The Power of Smiling

I was reading an article on LinkedIn on called "smiling in the workplace" and it reminded me of hearing this by the famous actor Anthony Hopkins. It was decades ago, and he was chatting to Terry Wogan on his breakfast radio show about his time recovering from alcoholism. He said “I was in this recovery home, and I feeling very low at that time. I wasn't interested in very much, and certainly didn't feel much like smiling."

He went on, "but there was this nurse – very pretty she was, and I thought to myself, ‘she’s nice’. So I wondered how to attract her attention, and, although I didn’t feel like smiling, I thought I would give it a try, and so I smiled at her.  And she smiled back.”                   

He went on, “Well, I thought, that was nice. So I did it again on the next occasion. And she smiled back again. And I quite liked it again. So I did it another time. Then another.” With a tone of real sincerity, he added “And do you know what, I’m still doing it now.” And that was the key, he claimed, to getting out of his mild depression. 

In NLP we refer to this as the power of  “Acting As If” something were already true. But you can just call it the power of smiling and making people happy – including yourself.