partnership, and presence she is working toward.

When you arrive already whole, the relationship becomes abundance rather than rescue. When you arrive depleted and hoping the other person will fix it, you’re placing a burden on the connection that it cannot sustainably carry.

This is not a cold or self-sufficient philosophy. Courtney is one of the warmer people you will meet. She’s a mentor by instinct, a connector by nature, someone who has spent her entire career in service roles because she genuinely loves helping people step into their next chapter. What the book gave her was not permission to need less from others, but a clearer understanding of what she needed to give herself first.

“If you can’t be your own best friend first, you truly can’t be someone else’s best friend.”

Loving Without Condition

There is one more gift the book gave Courtney, or more precisely, a gift she received through a dear friend who was working through these themes alongside her. A friend of hers offered a small but transformative reframe. Instead of unconditional love, try loving without condition.

That shift might sound cosmetic but it isn’t. Unconditional love is a phrase so worn smooth by use that it can slide past us without really landing. Loving without condition asks you to be active about it, to notice the conditions you are placing on your affection, your patience, your forgiveness, and then to choose to release them. Do you love yourself without condition? Can you honor someone else without attaching conditions to that honor while still maintaining a healthy, honest relationship?

Courtney is the first to acknowledge how hard this is. As a spouse. As a parent. As a friend shaped by a childhood full of temporary connections. She was forced to adapt quickly for years, building intense friendships that would dissolve when the next transfer came. She is still tracing the ripple effects of that. The book keeps helping her do it.

The Stylist Who Was Always Already There

Countney launched Inside-Out Style Studio when she turned 40. She describes it as an arrival versus a pivot. Everything she learned about the power of a uniform in childhood, everything she observed about credibility and first impressions in her corporate and nonprofit career, everything she worked through in her own reading life about showing up authentically, all of it points to this.

The work she does as a personal stylist and image consultant is not about fashion for fashion’s sake. It is about clarity. About helping people understand how they want to be read (no pun intended).

Her work is about helping others build a wardrobe that functions quietly in the background, freeing up mental and emotional energy for everything else. Some of her clients love clothes and want more intention behind their choices. Others feel disconnected from their wardrobes entirely and don’t know where to start. What they share, she says, is that they don’t want to guess anymore.

That is also what the best books offer. You stop guessing. You start understanding.

The Next Book on the Stack

When asked what How to Be Your Own Best Friend led her to next, Courtney goes quiet for a moment and then gets goosebumps. The book she reaches for is Celebrate Yourself by Dorothy Corkille Briggs, published in the 1950s, a similar but distinct approach to the same core question. It is written entirely in one woman’s voice. It has the directness of someone who does not need to hedge. Courtney told me that she has read it four or five times at different points in her life and always finds something she missed before.

That is the mark of a book worth keeping: you come back to it changed, and it gives you something new.

What She Wants You to Know

Courtney Lussenhop is building something quietly remarkable in Fort Collins. A business rooted in genuine care, informed by decades of professional credibility, and animated by a reading life that stretches from Betsy and Tacy to the margins of a 1971 paperback found in a Goodwill.

She wants you to know that your wardrobe is not trivial. She wants you to know that showing up with clarity and confidence is not about performance. She wants you to know that style, like self-love, starts on the inside and works its way outward.

And if you ever find yourself in a thrift store, holding a thin book with no cover, the title asking whether you could be your own best friend, take it home. Write in it. Use a different color pen each time you read it. Let the margins become a map of how far you have come.

Courtney did, and look at where it has taken her.

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