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Summary: Wisdom for Wannabes host Jackie Morreale reflects on the concept of fit, both in clothing and in life. She shares a personal story about an old suit that no longer fits her, prompting a deeper discussion about how our clothing choices reflect our personal growth and aspirations. Jackie emphasizes the importance of understanding apparel fit standards and how they relate to our self-image. She also explores the evolution of personal style and the need to reassess our roles and goals in life, encouraging listeners to consider what truly fits them as they strive for growth and fulfillment. Chapters 00:00 The Suit That No Longer Fits 02:04 Understanding Apparel Fit 04:18 The Evolution of Personal Style 06:19 Fit Beyond Clothing: Career Aspirations Dedicated to Susan P. Ashdown, PhD, fashion industry fit expert and Emerita Professor at Cornell University's Department of Human Centered Design.
Hello, my name is Jackie Morreale and I'm the host of Wisdom for Wannabes, a new podcast series that seeks to find wise words on business, beauty and betterment. I'm here today joined by an old friend: My pinstriped suit. Let me tell you a little bit about this suit. This suit was something I bought 15, 16 years ago. It's from Brooks Brothers. I spent what I thought was a lot of money on it back then. I had it tailored to fit my body after I bought it. The suit helped me get two corporate jobs. I wore this suit once a week for a corporate job for three years. We go way back. 15 years later, though, this suit does not fit. It does not fit my body. It does not fit my style. It doesn't fit where I'm trying to go as a creative person. It's unfortunately just taking up space in my closet. The reason I'm having this conversation showcasing my old suit today, is because I had a wonderful conversation with my mentor and professor from undergraduate and graduate degree programs, who is an expert in the field of apparel fit. We had this wonderful interview that is now posted on this channel. She posed the questions: What fits us? How much of our closet actually fits us? How much of our closet is just taking up space? It's an idea that I haven't thought about for a while. It made me go back in time 15 years when we worked on this together. A study based on how the fit of denim jeans on college-age women would improve their body image, called Relationships Between Perceived Fit of Denim Jeans and Body Satisfaction. In it, with statistics we proved, that the better the perceived fit of the jeans, the better the wearer would feel about their body. How amazing is that? To be able to use something like fit of clothing in order to feel better about our self and our body as a person. The issue here is, "Fit" is a major problem. Most clothes don't fit most bodies. Ready to wear is a broken system. Pretty much anything that you can buy off the shelf is not going to fit you unless you go through that extra step of investing in it and making sure that it's then custom tailored to your body. Bodies are always changing. Between the shape, the size, our posture, there are so many different facets that change the way a garment can fit you from one day to another. Years later, here I am holding onto this suit that's two sizes too small in the back of my closet because we have this beautiful history together. It doesn't fit me, it doesn't fit my body, it doesn't fit my style, it doesn't fit my career. It's ready to be passed on to the next person.  Traditional Suit FitLet's talk a little bit more about fit in terms of the technical standards of apparel. Since this is a suit, it's pretty standard in terms of how we measure the fit. When we're talking about a jacket like this:
Nothing should be too tight. Nothing should be too loose. Wrinkles always show where something is too tight or too loose. If there's a big wrinkle on your button, it is likely too tight. That's the very traditional version of what a women's or men's suit jacket should look like when it fits. No wrinkles, smooth lines, fitting the curves of your shoulder, fitting to the wrist bone, a little bit of protrusion around your neck as well as your wrist to show the shirt underneath. It's a very traditional, centuries old way of measuring fit. Again, nothing off the rack is going to look like that on you unless you are the fit model that the design was built around. If you have that fit model body, you are in luck. Find your store and buy it in every color. Either way, make sure you customize the fit of special pieces as things change with your own body to make it an investment piece.  On StyleLet's talk about the style. I'm no longer a pinstripe suit wearing kind of gal. I've been there, done that, and looking for more creative ways of expressing myself through clothes. I love to take it down to three basic questions, to determine if it is fitting me:
