What is it? What do you think?
Someone might think it is a dominant stance, wide shoulders, leaning forward, all combined, threatening fighting stance, but the truth is that the most powerful cue is a smile.
Smile is something that can change a world and I am not exaggerating.
When you smile, your brain is smiling as well, it gets a message that everything is fine, that we can relax for a while so the brain starts producing a hormone called oxytocin which is causing happy mood, strengthening the immune system and because of that we feel just great.
A nice fact about smile and oxytocin thing is, that you don’t necessarily need to smile genuinely in the beginning. The moment you shape your facial muscle to the smile, your “inner response system” will see that and react accordingly.
It means it will respond to a happy emotion. This system cannot distinguish between fake and genuine emotion, it just reacts to the contraction of facial muscles. When you fake a smile, you will trick your brain to feel happy.
Our brain is usually run by our emotions, these emotions cause that certain hormones are rushing in our blood. And when we have the knowledge that we can regulate these emotions it also means that we can regulate these hormones.
For example, when you will shape your face in sad expression, your cortisol level will increase and you will feel bad and when you change it to anger face you will start feeling motivated by the anger because it is helping us fighting. And then when you will drop this anger face and put a smiley face, you will feel happy and all the negative emotions will be gone.
Try this on your own sometimes.
When you will be angry, notice you have an angry facial expression and when you will deliberately change this facial expression you won’t be able to feel angry anymore. For the moment, this is not a magical technique on how to neutralise your emotions.
Back to the power of a smile. Not only that the smile has a beneficial impact on your own mood and health, but it has also a huge impact on social interaction.
1 – You are sending a calm, relaxed, friendly message which tells others that you do not intend to kill them all.
2 – Mirroring principal, when we see people’s behaviour, we tend to imitate that. It is an innate system because back in time it helped us to survive in nature, the group is stronger, that a single person. When you will smile at someone, that person will mirror the smile and his brain will make him feel good. All the oxytocin process is done in his brain, the same way as in yours.
So by smiling on your own, you personally are feeling much better and by this, you are making the other people feel better. It’s an only win-win game, you can’t lose!
And even if the person you are talking to would be such a grumpy, he wouldn’t mirror your smile…so what? You are happy, he is not. You wanted to do a good deed for him if he would be perceptive enough when he is not, it’s his problem.
So the moral of the story, SMILE because it is good for you, it tastes nice and it is even healthy. 🙂
In the next articles, I will be talking more about how to pick more information from observing, how to be more accurate in it and how to use it in your advantage.
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