Smiles

In Creating Happiness by Barbara Jacoby

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.

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