 Storytime! Learnings from Eric Carle, on Fit and Growth I also do a lot of reading, and I was reminded of one of my favorite authors / illustrators of all time, Eric Carle, and this wonderful book that he wrote for children. Eric Carle not only is a talented writer, illustrator, who changed the industry of children's books, but he was also a 40-year-old when he first published his book that everybody knows, 50 million copies have sold worldwide, his bestselling book, The Hungry Caterpillar. Many books later, we have this wonderful book, A House for Hermit Crab. As we go through the pages of this book, we find that it's about a hermit crab, who keeps outgrowing his own shell. As he's physically outgrowing his own shell, he needs to then find new shells to wear, right? But maybe it's not your style, so you're going to customize and make it your own. Then by the time you have this beautiful shell, your body has again changed or your career goals have changed and you need a new sense of style and by the time you've built up this beautiful fit and home and second skin and even built a little rock wall around it... you realize that you are not growing while you're wearing this non-fitting shell. Or jacket, in my case. Maybe you find a friend who still has some room to grow and it's time for this to stop taking up real estate in my closet and it's time for me to move on. It's time for the next person who has those goals to take over and do what they want with it.  Fit for Growth in Your LifeIf we think about clothing or we think about a home, it's our second skin. It's our immediate environment. We have to be comfortable in our skin in order to grow. Let's take it even further than that and say:
Something to think about. Is what you're watching or what you're scrolling fitting you, fitting your goals, fitting where you're going to be in the next 15 years? If it isn't, maybe it's time to donate it to the next person in line, and grow and figure out what your new fit is. Thank you, Eric Carle. May you rest in peace. Thank you for creating all these beautiful books and making me think bigger about growth and fit. And to Professor Ashdown, for always being there, with all your guidance in fit technology, and everything else that you've done. Have a wonderful day! Continue Learning About Fit and Growth:
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Summary: In this voice note, Jackie Morreale shares her thoughts on the study of philosophy with @NewAcropolisUS and how it relates to the challenges faced in everyday life. This course is for deep thinkers, and required reading includes ancient texts that offer insights into the complexities of human nature. Jackie Morreale describes in her own words Plato's Allegory of the Cave, as an example of learnings from this course, from Plato's Republic book, which was first published around 380 BC. The Allegory of the Cave alludes to our ability to break free from barriers of society, see the light, and teach others in words that they can understand, to show leadership and create change.
Hi there, my name is Jackie Morreale, and I am the host of Wisdom for Wannabes, a new podcast series on business, beauty, and betterment. I am also a student of New Acropolis USA, as part of a philosophy course I've been taking for a year. I would like to speak to this group as a whole. It has been a wonderful addition to my life to be regularly thinking about philosophy with a group of philosophers under very strong professors who have volunteered their time in order to share this wisdom with their students. The course has taken us from ancient Greece to Chinese philosophy, to India, to ancient Egypt, and philosophies from all over the world. Within the class itself, we have many people from all over the world, from Brazil to New Jersey, and everywhere in between. It has been a wonderful way to expand the way I think about things and to also identify patterns that have lasted over centuries and thousands of years, and scholarly research and thoughts that have been shared since BC. I recommend this group to anyone who's looking to think deeper about the meaning of their life, maybe find their purpose, anyone who's even just looking for a reading challenge. The book list alone is worth signing up for the course. To give you some of the titles at the top of my reading list, I've been reading:
There's so much in this class that I would love to share, but I thought it would be nice to walk through their final exam question, based on what we learned in this class. Question: In your own words, retell the Allegory of the Cave. That one is Plato. The Allegory of the Cave. There are people in this cave. They're in shackles. They're stuck deep inside this cave. There are others a level up that are casting shadows of fire with figurines on a wall, to keep them entertained, busy, distracted from the fact that they are in a cave, not free. Someone finds their way out of the cave. Lo and behold, there's a whole world outside of the cave. They see the light. They have to kind of close their eyes a bit because it's so different from what they're used to in the cave. They want to have their friends join them and also understand that there's a whole world outside of the cave. That person goes back into the cave, and says, There's a whole world and there's light outside of the cave! But talking to a group of people who have only seen darkness inside of a cave and illusions, on a wall, won't believe that person, unless they have the right terminology. That person who has seen the light becomes the teacher, until those other people can understand what they're saying. That person who's seen the light and is able to provide some wisdom to the people would be wonderful in any sort of leadership role. I've gotten so much from this class and looking forward to the next. Check out New Acropolis USA and bring philosophy to your everyday life.
