What you wear can change how you think

You don't just dress for others. You dress for yourself.

Hello fellow traveller,

I cycled to work most days when I was leading Urban Outfitters across Europe.

Dressed like a cycle courier. Ripped shorts, t-shirts, whatever was practical for the ride.

In the lift on the way up, people's reactions were interesting. Nine times out of ten, those who looked through me — or treated me as if I wasn't there — were making an assumption about who I was based on what I was wearing.

On more than one occasion, those same people turned up to have a meeting with me.

I didn't stay in the cycling gear for meetings. I'd get changed into something more considered — smart casual at minimum, a suit when the occasion called for it. But I was completely comfortable in both modes. That's the point.

Not that you dress up to perform confidence.

But that you dress intentionally — for yourself, for the moment, for what it asks of you.

And if someone's behaviour changes based on what they think your clothes say about your status — that tells you something important about them.

I didn't have a name for any of this then. Now I do.

Enclothed cognition

In 2012 researchers Hajo Adam and Adam Galinsky published a study introducing the term enclothed cognition — the systematic influence that clothes have on the psychological processes of the person wearing them.

Their finding, simply put: what you wear can affect how you think, feel and perform.

In one experiment, participants who wore a doctor's white coat performed significantly better on attention tasks than those who wore the same coat but were told it belonged to a painter. Same coat. Different meaning. Different cognitive performance.

The clothes don't just signal to others who you are. They signal to you.

And that signal can prime your nervous system, your posture, your attention and your behaviour before you've said a single word.

The suit story

Early in my career at Burton Group — one of the UK's largest retail businesses at the time — I worked my way up from the bottom.

When I was promoted to merchandiser, every other merchandiser wore a suit daily. I refused. I'd been promoted for my abilities, not my wardrobe. Casual was my default and I wasn't going to change that just because of a title.

But I always dressed for the occasions that mattered. Range reviews. Board meetings. The moments requiring full presence. I'd put a suit on, feel something shift, and walk in differently.

Not more arrogant. More grounded. More present. More able to listen because I wasn't spending energy managing my own uncertainty.

The suit was doing some of that work before I'd opened my mouth.

And something interesting happened. Within days of me refusing the daily suit, almost every other merchandiser stopped wearing one too.

When you stop performing, you give others permission to do the same.

Later — in rooms with some of the most commercially sharp people I'd encountered, including Dick Hayne (founder of Urban Outfitters) himself when he visited the UK — the same principle applied. I dressed for the occasion. Not daily. But deliberately, when it mattered.

The distinction that matters isn't formal versus casual. It's intentional versus automatic.

It works from home too

This matters more than ever now that so many of us work from home.

I'm sitting here today in shorts and an old t-shirt. No client meetings — just thinking, writing, creating. That's appropriate to the day.

But on client meeting days I dress differently. Not formally necessarily — but intentionally. Smarter clothes. Something that signals to me: this matters, show up for it.

Not because the client can necessarily see what I'm wearing below the camera line. But because I can feel it. And that feeling changes how I sit, how I listen, how I engage.

Working from home doesn't remove the principle. If anything it makes it more important — because the external cues that used to prime our state automatically — the commute, the office, the colleagues — are gone. We have to create those cues ourselves.

What you wear is one of the simplest ways to do that.

But what about Zuckerberg?

You might be thinking: what about Zuckerberg in his grey t-shirt? Or Jobs in his black turtleneck?

These aren't counterexamples. They're the same principle pointing in a different direction.

Jobs famously said the turtleneck eliminated decision fatigue and freed his attention for what mattered. The choice was deliberate. The meaning was intentional. It still primed his state — just differently.

The principle isn't dress formally to think well.

It's: your conscious relationship with what you wear primes how you show up.

Supreme confidence expressed through radical simplicity is still a choice — and that choice is still doing psychological work.

Whatever that looks like for you — that's the point.

What the research actually says about posture

There's a well-known body of work around power poses — the idea that expansive postures increase confidence and performance. The original research by Amy Cuddy attracted enormous attention and then significant criticism around replication.

I want to be careful here.

The specific physiological claims — that two minutes of power posing raises testosterone and lowers cortisol — have not replicated reliably. Those claims are contested and I won't repeat them as fact.

What is well supported — and what most people who've tried it will recognise from their own experience — is this:

Your posture affects your psychology.

Slumped shoulders, collapsed chest, eyes down — these don't just signal low confidence to others. They generate it internally. The body and the mind are in constant conversation. What you do physically primes what you feel mentally.

Standing tall, shoulders back, feet planted, breathing fully — this isn't performance. It's preparation. It's sending a signal inward, not just outward.

And that signal matters.

Practical application

Before anything high-stakes, ask: what does my body need to do first?

Not what do I need to think. Not what do I need to say. What does my body need to do.

For some people that's putting on a specific item of clothing that carries meaning. The suit. A particular jacket. Something that signals: I'm ready.

For others it's a physical ritual. Standing tall for thirty seconds before walking in. Rolling the shoulders back. Taking three deliberate breaths.

For others it's movement — a brisk walk, a few minutes of Wim Hof breathing, something that shifts the physiological state before the cognitive demands begin.

The specifics matter less than the principle.

You are not just arriving at the moment. You are preparing your body to meet it.

The thread

Four weeks of the Reset Series.

Week one: the breath that calms you down. Week two: the breath that wakes you up. Week three: moving through what the mind can't think its way out of. Week four: using the body to prime the mind before what matters most.

The thread through all of it is the same.

You are not at the mercy of your state. Your state is something you can work with — deliberately, practically, without a retreat or a quiet room or forty minutes to spare.

The body is always available.

What you wear. How you stand. How you breathe. What you do in the two minutes before you walk in.

These aren't small things. They are the things.

This week: choose one physical anchor before your next high-stakes moment. Notice what shifts.

Then hit reply and tell me what you found. I read everything.

Best, Hugh

You've lived many versions of yourself in this lifetime. And there are many more still to come.

If this resonates and you'd like to explore further, you can book a discovery call here.

P.S. The suit still comes out occasionally. Not for every meeting — but for the ones that matter. It's not about formality. It's about telling myself something true before I walk in the door.