Non-Verbal Communication: Clothing

Video Transcript

"Okay, another form of artifactual communication is your clothing. What you wear gives a very strong impression of who you are. Like me, I like red sweaters. I wear my red sweater almost everyday. That's a big part of who I am. And everybody has a different style. You know, maybe your style is more formal. Maybe it's more casual. Maybe you have a very Bohemian style, where you dress very eclectically. Neither is good or bad, it simply is a non-verbal impression of who you are. The only thing that you want to consider when it comes to clothing is, are there certain times where you need to alter that expression. For example, when I teach college class I always bring this up to my students. I tend to dress a little more conservatively. And I ask my students on the first day of class, when I walked in the door, what was your impression of me? And they rattle off, all these complimentary things of course, because they all want A's. But then I say to them, what would you have thought if I had walked through the door in a tank top and cut off shorts. And they're all in shock because they wouldn't quite know what to think of that. But, it would give them an entirely different impression of me because I say to them, "What would you think of me as a professor if I did that". And the answers are always completely different, than what the initial perception was because of the way I dress. So dress is a non-verbal and it's just something to consider again based on whatever situations you might be going into."