Confidence: How dressing affects your attitude and confidence

Confidence How dressing affects your attitude and confidence

Are you stuck in a rut?  Are you no longer confident in yourself?  Do you realise just how dressing affects your attitude and confidence?  Are you aware that you can change your mental state through the every day habit of getting dressed?

It can come upon us without being aware of it.  One day we realise life is not as fun or as enjoyable as before.  We neglect our appearance, wear the same clothes repeatedly, and reduce our beauty regime to teethbrushing and slapping on random moisturiser.  Then one day we realise that we lack confidence.

We would love some form of transformation in our life to get us back to how we felt before.  But we feel it might be beyond our ability to regain.  But by learning valuable tips on how dressing affects your attitude and confidence you will learn how to reset your confidence when life throws you a curved ball.  It’s easier than you think to get a boost of confidence that will get you back on the right track.  This blog post will show you how.

How to boost confidence and self esteem

This blog post is about boosting confidence and self esteem through self care and clothing and showing just how dressing affects your attitude and confidence.  Carefully choosing what we wear can be a powerful way of reconnecting with who we are.  A sartorial boost of confidence is not just a fashion ploy designed to lure us into buying more clothes.  This is how dressing affects your attitude and confidence in a real way.  It’s a valuable tool, increasingly confirmed by scientific study to have potentially life changing value in our lives.  Self care is important because it raises our level of self acceptance.  This, in turn, raises our level of self esteem.

The vital luxury of looking after yourself.

For those of you in need of a confidence reset on your life here is the way to create that change.  Effective transformation is possible through focusing on your clothes and effective self care.  Enjoy!

The idea that self care is not a luxury but an essential tool to enjoying life has made a welcome return.  For years the cry has been, “Work harder, get to the gym, pack it all in, get up earlier, be like the boys, lean in!”  While this is good and motivating it has to be built on a bed rock of self acceptance, not self loathing.  When the chips are down, as they occasionally are, we need to know how to return to ourselves in order to be able to pick ourselves up.  Self condemming or self loathing or self critical talk impedes picking ourselves up.  Confidence and self esteem, on the other hand, make it easier to pick ourselves up, and face challenges.  This is exactly how dressing affects your attitude and confidence, by giving us valuable tools to deal with life.

 

How to boost confidence and self esteem with clothes

The daily pressures of life can all cause us to loose confidence.  Coping with change and rate of change is part and parcel of our modern life.  We all know how change can be hard to deal with.  Change in our work circumstances, home circumstances, or family life all require us to adapt.  Adapting to massive change also potentially brings  massive stress with it.  So the idea that the clothes we wear can be used as a tool to counteract these ongoing life events, is truly extraordinary. Therapy on a hanger!  Research shows, though, that this is the case.

Clothes, research reveals, have the power to modify behaviour.  In addition they provide two functions which are useful to the regaining or retaining of confidence and are how dressing affects your attitude and confidence.

How dressing affects your attitude and confidence (1)

The first is that we assume the identity of the clothes we wear.  Studies show that a group of [non scientific ]people dressed in lab coats performed better in tests than those in the group not dressed in lab coats.  The wearing of some clothes can give us a confident attitude.  Therefore we can rely on clothes to give us confidence that we might otherwise be lacking.

We know this is the case though, don’t we?  Have you ever faced a difficult meeting by thinking, “I’ll wear that jacket.”  Have you prepared for parents evening or a meeting with the headmistress by thinking “I’ll wear that outfit and those heels.”?  When you prepare to give a sales talk do you wear bold colour-blocked fabrics?  These clothes give us a confident attitude, and this is how dressing affects your attitude and confidence: because we can use them as a tool to trigger a confident attitude in situations where our natural reaction may be fear.

How dressing affects your attitude and confidence (2)

Secondly we assume the memory of the clothes that we wear.  You may have a particular dress that you wore when you won a big account for the business, or that you wore when you were proposed to or won a court case.  Whatever it might be for you that engenders feelings of happiness, or power, of achievement, or ability.  Wearing that dress on subsequent occasions will most likely resurrect those feelings and you may feel as great as you did before.  If you are wondering how to be confident in yourself, this is an easy way, it’s called Associative Learning Theory: clothes trigger the recall of the positive memories.  Positive memories cause the recreation of those emotional responses.  Tap back into that happy state by wearing those same clothes.  This will help you cope in times or trauma or change, and that in turn will give us that confident attitude.

