The 4 C's to an Easy, Breezy, Confident Brain

Why what you wear changes how you think.

“If your body acts out a story, your mind will believe it.” — Dawwn Karen

On day one, she entered the school normal. Or at least as her normal. Blue jeans, sneakers, a red t-shirt underneath a dark denim jacket. It was comfortable, practical. Exactly the type of clothing she’d worn for years.

Two weeks later, she was unrecognizable.

She walked in…no, strolled in on heels. Her short skirt, patterned with baby blues and soft pinks, was complemented by a top and cardigan of the same colors. The outfit was feminine yet pronounced. People paid attention because her clothes demanded it.

Of course, I’m talking about my first very real, very serious celebrity crush: Lindsay Lohan in Mean Girls.

I bring up the movie not just because I love the Jingle Bell Rock dance, but because that experience — of clothes mattering — is so foreign to most men.

We don’t think about Pretty Woman moments, where the clothes we wear reshape the lives we live. Most of us just slowly graduate t-shirt themes, from bands to sports teams to “World’s Best Grandpa” letterings.

But what would happen if we did care more about what we wore? What happens to our brains when we do?

Can a pair of shoes really change your life?

Why Clothes Matter

I knew when I started outlining ideas for this Body Body Body series, I wanted to start the kinds of conversations that were absent from my life. To fill the gaps and fix the blind spots.

Doing that meant thinking outside the box and reaching for sources outside my normal circles of influence.

One such recommendation was the book Dress Your Best Life by Dawnn Karen, a psychologist and professor in New York known for pioneering the discipline of Fashion Psychology.

Now, if you’re like me — a day spent shopping for clothes sounds fucking exhausting. Plus, every $50 I spend on a nice shirt is fifty fewer dollars towards my Porsche Cayman GT4 fund. #Priorities

But, like sleep and so many of the other topics we’ll cover over the next few weeks, there is a cost to ignoring this aspect of our lives.

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Our clothes introduce us to the world. Or as Professor Karen says, “The clothes enter first.”¹

They not only tell others what to think about us and how to treat us, but they also do the same for our own thinking. Our outerwear is an inner signal that tells us who we are, for better or worse.

The right clothing improves our performance (at work, in the gym); it gets us hired and promoted. People who dress well get more dates, better invitations, secure more power, and make more money.²

Clothes are “a mood-altering substance.”³ They open doors, shut down challengers, and rewire our brains for confidence.

This last point, on using clothes to generate confidence, is the one we’ll focus on for two reasons.

• First, because confidence is the linchpin for everything else we’re after. Even if we can’t control the outcomes of our actions, knowing how to inject confidence into our brains as easily as we put on a shirt is a superpower that increases our chances of success (at literally anything).

• Second, because you can increase your confidence without going on a shopping spree. You will not need to wear a suit every day (unless that’s your jam), buy designer shit, or start waking up an hour early to get just the right look assembled. There's an easier way, I promise.

When you dress your body, you’re also dressing your brain. Here’s how to do it right.

What is Confidence?

Let’s start by making sure we’re talking about the same thing: confidence is ability belief.

Confidence is a knowing about your doing. It’s strong thoughts and positive emotions hovering around specific parts of your life that enable you to show up fully.

The more generalized a person’s confidence, the more it’ll seem like they are confident in every area of life (this is a great hack). For example, one car mechanic might be great at his job but never translate that confidence outside of work — while another mechanic might see his good work and develop beliefs like “I am good with my hands, I can learn quickly, I’m a great problem solver” — all of which can carry over and inject confidence into many other areas.

Nearly every skill you have can be generalized into a broader sense of confidence to positively influence more parts of your life. 

When we talk about clothing or fashion, this is one of the elements were tapping into. We want to borrow/transfer/alchemize clothing confidence into the tangible things that matter.⁴

The 4 C’s of Confident Clothing

I took the fashion psychology insights pulled from ~500 pages of reading, filtered out everything not related to confidence, and wrapped it together in a nice little package we’ll call The 4 C’s.

If you want to know the secrets to confident clothing, these are it.

Congruence

Our first C is the most challenging, the least clear, and the hardest one to get right. It relies on feelings, intuition, and awareness. But I promise, once you get congruence right, everything else falls into place.

Professor Karen explains congruence as “alignment” between who you are right now and who you want the world to understand you to be. It’s about honesty.

A congruent dresser gut checks their closet:

• Am I wearing these things because I’ve always worn them?