Summary: In this voice note and mini research study, Wisdom for Wannabes podcast host Jackie Morreale discusses the importance of our energy on our interactions, particularly during the school year or when arriving to an office and greeting an administrative professional. She reflects on a note she found at her children's school that emphasizes the idea of matching energy with others. Through a social experiment, she explores how positivity can be contagious and how our energy affects those around us. The conversation encourages self-reflection on the energy we bring into different spaces and the impact it can have on our interactions. Takeaways:
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Hi and happy summer everybody! Parents out there and kids are super excited for the summer. Teachers who have off for the summer super excited. Lots of blue skies ahead of us as we refresh and recharge our batteries before the next year starts up again. I happened to find myself at school last week, on an errand. I encountered this cool note at the front desk, a laminated Post-it note that looked very similar to this one that I had to create just for myself. It says, I match energy, so you tell me how this will go. How cute is this person for making a Post-it note that's so truthful and putting it on for everyone to see, as they're checking their kids in late or dropping off glasses or lunch or a water bottle. This note really made me reflect. It was my first time seeing it. I've been there many, many times. I have never noticed it before. Could have very easily just written, Be kind, right? As we would see all over the place in school, which is true. We should be kind. Everyone's fighting their own battle. It is on us to be kind to everyone as we would expect them to be kind to us. But to say, "I match energy, so you tell me how this will go", really forces anyone to see it, to notice it, to reflect on themselves in such a smart way.
How great is this person that she knows that she's going to match this energy of the people that walk in. Is anyone really going to the main office in any organization and not asking for a favor? If you're asking for a favor, you might as well bring some light in, some smiles in, when you greet this person. We're all so wrapped up in our own deadlines and where we're trying to go that quite often it just slips through the cracks... and this person feels the brunt of that. This gatekeeping role is so important for every single organization. I know today is not Administrative Professionals Day, but I thank everyone in an administrative role for making my life easier, for making everyone's lives easier, for making magic happen every single day. Happy summer to them! I genuinely hope that you are able to come back to the new school year fully refreshed and revived. Let's think about this question a little bit more: What energy am I bringing with me when I walk into a room? Let's bring this to your house, your office, a Zoom call even.
Has anyone else in the room shown up where you've been and caused this chain reaction, caused this light to enter the room? If you have seen this, tell that person. Tell them to keep doing it, that they changed the room. It's hard to realize that we do match energies. Just look at your pet or your children or a meeting, right? If you get home and you've had a bad day, you kind of feel the entire vibe of the household shifting. Maybe you have a wonderful pet that'll come and greet you if he or she knows that you are sad. They know how to react to energy instinctively and it's an amazing thing. Thinking about how we create this chain reaction of positivity in the world. While we have hundreds, maybe thousands, of interactions, some of us, every day - whether it's in person, on the phone, email, text messages, online, however you communicate...
