Why it's Bad Advice to Dress Like Mark Zuckerberg

Hey everybody, Dr. Robyn McKay here and welcome to this week's episode of Mindset Rx. It's your place to be if you're an emotionally intelligent leader, who's ready to set the tone for a positive, purposeful and productive week, and I am your host. So glad to be here with you today. We're talking about something that it's old news, let's be honest. I think that this article originally came out in about 2016, so we're talking about five years ago, which seems in covid time like a lifetime ago. Another lifetime anyway, but there was something that happened last week. Perhaps it was because Zack was kinda back in the news for a couple of different things that it occurred to me that I've had a bee in my bonnet about this deal for quite a while, actually since the article came out, and I've never publicly said anything to my audience, to my listeners around what I actually think about this piece of advice that was given so many years ago, and that continues to propagate itself to this day actually, I know that there are other people have opinions about it. I'm gonna share mine.

And this opinion and advice is specifically for emotionally intelligent people, and of course, what I'm talking about is the bad advice I'm saying that it is to dress like Mark Zuckerberg with his t-shirts and jeans and whatever kind of running shoes he wears to work every single day it sort of become the Silicon Valley uniform, if you will, especially for guys in that, in that realm, the problem is that...

Well, there are lots of problems with it actually, but the problem is with emotionally intelligent people is that we actually like to dress up, and we actually... A lot of us like to have a beautiful aesthetic about our wardrobes and about how we show up at work, so I wanna talk about that today. So before we do, as we do every week, I wanna go ahead and set the tone and just bring us into the present moment so go ahead, wherever you are, whether you're watching live and if you are, say hello, if you're listening to the podcast or watching the recording of this, say hello also, I'd love to hear from you and I'll be sure to get back and say my hellos back to you as well, even if you're not here with me live. So let's go ahead and breathe in love and grace, breath out everything that doesn't serve you, and notice your hips on your chair, or if you're moving around and notice your feet on the ground and take another deep breath in and let it go, and bring yourself fully to this here and now moment, right here, right now, and then just breathe and breathe one more time.

Now whole idea of mindful breathing is to pay attention when you're breathing, breathing in and breathing out, and knowing when you're breathing in and knowing when you're breathing out, taking yourself off of autopilot, coming into this moment, this here and now moment, this is your point of power, this is the point where you make excellent decisions, this is the point where you have access to your intuition, your creativity to what's possible now and in the future. So take another deep breath in. Let it go. And let's go ahead and dive in. I wanna start by reading kind of an excerpt from Zack's original statement around this, I think that he came out with the statement after he got back from maternity leave from the birth of his child back in 2016, so he says this, "I want to clear my life to make it so that I have to make as few decisions as possible about anything except how to best serve this community. There's actually a bunch of psychology theories that even making small decisions around what you wear, what you eat for breakfast or things like that, they kind of make you tired and consume your energy."

"My view is, I'm in this really lucky position where I get to wake up every day and help serve more than one billion people, and I feel I'm not doing my job if I spend any of my energy on things that are silly or frivolous about my life. So that the way I can dedicate all of my energy towards just building the best products and services and helping us reach our goal and achieve this mission of helping to connect everyone in the world. Giving them the ability to stay connected with the people they love and care about, so that's what I care about."

"Even though it sounds silly that that's my reason for wearing a great t-shirt every day it's true." Alright, so I get it. Decision fatigue is one of the major reasons that gets cited for wearing the same thing every day, and by the way, he's not the only one who does this you can think about Steve Jobs, remember the black turtle neck blue jeans and New Balance sneakers. Personal Development Leader, Glennon Doyle said that, I think earlier last year, she said that she wears white t-shirts and blue jeans every single day or black t-shirts and blue jeans every single day, citing the same reasons. And I get it listen I'm a psychologist, I understand decision fatigue, but here's the thing that I want us to consider, especially if you are an emotionally intelligent person; there's actually a personality profile that I've given for years and years, it's called the NEO personality profile. It assesses the big five personality factors that exists in all humans around the world, and in the NEO, there's one factor of personality openness, which is genetically linked, in other words, you are born with it, you're born with how open you are.

And the openness factor, it consists of six different facets, one of which is aesthetics. Aesthetics is the psychological need, or even I would say requirement, to have beauty around you, to value beauty, to appreciate beauty and to have it around you.

Now, personality exists on a normal distribution curve with about 68% of the population falling within one standard deviation of average, so most people care about aesthetics on average, just in an average way. But there is a small group of people about, I'm gonna say about 11 to 14% of people who really have a deep-seated need for beauty, it's not... I like to say when I'm interpreting people's personality profiles that beauty is not optional for them. There are people who can work in a white room with no windows, right at a computer screen and wear white t-shirts and blue jeans and New Balance tennis shoes every single day of their lives and be perfectly fine with that, but the people who score very high on this particular facet of personality aesthetics are those of us who really require beauty on our bodies; how we adorn ourselves, how we dress for work, how we dress anywhere in our environments, having beautiful things around us, and if we don't have that, what I like to say is we become a little bit badly behaved, in other words, bad behavior can look like all kinds of things.

