Whether you’re trying to teach your children positive social skills or are looking to improve your own, this is a perfect place to start.
Why should we smile?
Smiling helps you speak clearly. Smiling helps strengthen facial muscles that, in turn, help with diction. A smile also moves the lips out of the way so that frontal speakers (who use their lips to form consonants more often than they should, ie. mispronouncing r’s and l’s as w’s) can speak clearly.
You feel better. The research is clear. A smile is not the cure to all of your ills but it does have a positive effect on your health, well-being, and happiness. By smiling you can actually feel better. So don’t wait to feel better to share that smile.
Smile and the world smiles with you. Smiles encourage the same from others, too. We are hardwired to mimic those we are engaged with. It is our primitive way of discerning if the other person is a threat. When listening to someone, our facial muscles are activated to mirror the speaker’s expression. That is one way that we read non verbal cues.
Smiling changes your voice in a positive way. Research also indicates that smiling affects the quality of one’s voice. Our instincts to protect ourselves are so ingrained to trust a TRUE smile, that we can hear the difference in tone between someone smiling and not smiling. It is just one more way to increase our chances of being heard.
An authentic smile creates trust. What is a true smile and how does it help in conversation? It’s dubbed the SMIZE: smiling with your eyes. Simply said, the smile that reaches your eyes is an authentically joyful, happy smile. There are nervous smiles and lying smiles. These smiles are social cues as well, however they will not help in the moment when you need to be trusted and heard.
Trust helps conversation. Please, do not encourage your children or others to smile because it makes them more attractive. It has been tested. Yes, evidence indicates that smilers are viewed as healthier. However, smiling men are not always seen as more attractive than non-smilers. For our purposes we need to make this distinction – attraction is a very different beast than trust. Even though people tend to view those they are attracted to in a more positive way, we need to understand how to engage people’s need for security in their interactions. If you want to be heard, trust helps build those kind of conversations.
When we trust another, our ‘thinking brain’, or frontal cortex, can remain engaged instead of our ‘lower brain’, or amygdala and limbic system, which is responsible for fear based reactions. Skip Pritchard lays it out in his article that this is the conversation we would like to encourage. “Our state of mind – and our level of trust and distrust – directly impacts what kinds of conversations we have and how we interpret them.”
How do I smile more?
Let’s go back to the old lesson of objectives, our ‘why’. If what you are saying needs to be heard then choose the actions that help with that. If smiling brings the listener into the conversation then you have every reason to give them that smize! Authenticity is the key.
What if smiling doesn’t come naturally?
My youngest and I recently attended a elementary school choir festival. I was all smiles watching these amazing kids on stage. The adjudicator was charismatic. She asked each group how they were doing and of course the standard response was, “Good.” That’s when she told them that they shouldn’t say good. They should say ‘Fantastic!’ because you have to smile when you say the word fantastic.
So if you would like to bring your smile out today and work towards better conversations, try using these words and phrases. Can you think of some more?
My own name is a smile word! Guess I’ve been practicing a long time.