We Stopped Getting Dressed
In 2021, I was at the pinnacle of my multi-decade career as a leadership coach, watching something happen.
I would talk to a handful of clients every day. Executives, founders, mothers, women who had spent careers building real things. They were exhausted in a way I hadn’t seen before, lost in a way that didn’t match anything happening on paper, quitting, suddenly, jobs they had loved.
The news called it the Great Resignation. More than forty-seven million Americans walked away from their jobs in 2021 alone.
I kept listening, kept asking, kept turning the same question over.
What was actually happening?
One afternoon, between calls, it came to me.
The one thing nearly everyone I was speaking with had in common was the most ordinary thing imaginable.
We stopped getting dressed.
Not all of us. Nurses and doctors still put on scrubs before dawn. Teachers, and the people behind every register in America, kept getting dressed and showing up for the rest of us. But the corporate world got sent home, and home had no dress code. We traded the jewelry for joggers, the blazer for the hoodie, and the daily commute for a computer at the kitchen table. The morning practice that used to anchor the day quietly disappeared.
I was on calls with leaders of Fortune 500 companies and I could see it. Cameras went from all on to barely on. Leaders who looked like they had just rolled out of bed because, some mornings, they had.
The jobs hadn’t changed so much as what we wore to them. And my theory is that started changing our identities.
I won’t argue the Great Resignation was caused by a wardrobe shift. That would be too small a claim. But getting dressed every morning is one of the levers we didn’t know we were pulling until we stopped pulling it.
When you get dressed, you’re casting a small daily vote that your life is worth showing up for. You’re telling your nervous system that the day ahead is one you’ve chosen to participate in. When the signals stop, the body knows before the mind catches up. The exhaustion has no clear source. The woman you’ve been working to become slowly dims.
Most of us went back to dressing eventually. The world reopened. But many women I work with still say the same thing.
“I never know what to wear.”
This is what these letters are for. Coming back.
PUT ON something today you wear when you know the world is watching. Maybe it’s the piece you used to love and haven’t worn in awhile. The world doesn’t have to be watching. Your life is.
