Live your life with some style. Why not? Now, in our age, all you have to do is walk down the street and this is true whether it’s in Asia, North America, Europe. You quickly realize that people are extremely informal today for the most part. Yes, if you’re fortunate, if you’re in the business area, perhaps of New York or Toronto, perhaps Paris, London, yes, people look pretty good, for sure.
Men and women are well dressed, but the average person, the person who is not involved in business on a daily basis is terribly dressed, truly terribly dressed. And I think this says something about the age that we live in because people increasingly don’t seem to care about anything at all. Truly, anything at all, especially style. Now, if we go back to the time of the great Louis the fourteenth, the sun king, style was everything, of course The French are said to have invented social etiquette The rules and manners that we follow today are very much predicated on the French court of the time of the seventeenth century. So, what am I to do as I go forward in the modern age?
Well, I’d like to share a small story and then you can reflect on what it is. I always try to dress up for an event and an event for me is something like travel. So I recently went to Poland. As you know, when we travel today, you’re treated basically like a criminal. You have numerous security checks and people constantly going through your luggage and removing perhaps something that appeared to be okay, but suddenly it is not at another border checkpoint, etcetera, etcetera.
So I began my trek in Taipei. And in Taipei, I had to go through the Taiwanese custom service. Now, gates now are quite electronic and you have to lay your passport down and there’s some other rigmarole, so to speak, that you have to go through. And I became a bit flustered by this particular gate. It wouldn’t open.
And the guard came along and opened it for me and said, sir, I really like the way you are dressed. The gate was opened. The same thing occurred when I went through security in Munich. People were very gracious. A man commented, sir, you are extremely well dressed.
This got to be a bit amusing to me. I’m walking along. A young woman said to me, sir, I really like your hat. Now, this has absolutely nothing to do with me, of course, but it was a test, if you will. It just showed me that if you’re willing to dress up just a bit, you’re treated differently in society.
So isn’t this the reason that we want to dress well? We want to know which season we are, the colors that complement the way we look and this is because I am unique. Each of us, the 8 billion of us that occupy this planet at the moment are all unique beings. We all have a brand, a personal brand, but seemingly most of us do not know how to uncover and expose our brand. And the brand, as I’ve said many times, is the only thing that makes me 100% plus.
No one can jump inside me and look at the beauty of me. They have to look at my external expression and hear my words. There’s no choice. So it is important that we try to bring a bit of style into our life. Now, how do I begin?
Because I think that we live in such an informal time that if you’re with a group of friends and you suddenly begin to quote unquote dress up, you’ll be laughed at. Of course, I would suggest that you start small. If you go out for an evening, dress a little bit better than you would on an informal time. Perhaps, add a pressed suit, if you would, or a pressed shirt. And later, perhaps add a necktie, a bow tie.
And this is equally as true for young women, but, of course, young women have a natural propensity to dress better than young men and I think they recognize this. Why? Well, to sound sexist probably because they like to dress up for each other and to dress up for, of course, the opposite sex for men. This is very true. And then slowly in your notebook, begin to document the reactions that you receive wherein you’ve changed your demeanor, you’ve changed your attire.
And I think you’ll find that very quickly, you begin to occupy a totally different world. I was listening recently to a speech by a woman who spoke with an upper class British accent, the Queen’s English, if you will. And at the very end of her speech, she said, you know, I grew up in a Welsh working class coal mining family. And when I went to Oxford in my second year, one of my professors took a liking to me and he pulled me aside and he said, look, Kate, if you really want to advance in this world in the British Isles, you will have to change your accent. So for the next two and three years, she spent every week going to language classes and she altered her accent and you would not, of course, you would never have known that she wasn’t born into an upper class family.
So she had changed her personal brand and, of course, she was extremely well dressed. But you were attracted to her because she said power and confidence. She made these statements through her attire, through her brand. So I think this shows us that if I’m a young person like I was once and I’m born in a small village, I can change my brand. I can change who I am in the world.
It is all up to me. I can be totally free. I’m free to be me. So think to yourself the next time. I want to change my style.
I want to change my brand. I want to be truly who I feel I should be. And you know what they say. You know what they say. Critical thinking is everything, especially if I want to have a decent style and critical thinking is great, truly great. You take care. God bless. Bye bye.