• Am I wearing these things because I want to be seen as someone different than I am?

• Do these clothes represent me well?

Before working on the subject, I’d never really thought about these questions (much to my wife’s dismay). But during it, I stumbled upon a few unexpected answers.

Many times, I “dress to disappear” – a practice psychologist Nadene van der Linden calls “The Grey Rock Method.”⁵ A lot of guys do it. We wear clothes that might be a little too big, void of color, and a bit (okay, desperately) worn in.

It’s an outer effect of our inner exhaustion, depression, or overwhelm.

We think that by ignoring our clothes we negate their power to tell our story, but the opposite couldn’t be more true. What we wear is a body-sized billboard advertising what we think about ourselves along with what we are asking others to think of us. Congruence is the practice of intentionally shaping that message.

Consistency

The second C is my favorite because it lets out a lot of the pressure people feel when it comes to getting dressed, especially for guys.

A confident wardrobe is a simplified wardrobe. You want to aim for fewer, better choices.⁶ And if this sounds like a uniform, you’re not far off.

The author found that people with “repeatable” outfits displayed more confidence and less decision fatigue, both of which translated into higher performance in tasks throughout the day.

Now, consistent, or uniform for that matter, doesn’t have to mean exactly the same thing day-in and day-out for every scenario. Instead, think categories and environments.

Let’s say you feel your best in a long-sleeve henley shirt. [Categories] Cool, buy 5 of them in different colors (optional), pair them with your favorite type of pants, and wear each one during the week. [Environments] If that’s your work uniform, build a gym uniform, and a date night uniform too.

By matching your clothing to the situation and only wearing (and rewearing) the things you like most, you’re teaching your brain to think, “I am always my best self.”

Condition

Everyone knows a guy who "cleans up well." Maybe they rent a tuxedo for the annual Christmas party or pull out their best suit once a year for an anniversary dinner. The problem is you can usually find them in the same ratty-ass sneakers the other 364 days.

Don’t be that guy.

Instead, think more money towards more uses. You want your “everyday staples, the clothes you wear most often, the things most people actually see you wearing…” to represent the bulk of our clothing investment.⁷

This is a natural extension of our consistency principle, but it goes deeper than that.

The condition of our clothes matters because their qualities become our embodied traits, a phenomenon tied to the term “enclothed cognition.”⁸

By wearing a crisp, clean white shirt, you're more likely to feel clearheaded, make sharp decisions, and speak with authority. A heavy jacket might make you more reserved. Bright cut-off shorts will amplify your energy (and possibly your social anxiety).

This condition element applies to what people can’t see as well. Got a big meeting coming up? Get yourself some new, properly-fitting underwear and socks. Undergarments can deliver the same boost in confidence as any outward-facing garment upgrade.

Wear your desired adjectives (clean, organized, quirky, strong, etc.), and let your outfit reinforce everything you’ve already worked so hard to be.

Choice

Finally, Karen emphasizes the importance of “active choice” in our clothing psychology. The details of what we wear are secondary. It’s the exercise of choice that gets the machine of confidence fired up in our brains.

If confidence is ability belief, the first ability we want to build is autonomy. The idea that we have a say in the direction of our lives. Maybe not control. More like influence.

We can exert that influence in a thousand different ways, but we start with the simple things — like how we choose to present ourselves to the world. And with each rep of this practice, we reinforce the belief: I choose my clothes; therefore, I direct my life.

For those with mandated uniforms, don’t fret. Your choice will come in the form of accessories (watch, ring, necklace, etc.), undergarments, and shoes. And if none of those are an option, then you’ll just have to pour your energies into non-work uniforms.

Style Equals Substance

Clothes communicate who we are, and we decide our clothes.

If this post is anything, it’s an invitation to be intentional. To reclaim the story you tell. To take hold of the advantage sitting right in front of you.

A new shirt probably won't change your life. But more confidence absolutely will. That's something people can see. Something they can feel.

And it’s something you can control.

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Challenge #12: Styling a Confident Brain

1. Dress Your Best Life by Dawwn Karen, page 35.

2. DYBL pages 110, 129, 198.

3. DYBL page 126.

4. Just popping into say “alchemize” is such a cool word. Here’s the Oxford definition for the curious: “transform the nature or properties of (something) by a seemingly magical process.”

5. DYBL page 66.

6. DYBL page 92.

7. DYBL page 77.

8. DYBL page 39.