Feeling empowered is key for entrepreneurs, and style is one of the most powerful tools that can reflect this sense. Your style and the clothes you wear can play a significant role in shaping your mood and confidence.
Feeling like you’re dressed for success can help to deliver a level of self-assurance that you can use to achieve better results–not only when it comes to giving off a strong first impression to those you meet but also on days when nothing is scheduled. This is because building your entrepreneurial look can help to bring tangible results for yourself on a personal level.
Whether you’re in the office today, or meeting to secure VC funding, you should always dress to suit your entrepreneurial spirit. While there’s no magic formula to release your entrepreneurial spirit, it’s possible to follow a number of general rules to ensure that you’re always thriving in any business situation.
Getting to Grips With Your Entrepreneurial Spirit
When we talk about the entrepreneurial spirit, we’re referencing your drive behind your endeavors. These forces can empower anyone on the road to becoming their own business owner and startup founders.
If you’ve ever felt the motivation to create your own business, there’s a good chance that you have some entrepreneurial spirit alive and kicking inside you.
Your entrepreneurial spirit is characterized by intangible qualities like resilience, curiosity, drive, a business-oriented mindset, and a willingness to take measured risks. While the entrepreneurial spirit isn’t enough to turn you into a Nasdaq CEO on its own, it can be combined with other qualities like experience and strong teams to become a driving force in the success of a business.
With this in mind, it’s essential that your wardrobe is conducive to your entrepreneurial spirit. This means that you should always seek to wear the clothes that you feel most suited to as a business owner.
While some CEOs like Apple’s Steve Jobs crafted their look around a more simple and casual appearance, other business leaders can prefer to dress to match their ambitions. With this in mind, there’s really no fixed rule on dressing to accommodate your entrepreneurial confidence, but there are certainly some recurring themes that are worth exploring:
Formal Clothing can Help to Find Fresh Perspectives
While the aforementioned Steve Jobs found success with a different style, dressing formally certainly correlates with confidence. In fact, researchers have found that formal dressing can help wearers to think more broadly and holistically–which can help to pave the way for taking on new ideas and challenges.
More formal clothing can also pave the way for more abstract processing than concrete thinking, which can help entrepreneurs to ‘think outside the box’ more readily. It also means that entrepreneurs can think more deeply about key business matters, and wearing clothes that can help encourage this can help to build more confidence in achieving goals.
Dress Like You’re Ready to Negotiate
Here, the notion that you should always ‘dress for success’ really rings true when it comes to negotiating or pitching your business plan to external parties. Fundamentally, what you’re wearing can certainly impact the outcome of your negotiations.
It’s incontrovertible that what you wear can impact how you perceive yourself, and so it’s also likely to affect how others perceive you, too.
The key takeaway here is that you should never underestimate what your wardrobe says about you. Of course, your clothing should never be a substitute for hard work and guile, turning up in a t-shirt and jeans could be a sure-fire way of making people think that your business proposal shouldn’t be taken seriously.
In fact, statistics from Scientific American found that the chances of negotiating a profitable deal are raised if you appear professional. This means that it’s certainly worth looking to bring more professional attire into your wardrobe to add more confidence when entering into negotiation situations.
Don’t Abandon Comfort
While formal and negotiation-ready style says a lot about your business intentions, you risk your entrepreneurial confidence being knocked if you’re uncomfortable in what you’re wearing.
If you feel uncomfortable in your attire or what you’re wearing is painful, it’s important to make alterations with your wardrobe so that you can feel free to be yourself without any negativity about your clothes lingering in your head.
While you may have found the most eye-catching shoes in the world, they can have a negative impact on your charisma if they’re uncomfortable–leading to more stress for both yourself and those around you.
However, there are plenty of measures that you can take to dress both comfortably and confidently, and if your wardrobe has uncomfortable clothing in it, look to make small adjustments to substitute your difficult items for something equally as alluring and more comfortable.
There are plenty of options you can choose when it comes to combining comfort and confidence in your wardrobe. For instance, sunglasses can be a great way of generating a more confident look while maintaining a level of comfort when out and about, and brands like Ray-Ban have a big selection of business-ready shades that can strike a strong first impression.
You should always test wardrobe additions before wearing them to ensure that you look great and, most importantly, feel comfortable before attending that all-important business meeting or to congregate with clients.
At its best, a strong wardrobe will be capable of generating a strong first impression and delivering entrepreneurial confidence that can see you helping your endeavor to grow. Building a wardrobe that’s filled with comfortable and confidence-boosting clothing, you’ll be ready for whatever the business world throws at you.
