Did you ever notice what happens when you smile? Well, give it a try. Go ahead. Right now. Now, how do you feel? Yes, I know what you mean. When you are smiling, you feel good. All thoughts of anything bad or negative just go away. And if you keep on smiling, you just can’t feel badly.
Now while you are still smiling, think about something that normally makes you very sad or brings you to tears. Hold that smile and you just can’t go to that sad place. I just discovered this and I wanted to share it with you. I don’t know how it works but I just know that it does.
Now, let’s see what happens when you smile at someone else. Some people may look at you a little strangely but if you just keep smiling, you just might see those stern faces crack a little bit. And when you smile at your family and friends and co-workers, you can pretty much get a smile back from each person every time.
So what, you might ask? Well, those smiles back and forth and all around create a lot of positive energy. It makes you feel happy and it makes other people feel happy. So, I decided to do a little experiment.
For ten minutes, I made sure to smile at every single person with whom I came into contact. Amazingly, every single person smiled back and some even said hello. I liked this. I was having a lot of fun and I could see the difference that the smiling had made on others. Now I am wondering whether I can make this work in whatever I do.
So tomorrow morning, I have to give a presentation to more than 50 people. I haven’t had much time to work on it and even less time to practice it which makes me a little nervous. But I plan to interject a lot of smiles into my talking points and I am looking forward to seeing whether this helps me to have success. It might just be a matter of thinking that it will work or it may be that having a smile for everyone will reposition my thoughts from fear to fun. We’ll just have to see if it works and I do plan to report back to you next week.
In the meantime, I want to experiment with this a bit to see how it goes and should you choose to give it a try yourself, I would love your feedback about how it did or didn’t work for you. I think that creating an environment that is full of smiles will not only make me happy but it should make a lot of other people happy as well.
What is the worse thing that might happen? A few people might think that I am a little crazy but that doesn’t bother me. Other than that, I can’t see anything on the downside. On the upside, it makes me feel good when I smile, it is lots of fun doing so, it’s interesting to watch others’ reactions and it makes me happy to make others happy. Gee, it seems that something that is so simple can have such a great impact on creating happiness. And the bottom line is that creating happiness it what it is all about for me.
Have fun and I will report back to you the results of my experiments and if you choose to share your thoughts and experiments, I will incorporate your results into my writing. I figure that the more we learn about each other, the more success we will have in creating happy lives for ourselves.
I would love your comments.
Thanks for sharing this past post with us Barbara! “Smile” is one of my all time fave songs. I am from Texas. And Texans are known (most of the time anyway) for their Texas hospitality. I have smiled through fear, through sadness, through pain, and through hostility. Maybe that’s what keeps me sane. Because when all else fails, I smile. I don’t always get a warm reception. But that’s all about them ~ not me. Most of the time I am greeted with a smile. But there are times when people are rude and don’t crack. Or there are those that are confused by the smile. One of my friends that just moved to Texas from the North said, “I thought Texans were supposed to be nice. I haven’t met that many nice people here so far.” I told her that we live in a big city (near Houston), and that a lot of the people that she is meeting aren’t even from Texas. They just live here at the moment. I don’t know that many native Texans myself in the area that I’m living in now. I told her that if you drive down a Texas country road, you will be met with a “finger wave”. And I’m not talking about the middle finger. Texans in the country keep their hand at the top of the steering wheel, just so they can lift their pointer finger for a “finger wave”. When you aren’t expecting it, you think ~ “Did he just WAVE at me?” It’s so cute ~ I just love it. Anyway ~ that is a little bit off topic so I’m sorry I went off on a tangent. Smiling is contagious and it does feel good. So when all else fails, SMILE!!!
My sister used to live in Austin and I loved it there. I am familiar with the finger wave and that alone makes a person smile. Thank you for sharing and for the reminders of all the good times that I had in your State. What a nice way to finish off this most extraordinary day.
Well, Since I was old enough to remember anything, my mom always told me when I was upset that if I want that mood to change or go away to just SMILE! At first when I was young, I WAS YOUNG so I didn’t want to do what my parents told me to ESPECIALLY when I was in a bad mood! NO WAY, NO HOW, NOT HAVING IT! Well as I got older, that lesson didn’t stop, my mom still constantly reinforced that “If you would just smile….”
So Junior High came around and I had a couple of girls that I didn’t like and Visa Versa. So when they would say hateful things and get me down, I remembered one day to “just smile”, so I did and WOW! It worked, though I didn’t want it to because that would mean my mom was right and OH GOD we can’t have that! But over the years it has helped me in many ways. Although I think we can all relate that sometimes you just want to have a bad day and bawl your eyes out cause it’s good for the soul!
My husband constantly marvels at the fact that I can be in the NASTIEST SADDEST DOWN IN THE DUMPS mood and walk into a room full of friends or family, put on a smile and all is well! It baffles him, and of course he’s never tried it, even though I’ve told him about it. He says he just doesn’t understand how I could switch my mood on and off like that in the blink of an eye. But there’s nothing I can say or do to make him understand until he actually tries it!