Why You Should Always Wear Penguin Earrings at Fancy Restaurants

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The best way to expand your comfort zone is to force yourself to do something outside of it.

And when you get comfortable doing things outside your comfort zone, life becomes more fun.

I made up that part.

But I plan to prove it anyway.

And this is the story of a very small start.

Yesterday, my boss called a surprise lunch-meeting at a reasonably nice restaurant near work. I was dressed… maybe not quite appropriately, but not too shabbily either. I long ago gave up trying to fit in with the “stylish” Westchester women, but I still make an effort for normalcy when I’m at work.

However, yesterday I just happened to be wearing Christmas penguin earrings. You see, one of my friends was having a “Boozy Ladies Holiday Party” that evening, and I wanted to be appropriately festive. I suppose there were more subtle ways to achieve this, but what fun is subtlety?

So about 20 minutes into lunch, I was looking at my boss’ glittery gold hoop earrings across the table when I suddenly remembered I was wearing penguins in my ears. My first thought, not surprisingly, was embarrassment. I reached for my hair and tried to brush it over my ears surreptitiously.

But then I stopped myself and thought, “Who cares?” Why would it matter to anyone that I was wearing penguin earrings? If someone happened to look at me and get a smile from it, then I’d done a little bit of good for the day. And if they looked at me and wondered why the heck I was wearing penguins in my ears, I’d given them something to think about. By trying to hide my earrings, I was instinctively reacting to the assumed opinions of people I don’t even care about.

And anyway, the cardinal rule of doing strange things in public is: Most people aren’t paying half as much attention to you as you think they are. (I made that up too.)

So I decided to embrace this strange circumstance. I pushed my hair back behind my ears, smiled at the thought of it, and proceeded with business as usual. Penguins and all.

And you know what?

Nobody cared.

The pleasure I took from this experience made me epically nostalgic for those funny t-shirt and funky earring days of yore. It also made me realize that being juvenile is not always a bad thing. If we stopped pretending that adults are supposed to have all the answers, we could learn a lot by being a little more juvenile. After all, kids can find fun in anything. They know how to play. They laugh more than adults. And they are not yet socialized into caring what other people think.

We establish limits and boundaries as we grow up, and as a result, our comfort zone tends to shrink. Maybe by embracing qualities of fun, play and downright silliness, we can push those boundaries back out.

And so, thanks to the penguins, I am reclaiming my wardrobe from the “shoulds”. We hear that we should dress as we would like to be perceived. Well, I would like to be perceived as being unashamedly and unabashedly me, even if that involves appearing a bit juvenile, and I would like to be perceived as someone who is having fun and doesn’t care what people think. Or rather, as someone who doesn’t care what the wrong people think.

And how will I know the right people? Well, they’ll be the ones who smile when they see a woman wearing penguin earrings.

Are you smiling?

Tagged as: boss, chinawhite, christmas earrings, comfort zone, holiday party, laughter, ny, penguin earrings, personal development, westchester