Just Smile
Many years ago, a book was published called Dress for Success. This was back in the day when most men wore suits to work and women wore skirts. The idea was that if you dressed up when you went to work, you were more likely to think better of yourself and succeed because of your positive mental attitude.
All that may sound a bit corny now. Society has moved on a lot. The only people who wear suits are bankers, high-flying business executives, and senior civil servants. The rest of us would rather be comfortable.
That raises the question: Is it possible to influence our attitudes in another way so that we carry ourselves in the same positive way that dressing up used to.
And the answer is that, there is.
Just smile.
Michael Masterson, in his book The Pledge, talks about how we can improve our attitude by smiling. He’s not talking about walking around with an artificial grin, one that looks as though the plastic surgeon forgot to remove some stitches. Instead, he is referring to an exercise plan.
Before your eyes roll too much and you snuggle a little tighter on the couch, hear me out. You won’t even begin to sweat when you find out how easy it is to do.
All you have to do is look in a mirror and smile deliberately 100 times in a row. Unless you are in the habit of smiling a lot, you will find that your smile muscles aren’t in very good shape. You may get up to 20 or 30 times, but after that, it’s unlikely that you’ll be able to keep it up. Like anything else, however, you’ll get better at it with practice.
What’s the point?
You may be wondering why you should even bother to smile 100 times first thing in the morning.
The reason that this exercise is so important is because the act of doing it releases endorphins in your brain. Endorphins are among the chemicals that affect your mood. They are responsible for making you to feel happy.
And let me tell you, after smiling at yourself a dozen times or so in the mirror, you’ll probably be laughing out loud because you feel so ridiculous. But that’s okay. It’s okay because it’s doing exactly what it’s supposed to do. Laughter can be seen as an expression of uncontrolled happiness.
When should you do it?
The best time to do this is first thing in the morning. Brush your teeth and then smile 100 times. It will take you about two minutes; less if your smile muscles poop out.
You may wonder how anyone could possibly do it without first imbibing two or more cups of coffee.
This is where you have to understand something. You’re not smiling because you’re happy. Instead you’re smiling because it will make you that way. So drinking a quart of coffee isn’t necessary. All it does, in fact, is distract you from doing it.
Distractions
What is a distraction? It’s nothing more than an activity that takes you away from what you should be doing.
How do you know what you should be doing? You have to evaluate the results you will get from doing one thing rather than another.
Coffee may wake you up, but smiling will make you feel much more positive about yourself.
Why feeling positive is so important
It’s essential that you feel positive about yourself. That doesn’t mean a pie-in-the-sky or head-in-the-sand outlook. It means that you have a humble confidence that you’ll be able to handle the day’s events.
Humility is essential. Without it, it’s easy to become cocky – overconfident; and overconfidence leads to errors.
A humble confidence, however, is one in which you recognize that you have the ability and the attitude to cope with whatever the day holds for you.
That’s really important.
Here’s why.
Let’s think about how you might cope with the day if you had a negative attitude about yourself.
You’d:
- Doubt your abilities to do anything
- Second-guess your decisions or dither
- Miss opportunities, to help yourself, others or both
- Conserve your energy in the extreme
- Become introspective or more so
None of these things are good for you.
It’s one thing to have healthy doubts about what you can do; it’s quite another to doubt everything that you do. That’s the difference.
This kind of thinking also leads to economic recessions. When enough people lose confidence in the economy, they spend less.
Now it could be that if you spend too much that a little conservation is good; but the thing is that when a lot of people suddenly stop spending, the economy shrinks. Sales decline, there’s less money to go around, and jobs are lost.
Many economies, not just the one in the US, depend on consumption to keep them going.
Talking up the economy
Napoleon Hill, author of the classic Think and Grow Rich, tells us this story.
Back in the 1930s, during the Great Depression, the President of the United States Franklin Delano Roosevelt assembled all of the editors of the leading newspapers across the country. He explained that they needed to write stories that would tell people that the economy was improving.
You see, people were acting as if it was getting worse; and that made it worse. It was essential that people started to behave as they would if it was getting better so that it would get better. And so that’s what they did.
World War Two intervened before the full affect of this strategy could be realized.
Act the way you want to feel
You may be wondering what this has to do with smiling. It’s simply this: If you act in the way that you want to feel, then pretty soon you’ll begin to feel that way.
Did you know that you make yourself feel sick by telling yourself that you are? If you think about how yucky your stomach feels, even if you’re not sick, after awhile you’ll get nauseated.
Now if you can make yourself sick like that, then you can also help yourself to be happy by smiling a lot.
That’s what that book, Dress for Success, was intended to do. Studies have shown that when people get dressed up, they act differently than when they put on cut-offs and a dirty T-shirt.
It’s unlikely that you will wear either in your job; but the thing is that you can’t rely on what you wear to help you to act professionally because the clothes you do wear don’t have that affect.
Smiling, on the other hand, does.
When you smile repeatedly at the beginning of your day, you’re telling your brain that you’re happy. Then all those endorphins, the same ones that are released by those who run or cycle or engage in some other aerobic exercise, flood your “little gray cells,” as Poirot referred to them, and you experience positive emotions.
With practice, those positive emotions will stay with you during the day. When they do, life’s challenges won’t seem quite so big.
And here’s an added bonus. Did you know that it takes fewer muscles to smile than to frown? What that means is that it takes less effort to smile. It’s less tiring to smile.
Let me ask you something. Would you rather be around someone who has sad and introspective or someone who was genuinely happy?
Even if you are naturally melancholic, don’t you find it uplifting to be around someone who is optimistic?
It’s encouraging to encounter people like that. Why? Because they have a way of making us feel better about ourselves.
Keep smiling
You can make yourself feel better by smiling.
Do the 100-smile exercise every morning. It may take a couple of months for it to become a habit; but it will change your life.
Let me know how you get on.
I can’t wait to hear of your success.