My parents came to the U.S. with very little. My mom worked on a hamburger truck, and my dad worked on a loading dock. They were both college educated, so it was incredible to see how they took that humble beginning and ended up owning multiple businesses.

I ended up going to Yale and then working in the family business for a few years. From there, I went to McKinsey & Company, which is a global management consulting firm. I always credit my time there with giving me two gifts: The first is the importance of client service; that it is my role in life to help others succeed. The second is the power of apprenticeship and mentorship. I truly believe that feedback is a gift, and your best coach is your toughest coach.

When I was 22 years old, I was sitting in my first professional review at McKinsey. The first line of my review was, “Lisa comes across as young and overly enthusiastic at times. She should seek to have more gravitas.” I didn’t have any of that. Who has gravitas at that age?

I went back to my boss and said, “How do I get gravitas?” She said, “Go buy a new dress, and wear big jewelry and great shoes.” I said, “Why do you want me to go buy new clothes?” She said, “Actually, that’s not really what I meant, Lisa. I want you to look in the mirror, and I want you to like yourself. I can teach you how to be great at this job, but what I can’t teach you is how to like yourself.” So, I started a company with a mission to catalyze confidence, and we launched it officially in September 2013. The company’s called Gravitas, obviously inspired by my first professional review.

The whole idea is that we would create innovations that help women see the best in themselves. We patented a global innovation, which is building shapewear into clothes. Within six weeks of launching the company, Oprah gave us two full pages in her “Favorite Things” issue in November 2013. In a day, we sold out everything we had in the warehouse.

About two months after we had this incredible Oprah Magazine moment, we started to get hundreds of emails about how we had changed women’s lives. What I realized is that we were giving people the gift of self-confidence through every single box we sent out.

I have spent the last five years really thinking about what it means to be confident. And I believe that it is a choice. We are born fully self-confident, and at some point in our adolescence we actually learn what it means to be self-conscious. It creates this lifelong balancing act between being self-confident and self-conscious. Oftentimes, we can choose to be self-confident. There are times where being self-conscious can spur us to action. But, most of the time, we need reminders in our lives, like a dress, of what it means to believe in ourselves.

If we wake up in the morning and start the day with a laundry list of things we don’t like, the fears we have, that is the energy we will carry through the day. If we start every morning thinking about the things we love about ourselves, the things that only we can do, that changes the entire chemistry of how we think about ourselves. And, I do believe fashion has a powerful role to play in how we see ourselves and how we take on the day.

But truly it is the step before that. It is the step of taking stock of the things that only you can do, the distinctive assets that you bring to your family, to your companies, to your teams. If we were able to do that, I could see self-confidence being the most powerful outfit that you put on in the morning.

To practice this idea of choosing self-confidence, think about what your superpower is. We define “superpower” as something that you are the best at in the world. When upsets happen, when difficult times happen, that is the strength that we draw upon ― our superpowers.

So, self-confidence plus your superpower equal an ability to take on not only the day with confidence but also address upsets and tough times and allow you to pivot your business with purpose.

I have thought a lot about what it means to be innovative. I think the word “innovation” is too big. In my mind, innovation is any improvement to the status quo that changes people’s lives. It does not have to be big. It can be small, incremental changes that genuinely help others.

I am going to share the six steps that it took for us to develop our global patent for our shapewear product, and hopefully it will inspire you to make an incremental change to the status quo in your own business and in your life.

The first step to innovation is really thinking hard about whom you are serving. I often say you can only be innovative in areas that you know and understand. So, always start with whom you are servicing and being the expert for their needs. You cannot be afraid of feedback. You want to hear the unmet need.

The second step is truly being functionally differentiated. I think of it as putting together functional attributes in a way that no one else has.

When we started the company, I said, “Tailored clothing, built-in shapewear, under $300, but luxury quality.” These are four independent things. Any one company can win on one of these dimensions. What I tried to do was to say, “Could we take four of them and create a beautiful Frankenstein?” What we were offering was something that no one else had seen. You could go buy 100 different little black dresses. Why would you choose ours? Because there is a functional differentiation.

The third step is that you have to wrap this in an emotional call to action. You can build a better idea, but part of that is to win hearts, not just minds. I think the functional differentiation wins the mind, but to convince people of your new idea, it really has to win their hearts.

The fourth step of the innovation process is what I like to call “resilience in execution.” It is very likely that your innovative idea in its first execution will not be correct. Part of innovation is iterating and being willing to adjust. Anyone who received a face mask from us during the pandemic in week one knows that the week six mask is much better because we just got better at it. We listened to feedback.

The fifth step is gratitude and humility. No innovation happens in a vacuum, and no innovation happens because of one single person. All of us are walking around with amazing, great ideas. You cannot execute them without a team. I believe thanking and giving credit to everyone else who helped in the innovation process is a huge way to make sure your innovation succeeds.

The last step I call the “North Star belief.” For any great innovation to be successful, you have to always come back to why you’re doing it. What’s the vision?

Three months before we launched our company, the website failed. The web team had to do a rebuild in two weeks. I sent the new version to my mom. I said, “Mom, do you like the website?” And she said, “Yes, you will succeed.” That is almost like a North Star, in a way, because through the innovation process, because you are going to iterate, because you are going to fail so much, ultimately you do have to come back to a belief that you will succeed, and you will make a difference in people’s lives.

Lisa Sun is the founder and CEO of Gravitas and a former associate principal in McKinsey & Company. Sun blends stories from her personal journey with data and experience-driven insights from her 11 years at McKinsey to encourage audiences to harness their “superpower” and use gravitas to advance personally and professionally. Sun founded Gravitas in 2012 with an understanding of the transformative power of clothing. Two months after launch, her first collection was featured in O, the Oprah magazine, People and The Today Show in the same month.