Let's bring ourselves up and let's bring other people up as well. I will keep that sticker. For those of us who want to create some positivity in the world and have that energy resound, for the sake of this conversation, did a little social experiment, with my daughter. Something like this, a little matrix if we have it here. We did a social experiment over three mornings last week. After we saw this sign we asked: What would happen if we just waved and said hello to everyone that we saw? What would happen? We did this over three days. The first day we went to the park, then we went for a walk around the community, and then we went to a camp drop-off. We charted it out based on other crazies like us who initiated a wave or a hello, those who matched our energy and said hi back in some way acknowledging us, or those who just had no response. The total was 30 people in our group. For the sake of conversation: If we're able to match negative energies, can we also match positive energies? Our results were interesting. They were situational. In terms of those others like us who initiate a hello, and this is just them, the park run had the most of them. There were two folks who were running and initiated the hello and it so great before we even had a chance to pick up our hands or smile. And one from the community walk initiated the hello. So of the 30, we have 10 % of people like us who are trying to put this positivity out there, these smiles out there first, because we know that other people are going to match our energy. Let's lead it with positivity! Thank you for that, 10 % of people. I really appreciated your hello. Right back at you. Let's talk about those who matched our positive energy, our hello or our smiles. In the park run, we had seven of the ten who matched our energy. This high energy group that are out there trying to find wellness and health. Thank you folks for smiling, thank you for waving, thank you for saying good morning. Next up was the community. Of the 10, five of them waved back or just matched our energy. Camp drop off, three, smiled or waved back. It's a little bit of a different group, less familiarity, more hustle, more bustle, more craziness happening to try to get kids to that camp drop off or to try to get back to your desk and pick up your next call. If I look at that group who match our energy in three different situations, with high energy, more familiarity, and more hustle bustle. We had a total of the seven + five + three = 15. 15 out of 30, 50 % mirrored our good energy. How great is that? It's not just about the bad energy that we're mirroring. If you put out there good energy, 50 % of the time, you will get it back. I would have done this mini research project if I had found that one person had mirrored my energy, it would have been worth it. Because maybe that one person takes it and has an exponential effect to their positivity. When I saw that 10 % initiated a hello just like us, and 50 % matched our positivity, that's incredible to me. No responders. In the park, we had one no responder. In the community, we had four no responders. At camp drop off, we had seven. People are in their own world. We can't affect everyone. We had 12 people out of the 30 who did not respond. Were not expecting this social experiment. Did not communicate back, 40%. But the majority did! Based on this cute little social experiment, I would say this: Put your best self forward. Think about every space that you put yourself in. When you walk into your house, when you walk into a boardroom, when you walk into a new office for an appointment and a gatekeeper welcomes you. Bring your smile, bring your positivity, because the majority of the time, they're going to send it right back to you. On those days where you just have abundant energy, bring it with you and share it with other people. If you feel it from that 10% of folks who already have the same and are putting it out there, just tell them they're doing a great job. Let's see how many people that we can spin the negative to positive, and have them be enjoying the fact that they match energy because it's important. Learnings from a Post-It note. I thank you for making me reflect and making me think about this a little scientifically and making me realize that we also match positivity and the majority of people do the same. Have a wonderful day! Hi there, Wisdom for Wannabes host Jackie Morreale here, to ask you a very simple question: How many tabs open do you have on your browser right now? How many tabs open do you have on your phone, of apps that you're using? Simple question. For me, it was 23 on my browser and it was 12 on my phone. It came up yesterday as a question from my child who was looking to find something on my phone and couldn't, because of all the noise that I kept open on my phone at all times. I literally have taught a colleague my method for crazy productivity with the 23 tabs open before and now I feel a little bit ashamed to have done that. When we think about productivity, is it a matter of having 23 tabs open? Is it a matter of having five screens in front of us, which we are going to dissect information at the same time from? What I've learned is that productivity is something different. If you want to be productive, try focusing on one thing. That's where you're going to find your flow. (It is so difficult.) If we think about our computers and what abuse we put them through with all these tabs open, all these programs running at the same time. I do love my control C, control V. I did learn that in college from a professor who said your left hand has to