Dress How You Want to Feel (And Other Things Nobody Taught Me About Leadership)
- Apr 7
- 4 min read
By Joy Errico
"I have socks older than you."
A senior executive said that to me in front of a room full of people. Including my CEO. I was in my early twenties, working with a celebrity spokesperson for the first time. I had worked really hard to earn my seat at that table. But in that moment, none of it mattered. I was mortified.
It was dismissive and condescending. It was also a turning point.
I realized that talent and hard work weren't enough on their own. I had to make sure my presence matched my capabilities. Was that fair? No. Was it real? Absolutely. So I got intentional about how I showed up. And the dynamic changed. People stopped seeing my age first and started hearing my ideas.
That lesson has stayed with me through twenty-five years of corporate communications, from Macy’s to Staples to BIC to Rite Aid. And it shaped how I think about presence today. Not as a style choice, but as a communications strategy.
Here’s what I’ve noticed across all those years and all those rooms: we spend a lot of time coaching women on what to say. Executive communication, negotiation, leadership language. All of it matters. But we almost never talk about the other half, which is what women communicate before they ever open their mouths.
Your presence is part of your message. It either reinforces your credibility or creates friction that makes people work harder to hear you. And for women, that friction has always been disproportionate.
We’ve been handed a false choice for decades: be taken seriously or be yourself. Look polished but don’t look like you’re trying. Command the room but don’t intimidate. Care about how you present yourself, but never admit it. Because admitting it means you’re not serious.
The most effective women leaders I’ve worked alongside never bought that.
They understood that how they showed up and what they had to say weren’t competing priorities. They were two sides of the same coin.
The thing about presence when it’s working? You almost can’t see it. You just feel it. The room leans in. People hear what you’re saying instead of working to get past what they’re seeing. And that’s not something you’re born with. It’s something you build.
It starts with a deceptively simple question: How do I want to feel when I walk into this room? That doesn’t mean throwing out what’s appropriate. You should always look polished and put together. But within that, there’s room to be intentional about how you actually want to feel.
Because confidence isn’t something you find. It’s something you build before you open the door. Your physical state drives your mental state. When what you wear reflects how you want to show up, you stop performing confidence and start carrying it.
Some mornings, getting dressed is the easy part. But some mornings are harder. The divorce finalization. The layoff announcement. The meeting after a loss nobody knows about. Those are the days your clothes need to do the heavy lifting. You reach for something familiar, something comfortable, something that makes you feel capable. Your outfit becomes your container when you feel like spilling over. That’s not vanity. That’s survival.
What makes this a Women’s History Month conversation worth having is that the rules are being rewritten right now. Not by anyone’s permission, but by practice.
I see it in the founder who walks into a pitch looking polished and put together, but wearing a color that makes her feel like herself instead of defaulting to safe navy. In the executive who builds her wardrobe around how she wants to feel on her hardest days, not just what the dress code requires. In the working mothers who refuse to split themselves into a professional version and a real version. Because they’ve figured out that the split is what’s exhausting, not the work.
These women aren’t rejecting professionalism. They’re expanding what it looks like. And they’re proving something the women who came before them always knew: authenticity and authority aren’t opposites. They’re the same thing, expressed with courage.
I spent most of my career helping organizations tell their stories. Eventually I realized I needed to help women tell theirs. Not just through words, but through the full experience of how they show up. That’s the work I do now. And it comes back to something I believe down to my bones: your personal brand and your professional strategy were never separate things. The most powerful version of your leadership lives where both meet.
So here’s my question for Women’s History Month: Are you showing up as the leader you actually are, or the one you think they want to see?
Because the women who changed history didn’t wait for permission to take up space. They walked in, fully themselves, and made the room bigger. And the women doing it right now? Their daughters are watching.
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