When you change what you wear, you instantly change the way you feel about yourself in that moment. This is what helps you to access all the right implicit memories. You’ll be reminded of times you felt powerful, successful, and attractive.
A sharp suit can immediately make you look better. By investing time and money into your appearance, you demonstrate to your others and yourself that you care about your appearance and thereby that you value yourself. What’s more, is that you look more attractive by emphasizing your shape in a positive way, and by adorning yourself in high-quality materials.
The result? People think you are successful and confident, which in turn means you instantly become more attractive both as a dating prospect AND someone to hire and promote. This changes the way that other people react to you, they may be more likely to offer you job roles or to ask your opinion.
From your perspective, both the positive experience of catching yourself in the mirror AND the way others treat you will make you feel good. Even the feel of the higher quality material can have this effect.
Power Positions and Body Language
Another way to help others to think you’re more confident is to change your body language subtly. Placing one arm on a door frame can help you to look as though you believe you own the space. Likewise, spreading out more, in general, suggests more dominance and confidence. Being still and calm also exudes confidence and makes you look like you are cool and in command.
The aim is not to be aggressive, but by recognizing when you are doing the opposite (curling into a ball and generally shrinking, shaking, and biting) and to cut out those behaviors. And next time you walk into a room, boost your chest up as you enter the door and “beam.”
What’s more though, is that the right body language can even drive the production of feel-good hormones and neurotransmitters that actually make you more confident. Standing in a victory pose (arms in a V shape) in the bathroom before an interview can elevate testosterone and help you to be more effective in that interview!
Just Smile!
We all think of smiling like a good thing and something we should do more and we realize the benefits it can have on our popularity and on the moods of the people around us. However, what we maybe don’t realize as much is what it can do for the other areas of our lives – how simply smiling can actually make everything a lot better and even advance our careers, here I will go into that in a little more detail and look at just how impressive the power of a smile is (without wanting to sound too cheesy…).
What a Smile Does for Our Mood
First of all, thanks to something called “facial feedback’, simply smiling can be one of the very best ways to improve your mood. Simply by smiling it is possible you see to actually improve your mood as it causes your body to release more positive hormones – in fact, any expression that you pull has been shown to have this facial feedback effect. Next time you are feeling lethargic and tired then, simply try smiling and you’ll find it improves your mood to no end.
At the same time, because you are producing positive hormones and endorphins, rather than damaging ones like cortisones, this can then have a strengthening effect on your immune system and generally help you to become more resilient against illnesses and other problems. Of course, it can also help with motivation and psychological well-being no end.
What a Smile Does for Us Socially
If you thought that facial feedback was an impressive effect, then you will likely be more impressed still with the “mirror neurons” in our brain which fire when we see someone else pull an expression too. This then means that the expression you see someone else pull can also cause you to produce the respective hormones and to alter your mood.
That then means that when you smile at someone, it automatically causes them to produce endorphins and to feel happier too. This then means that if you smile every time you see someone, they will then feel happier every time they see you too.
This in turn then means that you can essentially create an association where they see you and then think of feeling happy and good about themselves. This association of course will then ensure that they are more likely to want to spend time with you and that will boost your social life, aid your career and help you to become more likely to succeed generally.
At the same time, because you will look happier and more confident this will also lead people to believe that you are both of those things. And when you seem more confident and happier, people tend to assume you’re more successful (which would be the reason you are feeling confident) which in turn ensures that they think you are more likely to be highly capable. Again this can help you in relationships and certainly in your career as you have an aura around you of someone who is successful and who you would want on your side. As you can see, changing the way you look and act can make you become the person you want.
Don’t just dress for the job you want… dress for the life you want!