Post 60:
Smiling is good for everyone
Yesterday I was in work as a part-time IT Support worker, whilst I am very lucky and thankful to have a job while at University, yesterday was a little mad because the servers went down, and several students lost their work. For some, it was a few sentences, for others it was a few MS Word pages. A big, big difference!
Whenever it happened I could only do one thing: smile more. why? Well I always knew that smiling was always good and nice, but for me it:
- Makes me feel happier/happy
- Possibly releases endorphins (I don’t have time to check if this is theory of fact)
- Allows others to view me as being friendly and approachable
But the best thing I learnt yesterday was quite simple, smiling eases tension, aids human interaction and allows people to listen more.
How? Why?
A few of the many students stories were really bad, but so was their reaction. One female student was in her final year, working on her dissertation. As if that wasn’t challenging enough, she lost a few pages of her work. To make matters worse, her work was due for submission in less than 24 hours.
Whenever I came over to help her, and advise her what to do she broke down into tears. Obviously (and naturally) annoyed, I gave as much reassurance as possible – perhaps this was the people person emerging form my inner self. But I also gave several smiles as I tried to help her locate her work, explain what happened, explain why her work was lost, and advised to write whatever she could remember on a piece of paper before she forgot what she wrote, or was going to type.
Smiling has a lot of power
On one of the floors in work, there is a “PC Drop-in” containing approximately 150 computers. This is were I spent most of my time advising people individually what to do. It was also were I spent most of my time smiling as I thought to myself how awful the situation really was.
Yesterday I officially learnt that a really angry situation and a smile lead to no tension, or verbal anger. Well, nothing said directly to my face. It even eased a student form crying uncontrollably as I sat next to her to help with the dilemma.
Smiling also allows anyone to hide their emotions temporarily. Now, this wasn’t something I was initially keen on writing because I don’t want to say that smiling makes you officially happy, content etc but I did want to touch on the fact that a smile can help you help yourself through a difficult situation. Of course, a smile isn’t going to make such problems go away, but it’ll start the process of trying to resolve the problems you are trying to come to terms with.
Hey you, yes you, smile more
From this extremely stressful period I am going to really appreciate the fact that I can smile, and the fact that a smile seemed to work wonders for really tough and stressful time. Even for me, I didn’t lose any work!!!
I’ll end this post with a really nice saying I once heard a few years ago:
Smile, let the world know you’re happy
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