 

Confidence and self acceptance examples

If you’re stressed or anxious your wardrobe choices shut down.  When people feel down they camouflage the body so that they feel they blend in and won’t be noticed.  It’s like a shield against the world – or a cave, or a hiding place.

Self acceptance creates a better environment for transformation.  Researchers have identified two ways in which our body reacts to wearing clothing that we like, both positive.   One of these ways is a feeling and the other is a state.  The state, “eudaemonic state” equates life as meaningful.  People in this state are open to positive development and growth.  Therefore if you are wearing clothes that you like, you are confident because you are open to growth rather unconfident and closed in on yourself.  This is also how dressing affects your attitude and confidence: triggering you into that mental state where you equate life as meaningful.

We wear clothes that we like when we are happy and confident: this is how dressing affects your attitude and confidence

Research also shows that we are more inclined to wear clothes we like when we are happy and confident.  Many women have a favourites pair of shoes.  Five times as many women surveyed said they would wear their favourite shoes when happy (31%) than when depressed (6%). [from Karen Pine’s excellent book “Mind what you wear: the psychology of fashion”].

Therefore in order to wear your favourite clothes, which in turn make you feel better, you need to have a happy mentality in the first place.  If that mentality is lacking you need a tactic to tap back into that mental happy place when thrown off track.

Research shows that if you are feeling less confident you will be less inclined to make an effort with what you wear.  In a study of 400 people  25%-50% of their wardrobe was worn in normal circumstances and emotions.  When people in the same test group were unhappy or stressed less than 10% of wardrobe was worn. So this should be a sign to you.  When you stop wearing even 25% of your clothes, stop and take remedial action.

 

Remedial action examples : Pick your confidence self care package

Self care is a vital part of maintaining a healthy self esteem, enabling you to pick yourself up when you’ve suffered a setback and tapping back into your mental happy place.  This then makes it easier to feel better, more confident.  Confidence puts you in the eudaemonic state, and better effects transformation.  So a simple act of self care, such as a hair cut, a manicure, exercise or reading, constitute a self care package that ultimately controls your life’s level of confidence and self esteem.

Quick steps to boosting self esteem and confidence

In brief then, in order to get out of your slough of despond as quickly as possible you need to:

1. look after yourself – self care: take a bath, get involved with your hobby, have a manicure
2. Wear clothes that hold happy memories for you

We all are in need of a boost of self confidence at some point in our lives.  It’s easier to trigger confidence than you think.  Two key takeaways for confidence and self esteem are self care and wearing clothes that hold happy memories for you.  This is how dressing affects your attitude and confidence in such a powerful way.  Confidence changes your mental state, and what you wear mirrors your mental state.  So don’t underestimate the power of the clothes you choose to wear each day.  This is why clothes are important.  They have much more of a bearing on how we feel about ourselves than maybe we have been led to believe.  Getting dressed each day you have the power of that choice, to be confident in yourself and increase your confidence.

 

 

 

OK, over to you.  Did you like this post?  Did it resonate with you?  Do you have examples of wearing clothes and transformation in your life that you might not have realised until reading this post?  I’d love to hear from you so please leave your comments below and I’ll be sure to read them.

We would love you to sign up for our exclusive Working Frocks list.  It’s the list to be on if you’d like us to look after your wardrobe and advise you what to wear so you don’t have to think about it.  Sign up here:

 

 

 

Finally if you would like to know more about how to improve your self esteem and change your attitude to life then take a peek at reDRESS.  reDRESS is our women-only membership site. It’s the place to come to transform your personal style and organise your style life.  It’s the perfect place if you are facing a change in life challenge. We can help you to navigate change in your life looking and feeling amazing.

You can start by detoxing your wardrobe, building a collection of clothes that suit you, finding your signature style and engaging with life from a place of your true identity.  You can join the wait list now, doors soon.  You can find out more about reDRESS here.

 

Until next time,

Sarah