A portrait's job isn't to make you look like someone else's idea of impressive it's to make you look like the version of yourself people actually recognize. That's harder than the right outfit or the right pose can solve on their own.
It's solved by patience instead. The first few minutes of any session are the least useful everyone stiffens slightly in front of a lens, however comfortable they expect to feel. We don't fight that. We let it pass.
Somewhere around the tenth or fifteenth frame, something shifts a real laugh, a genuine pause mid-sentence, the exact tilt of the head your friends would recognize instantly. That's the frame we're actually chasing. Everything before it is just getting there.