You know that how you dress matters. It offers either a huge ROI (return of investment) toward achieving your personal and professional goals or holds you back from making those goals a reality. But did you know that it’s the mindset behind how you dress that makes all the difference in which way your investment swings?
If you’re dressing with the mindset to impress, you’re doing yourself and your image a considerable disservice. If not to impress, then what should be your objective?
Impressing Leaves A Bad Impression
When you dress to impress others, you automatically make others the subject and criteria of your choices. You prioritize reflecting an expected image versus that’s authentic to who you are and what you offer.
It’s a mindset that creates unhappiness because it rarely results in you being an accurate match for whatever circumstance, whether that be a relationship or job you’re seeking to gain from the interaction.
It’s also a mindset that sacrifices your image’s authenticity in the eye of the beholder. Dressing to impress inevitably changes the criteria you make your fashion decisions. Instead of making decisions based on your best features and likes, you create a facade out of someone else’s likes and bests. The result can be disastrous as others pick up on the inconsistency and interpret it as fake, low self-esteem, ineptness, and so forth.
That’s not the impression your image should leave!
Dress To Express Yourself, Not Impress Others
While your image should be time, place, and circumstance appropriate, the objective of how you dress should always be to express yourself, not to impress others.
Your image shouldn’t portray what you think others expect and need from you. It should make the mirror image accurate to its contents.
Think of your wardrobe as a tool and asset in expressing all the ingredients that make you… YOU.
Dressing to express makes how you look an extension of how you feel, think, and act, and that’s critical to ‘strategically positioning yourself’ in the right places with the right people. It’s a formula for success that everyone, from entrepreneurs to job hopefuls, must apply to every interaction.
Application 411
To apply the express yourself mindset to your image, you’ll need to know your ideal look. This is the look that suits both your body’s dimensions and your inner workings.
Need help discovering your ideal look? Take some help from science and art!
The 4×4 Fashion Palette (formula) is based on science and art. The science is The Universal 4X4 Color System – (16 seasons) ®. The art comes from all the critical pieces created, leading to a new way of applying fashion, makeup, and interior design to your life’s picture.
The 4X4 capsule wardrobe is a collection of a few essential clothing items that will complement your body shape and lifestyle so that you can perfectly express yourself via your looks.
In closing, it all begins with the adage of being true to yourself. Know who you are. Understand your body dimensions, including your strongest and weakest features. Identify your ideal image and what you want it to portray about you. Then, apply a formula to bring it all together as a work of art to express yourself in a way that really will impress onlookers and leave a positive, memorable, invaluable impression.
