I remember my mother telling us each day when we were young, “Make your beds as soon as you wake up, brush your teeth, have your bath, bring the comb, let me plait your hair”. When it was evening, the ritual began once again, although with limited items, “Have your bath, bring the comb”.
There was no skipping this routine. So why did our mothers insist on our grooming to this extent?
The answer is simple. They knew the importance of projecting the right image – in gaining respect and in maintaining healthy relationships with the close and extended family. More importantly, when you project a well-groomed image, it is a mark of the care you take of yourself and hence a projection of your self-esteem too.
Project the neat, well-groomed look, and the battery of maids, cooks, drivers, cleaners, vegetable vendors, gardeners and others make inferences of the completeness with which you want the work done. Project an unkempt, untidy appearance and that’s just what they will infer too, leaving you with a shoddy job done and loose ends hanging all over the place.
Yet, Most of us have come to believe that the time to “get ready” is when we go out.
The Concept of Getting Ready
Whether you work from home or are a homemaker, home is where your office is. It is as necessary for you to get up and “get ready” each day as it is for those who go to office. Particularly, when it comes to homemakers, there are so many things you do at home that it is a full-time job, a job worth taking pride in. Our sense of accomplishment comes when we can take pride in ourselves and in the work we do. This is a strong reason by itself for us to take care of ourselves.
Unfortunately today, many homemakers don’t see the value of what they do at home and it reflects in the way they give up on grooming and taking care of themselves. When you do that, you reveal poor self-esteem and give the impression that you couldn’t be bothered about others and their perceptions, both of which make for weak relationships. We communicate our respect to people and occasions by the care with which we groom ourselves. What we give is what we get and the result is little mutual respect even though respect is the foundation of healthy relationships and is particularly true for marriages.
Hence, The 4 Elements of Image Management are essential in our lives whether we go out or not. After all, home is where the most important people in our life live in close proximity with us. It all begins with Grooming as a visible aspect of projecting your image and as a reflection of your inner life.
Grooming When at Home
As a homemaker or a work-at-home professional, home is your office and it pays to stick to a ‘take-care-of-yourself’ schedule just as office-going people do. It doesn’t take long and it is essential in our lives.
In our upcoming book about First Impressions , we have given the basic and advanced principles of Grooming. These principles apply as much for the time you spend at home as to creating positive First Impressions with strangers outside home.
There are two components to Grooming, one is to do with the sense of sight (visual cues) and the other with the sense of smell (olfactory cues).
Layers of Grooming
(Excerpted from our book of First Impressions)
Although it is up to you to choose to follow the advanced principles of grooming, the basic principles are a necessity.
These basic principles of Grooming indicate the need for hygiene among the visual cues and the need for freshness among the olfactory cues.
In part-II of this series, we talk of the basic principles of Grooming and how necessary these are in taking care of ourselves and hence, to look good every day of our lives.