Mr. Wonderful is leaving on a business trip. He hates traveling. He doesn’t mind being somewhere else. It’s the getting from here to there and back again that causes his distress. I feel for him. I walked into our room to find him sorting through his itinerary, organizing things for his trip while listening to the sappiest music playing on his tablet. He was singing along to it too. When he realized I was watching him he said “It cheers me up.” Well, then, Mr. Wonderful, carry on!
This is a thing we all do to some degree to help navigate life and smooth the rough edges. We change our atmosphere to help change our mood. Often it’s done reactively to calm ourselves down and it’s effective. I like to use it deliberately and I coach my clients to make use of this tool to manage not only their mood but their presence in the world.
Remember when you were a kid and you played ‘dress up’? You would put on a cape, or a crown, or both and suddenly you were a superhero or a princess. You felt like you could fly. You felt regal and important. How do you feel when you get dressed for work in the morning? Do you don an outfit that makes you feel powerful or one that makes you feel like you disappear? It matters. When you come home from work do you change out of your work clothes? What clothes do you change in to? How do they make you feel? The most important question: Is this working for you?
There are many things in our lives that are outside our control. But there are also many things we can control that we have chosen not to. We fall into routines that we no longer think about and mindlessly behave in ways that may not be helping us. It’s good for us to periodically take a step back and reevaluate the things we do, especially the things we do every day. The habits and routines we have reinforce themselves and the mindset that goes with them. Things that are repeated daily become frameworks and our life is lived inside them and shaped by them.
When you dress in a hurry, in the same outfit you’ve worn a hundred times, that you bought because it fit the dress code, not because you liked it, you don’t feel good in it. You may not feel anything in it, but you certainly don’t feel confident and powerful. What would your work day be like if you did feel confident and powerful? How might your career progress if you showed up in your power every day? What would you wear to feel that personal power?
This isn’t just about clothes. It extends out into your environment too. I have a friend whose day job is nothing exciting but it finances the life she is building for herself. She plays a particular mix of music on the way to work and a different mix on the way home. The first thing she does, when she comes home from work, is to change into the clothes that resonate with the new life she is building. The work clothes get put away. Incense gets lit. Her jewelry changes, her shoes change, and her hairdo is different. It’s about shifting from one persona to another. It’s about changing the energy she is living in to support the vision she is creating. Her work clothes are beautiful but they are part of a costume for that performance. Her costume, when she isn’t at work, is about who she is then. It delineates her work life from her home life. The physical changes enhance and enable the mental shift and her time away from work feels more like her own when she does these things.
How do you want to feel when you go about your day? What is the soundtrack for that feeling? What scent puts you in the state? What clothing invokes that feeling? Too many changes at once? Try changing one thing tomorrow and see how it feels? Then change another, and another, and let me know how it goes.