What a nice challenge to pick out from the jar on Monday morning. The week of smiles 🙂
This week I was supposed to start each morning by looking in the mirror and smiling at myself, however self-conscious it made me feel. Following this, I was to smile more throughout each day. I particularly liked the irony of the sentence on the card ‘smile at your colleagues when you get to work’ because again it reminded me of the normality that was expected at the time of creating these cards and how the world has changed so dramatically. However, I can smile at colleagues over Skype for Business, so it’s pretty much the next best thing. Apparently smiling increases productivity, and can give other peoples’ days a lift, so I was looking forward to giving this a try.
Because my life right now consists of three things – being at home, going for a run, and going for a dog walk, there was still opportunity to smile at plenty of other people given that where I run is like a cattle market right now. I decided to put it to the test.
On the first day, I smiled at people also walking their dogs, and every single one of them smiled back or said good morning. It made me recall when I was back living in Seville and I would walk down my street and be met with nods and buenos días’ left right and centre. I attempted it again when running down the vale, and again – everybody who I passed smiled first or smiled back. I do think that usually people are fairly friendly when walking the dog or out running anyway, as smiling or greetings aren’t necessarily a new thing, but I do feel they are more weighted and important nowadays with everything that’s going on.
My dog has such a beautiful face that when she pants she looks like she has the biggest smile. It’s impossible to not smile at her when she looks like that, despite how much of a brat she’s being, so that helped with keeping it up too. I also purposefully smiled at James, which was reciprocated by this strained, forced smile he does, which never fails to crack me up because it’s so obviously forced. So that was good – smiles resulted in laughs several times this week.
Overall, quite a nice week smiling at everybody. There actually wasn’t a single person who I smiled at who didn’t smile back – how wonderful is that?! I can’t really say that smiling so much made me feel fantastic, it seemed more just an extension of what I do normally, but it was still nice nonetheless.
See you next week!
Reflect and Introspect 