September 21, 2011

What’s your type?

“You don’t seem to be the kind of girl/lady who [fill in the blank with any of my hobbies, interests, or responsibilities].”

Talking to @thefitlounge on Twitter about first impressions, I was amused by the idea that anyone could be offended by a wrong first impression.  They were pretty standard in my experience whether I meant to give them or not.

In college, I was described as a “Forever-21 seeming kind of girl” as someone’s confessed first impression.  As a skinny-@$$ed kid who wore tank tops and jeans on a West Coast college campus teeming with a million other lookalikes, that was not out of line as far as superficial descriptions went. I did buy tank tops at Forever 21. They were cheap, and I had other priorities. (Bills.) That’s not what he meant, of course. He meant: some variety of a spoiled Asian girl with more time and money than brains, at college because her parents made her go not because she had any goals or ambitions beyond pledging a sorority or following the trend of the month, and seeking the most fashion I could find to catch the eye of the hottest guy on campus.  We were surrounded by the like, after all.

Since then, I’ve been pegged as all kinds of other similarly superficial, very stereotypical, “female types.”  I’ve been pigeonholed professionally by bad bosses as the “bait” for vendors, clients and colleagues (ick, ugh, and laughable), I’ve been initially dismissed as “only a girl” by people who thought I couldn’t possibly deal with the pressure of X, Y, or Z because of my size or my sex, I’ve been blinked at by people who didn’t expect that I’d bleed geek or finance if you cut me.

The people who mattered got past the notion, or the outside face if it was an intentional wall I kept up not to let them in at all, that I was not just a 2-D female.  They found that I was a person with a brain and the gumption was of my determination, not dictated by size, sex, weight or anything else.  They discovered that while I could be just a simple country girl, I’m a little more complex than that.

I’ve lived a bit of life.  I’ve flown in a home-built two-seater plane with a oil tycoon to hear the story of how it was built and why it flew better than his other planes; I learned how to ride horses and practiced martial arts; I learned basic car repairs and diagnostics with mechanically savvy friends so that mechanics couldn’t just pull a fast one because gee whillikers, lil lady, this here part that doesn’t exist needs replacing.  (Though, shady mechanics will try that with anyone, male or female.)

I’ve adventured to Comic-Con in many phases: as a volunteer, as an attendee, alone, later with friends, and still later, brought friends who had never been.  And for the love of money planning, should anyone in real life accidentally ask me a finance-related question, they’ll trigger a flood of information accumulated over the years.

Then there’s all of my background and history that only lives here on my blog – none of my family or financial life is really casual conversation so on meeting me, you might assume that I had a normal family with a normal childhood and had financial support to go to college and maybe held a job or two afterward.

Working with me, you’d be really confused because I still look like some really young age but I hold an incredible amount of responsibility and I’ve got a very strict code of professionalism so I must be old, but … am I?  And I’ll never tell how old I am either.  Because where’s the fun in that?  😉

In all of this, I’d come to realize that while it was valuable that I didn’t actually care what certain people (the average person on the street) thought of me, the fact that in general, people tend to judge based on appearances meant that any efforts put into directing those thoughts could make a difference where it’s important.

I do care whether people think of me as a “young professional” or don’t really think about my age at all because my physical attributes are just groomed enough to walk a middle ground of dressing for success at the level I want to be at but not being casual (like our C-suite) or overly gussied up.

That’s where Shelley’s suggestion of creating a “uniform” of sorts makes sense to me. I can’t afford a fully kitted out wardrobe with a huge variety of options and I don’t need it either. But a small, carefully crafted professional set of clothing to last a week is just about right.

I rely on the first impression that my professional dress will convey: that I’m someone to take seriously because I’m well-groomed and take my job and career seriously, to offset the first impression that I know my usual lackadaisical self would have given.  And then my work speaks for me.

In everyday life, I’m a casual person so I dress accordingly so as not to give the impression that I’m anything different.  In that “version” of me, I’m not motivated to dress much more nicely on average since I like to be able to play with dogs, read, work on the computer, do household chores, cook, clean, run errands, or any number of random things.  And I’m often reserving the good stuff for work. 🙂  I might be cleaning up my act a little bit overall and eliminating some of the far-too-casual from my wardrobe as I creep toward my 30s but on the whole, comfort is the watchword for the weekends.

:: Have you been commonly stereotyped in the past or present?  Was it a stereotype that bothered you or worked for you?  
:: Are you a different version of yourself in different places? 

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Fabulously Broke on Does holding or wearing designer anything, automatically mean you’re a high maintenance shopaholic?
Stacking Pennies on Designer Brands