be as productive as your right hand with the mouse and as your brain. That was a useful skill and I do use those copy paste shortcuts all the time. But when we come to our computer... it's so bogged down with information that we wonder why sometimes the simplest solution for a health checkup for our computer is just to turn it on and restart it, right? Somehow that resets things. If we think about our brain as a computer, how many things do we have going on in there? How many apps do we have open in our own mind right now? Is it 23? Is it 12? Is it two? Is it anything more than one? How can you be present when you have so much noise open at the same time? This is a question that I've really struggled with. I did not understand the feeling of flow and trying to create something. Trying to get into that state that's almost trance-like, where you can be completely creative and yourself and you just do. You've already been trained for this. You just do. You don't think. You just go with it. You're in flow and it is present. You see opportunities differently too when you turn down the noise. If I think about my own brain and how to achieve this, it's a struggle. The struggle is real, especially in the marketing field where we have 23 tabs worth of social media and CMS for your website and PR for news that you want to release on a new product launch and all these different communication tools that we want to keep open at all times. If that important client emails us, we want to respond immediately. So we're checking our email. We're always present. We're always making ourselves present. But are we really present? Present by way of being able to do productive work, what we do best. We're all bogged down with meetings. It's just meeting upon meeting upon meeting. So many of us are able to multitask during these meetings really well. But unless you're really present at the meeting, are you able to get anything from that meeting? Whatever you're doing, if you have 23 tabs open, I invite you to be like your IT professional and say, please shut it down, reboot, start with the one thing, and see how far you can take that. Something that helps me both as a marketing professional, as an entrepreneur, is I have a way of managing my projects. I have a lot of things going on in my head and I want to get them out. I want to keep it clear. One thing I've been able to use is a project management tool that I can take all the projects that I want to get done and put it in this tool. As soon as I take it out of my brain and put it into this tool, it's removed from what I'm thinking about so I can think about exactly that one ticket or that one list item or that one priority that I want to get done first, that's at the top of the list. Once you achieve whatever that goal was, that baby step towards a bigger goal, you're ticking off your list and throwing into your "done" pile rather than "work in progress", it is the best feeling in the world. I invite you to think about what tabs are open on your phone, on your computer, in your mind, and closing them down. The project management software that I use is free. There's plenty of options out there. I invite you to take everything, all the noise that's going on in your head and put it down somewhere else, whether it's a list or in a project management software, put it somewhere where it's no longer going through your head. This is the only tool that I've been able to use to become more productive and to find more time in my day for the things that I really wanted to do that I never found time for, for years and years. I'm a creative person, I love to design, I love to draw. I didn't draw for myself for 15 years. How did I reboot and figure out a time to do this when there's just no time, when you have a job and you have a family and you have a life? How are you possibly finding time to do something as simple as draw for five minutes a day? I drew for five minutes a day every single day last month. The way to do this was just to prioritize it. I had to make sure that this was on my to-do list, that I did just a little something every single day. Do you know the wonderful thing about changing your routine and doing something? Is that it's something that I looked forward to and still look forward to doing every single day. It's me time every single day. And it's time when I'm in complete flow for those five, 10 minutes, where I find something that I can just sketch, for the fun of it. There's nothing else going on. I am not scrolling. I am not seeing what's on the news. I'm not worried about tomorrow. I'm just trying to capture the details of something sitting in front of me on paper. It's different for everybody, so find your thing. If you can't find the time for your flow, it's a problem for your productivity. So figure out how to get your productivity in order. Close those tabs. Put them into some other list so you don't have to think about them and be present so you can find that flow. I have to say this book helped me, Atomic Habits, by James Clear. "Tiny changes, remarkable results", the subhead, captures it. There are so many little ways that you can make changes. I identified mine as I just had way too many tabs open in my life. Figure out which tabs need to close in order to open the new ones. Have a wonderful day.
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Jackie MorrealeJackie writes from her own experiences and reflections on her journey in seeking wisdom, creativity, spirituality, and life in general. This is "putting thyself out there" at its finest. 
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