Some women and men dress in the clothes they wore when they were younger, whether the look is appropriate or not. Baumgartner says this can sometimes be caused by people simply not knowing how to update their wardrobe. She says one sign of an unchanging style is if the contents of a closet haven't changed for more than five years. If you're looking to update, figure out the parts you like of the items you have – for instance, the polka dots in a '50s-style skirt – and look for that trait in a new item, such as a polka-dotted shirt. Others who are stuck in the clothes of decades past may be trying to cling to their youth. Baumgartner suggests looking for a role model who dresses his or her age who you can emulate. One client of Baumgartner's picked Jamie Lee Curtis. Model your new style after your role model and go from there.
Mark Sappenfield
Dear Reader,
About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:
“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”
If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.
But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.
The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.
We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”
If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.
