MAY 27, 2020
Smiling has great power. When you smile in emotionally painful situations, you gain the strength you need to get back to neutrality and understand what happened…
-Prabhsimrat Gill
Many times in life we face painful situations and it seems like we are doomed and this situation is invincible and we let our destiny and life be shaped by the problems resulting in gloomy days, weeks, months, years, decades and life. Now, you might feel that having problems could be the worst thing in the world as it just makes everything gloomy. Well, everybody has problems on different levels, but it doesn’t mean that everybody has gloomy lives. This is because what comes to our rescue is our smile…
We take our smile so for granted, that if god were to appear in front of us, he would be disheartened to see his creation completely ignore a great power for granted. Smiling has great power and we need to recognise it, understand it and use it to make our lives great.
First, I need you to do this quick exercise. As you are reading this, make a big smile spread on your face and affirmatively say to yourself, “I am happy and I am grateful for everything I have!” Do this thrice and just observe how you feel. I am sure you felt lighter, brighter, fresher and obviously happier. Now do another quick exercise. Make a sad and gloomy face while saying to yourself, “I am happy and I am grateful for everything I have!” Do this thrice and observe how you feel. I am sure you felt sad, gloomy, unhappy and inexplicably heavy around your head. Well, the words were the same, but the smile was what made the difference. The tone and the intention of the words matters. What the words are implicitly trying to convey matters. And the feeling with which you are saying the words matters.
Smiling has a lot to do with how you feel and the way you feel completely changes how you say the words and how you say the words completely changes the meaning they have and the meaning they have completely changes the way they affect you. All that is required is a smile, but let’s understand why a smile changes everything and how smiling in painful situations will save you from gloominess in your life.
Your mind reacts and responds to the inputs you give it without classifying it as right or wrong, unless intentionally classified in either of the categories. The mind will not judge things as good or bad until and unless you tell it to do so based on some external or internal beliefs you have. So basically you have the power to make your mind react to your smile and make it create a positive internal representation, even if your situations don’t really support you this way. Let us understand this with an example.
You have a presentation scheduled for today in your company which will give you a direct promotion if done well. You spend hours and days preparing for it and today you fall sick due to eating the wrong food and you won’t be able to make it to the presentation. Now you are feeling sad and you are perplexed and ambivalent about your near financial future as this means a big loss of opportunity to you. To add fuel to the fire you come to know that your previous application for a small promotion has been rejected due to you filing your absence without a medical certificate violating the company’s rules. Well in this case you have two choices, either to accept the fact that this promotion is out of your hand and move forward or to keep whining on this and feeling irrational guilt for something you could not control. Well, the first step to get out of this situation is to accept it. Even after accepting it, you will feel sad and anxious because of losing this opportunity and you will still go on to wonder about that no matter how hard you are trying not to. Your smile is what will make you feel better…
You are feeling gloomy, sad and anxious, because you are giving your mind the message that you have lost a great opportunity and your belief system will suggest that it is bad to lose an opportunity and that you will not achieve anything beneficial now, which is making you feel guilty and anxious for the future. Now there is another choice you have – accept it, understand it and move forward. But you have to support it with the feelings of happiness and acceptance so that your mind takes it positively and not sarcastically. When you smile and express gratitude towards your well-paying job affirmatively, your mind takes this gratitude positively by supporting it with a smile and telling it that the gratitude is to thank and the mind takes it that way, even if your situation is the complete opposite.
Smiling helps us to feel happy and grateful even in emotionally painful situations not letting our day be consumed by negativity and gloominess thus not hindering our productivity, gratitude and rationality. But, don’t become irresponsible with the power of smiling, as that will be a very bad misuse of this power. This will happen as every time you are in an emotionally painful situation you will smile and get away from it, thus not letting you reflect or understand your actions and hence making you ignorant of improvement. Use the power of smiling to become happy, productive and rational and then use that rational state to reflect on your actions and understand where you went wrong. You can read more about reflection in my blog on questioning. (Link for that blog- Ask the right questions… – Prabhsimrat Gill).
Smile in pain, reflect in rationality, understand in peace and improve in commitment and ambition and you will live a truly happy and successful life…