But I would say in my own life, I'll just share my experience as the chief example today, and I want you to think back in your life as well. But early on in my career, I was working in a biosafety level 3 laboratory, I was wearing scrubs every day to work, safety glasses, PAPR for protection. So way before all the things that have been going on in the last couple of years with the pandemic. I was very well trained in to clean rooms and so on, and so I got very used to dressing down for work, wearing jeans and tennis shoes and just going into the lab and working all day in my scrubs. And I think that there were a couple of factors involved with that, but I do know for sure that one of them was that I wasn't able to dress beautifully. I love my wardrobe, and I know that for some of you who score lower on aesthetics by the way, you might be rolling your eyes or going, "Come on, just give me a white t-shirt and blue jeans and I'll be fine," but if you are somebody who has a great shoe collection like I do, or who appreciates soaked highs, if you're of the masculine persuasion, there is something very important to our spirits, to our souls and how we contribute in the world, to bring beauty into the world, to bring beauty into our lives.

And the problem with emotionally intelligent people often is that we read advice, like the advice that was given... That Mark Zuckerberg takes for us for himself, or that Glennon Doyle takes for herself or Steve Jobs, or you can probably enumerate the people who dress down or who dress in the same way every single day. So we look at those people and we think, "Well, they're very successful, they're leaders, maybe I should imitate that person." Hopefully, if you're a leader at this point, you've got your own sense of who you are in the workplace and how you show up, but there can still be some peer pressure that shows up that maybe I should dress down, maybe I shouldn't wear my nicest clothes to work every single day, especially if I'm working at a tech company where everybody else is in blue jeans and New Balance shoes. Dad sneakers maybe we could call them that.

So the conversation that I just wanted to have with you today is that if you identify as somebody who has a love of beauty, if you are a steminist in stiletto, I have a dear friend who has that hashtag that she uses, it is not only okay for you to be dressing in the way that suits you, but that articulates your appreciation of beauty and style and fashion. It's actually necessary for your soul to do so, to fully express yourself as a leader, to show up in a way that is in complete alignment with who you are as a leader is an invitation for you to show up dressed in the way that best suits you, and that goes across the board, regardless of where you fall in that particular personality facet, if it's in your heart, or if it you just don't care about clothes and wear what you want, I'm not saying that I'm not wanting to put pressure on anybody to dress up if that's if that's not appropriate for their personalities. But what I am saying is that for those of us who might be feeling the pressure to dress down, or did you dress like everybody else or to wear our white t-shirts and blue jeans every single day, just to try it out and see what happens, you can, you could do that experiment.

And you can really pay attention to your mood, to your emotions, to your creativity, to your intuition, and see what happens, see what happens, versus what happens when you adjust your past, what happens when you feel you're dressed in your Jimmy Choos. What happens? One more story, and then we'll close up for today. I worked as a university psychologist for a few years early in my career, and every Friday we had our school spirit day, and the entire staff was meant to wear khakis and loafers and their yellow or gold golf shirts that reflected the school colors, and I could do that for a little while. I really could, I tried to fit in, I tried, I really, every Friday, I would just kind of groan as I looked at that polyester golf shirt, the collar, and the khaki pants, and my Cole Haan, my Cole Haan shoes. And over time, it just started to wear on me, I didn't like looking like everybody else. I'm not a clone, and neither are you. And I wouldn't say that was one of the chief reasons that I left the university to pursue my dream, to have an international executive coaching practice, but it did contribute it did contribute for sure.

So here's my encouragement today, if you are somebody who loves the aesthetic and you feel like you're probably if you were to take the NEO and you were to look at that particular facet of your personality, you would probably be, let's say in a room of 100 people in the upper 10%, somebody who, for whom that was most important.

I wanna encourage you this week, especially in this time where we're still working from home and we're still trying to figure out our way through this phase of the pandemic, I really wanna encourage you to honor your spirit, to dress in a way, even if you're just walking, even if your commute is just from your bedroom to your office, dress in the way that makes you so happy, that makes your heart sing. Put on your make up and do your hair, if that is in alignment with who you are, please don't make yourself wrong for appreciating and valuing beauty. I think beauty is one of the things that we bring into this world that is so vital, and yet it gets overlooked or even diminished out of practicality, out of necessity, and yet it may be part of your soul's mission to bring beauty to the world. And if that's the case, today is the day to start. And with that in mind, I'm gonna close out for today, it's been my joy to be here with you all. If you would like to have me read your personality profile, assess your personality and see not just the aesthetic facet of personality, but all 36 facets, reach out to me, reach out to me and ask, "I'd love to have my personality profile read" and I'm happy to make that happen for you. Alright. Okay, and we're gonna put a couple of things in the show notes about the article that was reported on Zack a few years ago, I'll put in the show notes to a way that you can work with me on your own personality profile as well.

Alright, until next time, I'm Dr. Robyn McKay, and thanks for joining me.