excerpt from my latest book “confidence”:

Photo credit: Josef Maxson Unsplash

Everything you wear has the capacity to either enhance or drain your confidence

Confidence comes in many guises. Confidence can be long lasting, or fleeting. You can be feeling great about your life and then get knocked from this belief in an instant. However you personally experience confidence, do remember that it always comes from within. Any outside influence is just that, outside. If you can develop strategies around your image that help you to feel good about yourself and your appearance, you begin to create a solid and confident anchor. This considered image, and associated confidence, can help you to become more resilient.

Now look at what you are wearing as you are reading this. Do you have your doubts about the veracity of the concept that your image can have a profound effect on confidence? Whatever your view, research has shown that the ‘message’ you send by your appearance is received in a largely unconscious way, and it happens almost instantly, EVERY time you meet someone. Whether this encounter is on a regular basis, or for the first time.

Your clothes, posture, grooming and attitude all transmit a vast amount of information to the viewer, the person you are meeting. Think about the people you are closest to, and your wider circle. Can you tell if someone is happy or sad, energised or depressed, looking forward to something, stuck in a rut, overwhelmed, busy, or just plain bored?

Keep this wider question in your mind for the next few days and see what insights you glean subliminally, and importantly how you subconsciously react to them. If you can intuit that someone is confident, they can surely do the reverse and sense how you are feeling, your confidence and general demeanour.