No they don’t, but it seemed like a far more fun intro than what it speaks of – enclothed cognition.

Yet, the technician, the doctor and the painter we really do need as characters for this story. Kellogg’s School of Management did an interesting study where they divided people into three groups and gave each group respectively – lab coats, doctors’ coats and painters’ coats and observed how they perceived and reacted to the situations that followed. Those in a doctor coat behaved more attentively, those in a painter’s coats saw the creative side of things and were more inclined to unconventional solutions, those in lab coats were much more careful with their actions and the steps taken. All of the coats were the same. Students just adopted the traits they associated with the role of the coat they were told they were wearing.

There’s a primary transfer going on here where the traits of that which we associate ourselves with rub off on our current expression of personality. This has deep implications – for example if you see yourself as a victim you most certainly are one and you’ll display victim like behavior as submissive language, tone of voice and use words that confirm that with which you’ve already associated yourself with.

The thing is that the you you’re in your regular private life is not always the same you that can make extraordinary things happen with all your insecurities you carry. Sometimes you’ll need to become someone else for a while, do the things that might not come naturally – so you construct an alter ego. This is common among athletes, singers, artists… and there is a reason aliases are so prevalent in such professions. Have you ever had an experience where you met a friend you haven’t seen for 10 years who called you by the nickname he called you back then and suddenly 10 years of growth just evaporated. You were that person again, associated with the nickname is the whole personhood of who you once were.

But you can use it to your advantage. Find a totem or a charm if you will. It can be anything, the glasses you put on, a little mantra you say, a scene you enact in front of the mirror, your lucky socks, that power tie that seems to work every time in a meeting – it was never the tie, the socks or the glasses. It was you all along, you just needed an object or a ritual to serve as a conduit for what is already there. You already have it all you just haven’t practiced it into constant being yet.

The moment of decision to become someone who can handle this certain thing is the “Phone booth moment”, as Todd Herman calls it -the moment when Peter Parker alone cannot do a thing that Superman can, it’s a reversible transformation available on call which can help us tap into a sense of confidence that we don’t naturally possess. What you present to others becomes the person they believe you are and looped back – you are not what you think you are but what you think others think you are. It’s a self-generating loop and you’re free to identify with the strongest most powerful version of you here, you’ll grow into it eventually – fake it till you make it.

So what’s your phone booth?