The Commanding Power of a Smile

Hi Everyone, Mazen here! Welcome to the Maximal Life!

Your body is a reporter that is constantly communicating with you and the people around you. Your brain is a bank and whatever you deposit- your experiences, your attitude, your interactions with other people, will be the deposits that you withdraw from. While life can sometimes be a mixed bag, and many things are out of our control, such as the behavior of other people, we can ALWAYS choose our own attitude and behaviors.

Many of us have conditioned responses to the many different challenges in life. Cultural conditioning would have us perceiving every change as a stress, every challenge as a problem, and every stranger as a threat. The resulting mindset from these conditioned responses leave us seeking distractions, avoiding each other, and spending our money on things we don’t need.

As Maximal Achievers, we strive to ascend cultural conditionings, because we see through the scheme.

The Myth of Stress

??We’ve debunked the myth of stress, by recognizing it as merely “a non-specific response in the body to any form of change.” We’ve delved into the science which proves that stress is just energy that we can harness and benefit from by choosing to perceive it as a challenge rather than a threat. Now it is time to take this knowledge a step further.

“What is the simplest and most powerful way to position our mindset for Maximal results on a daily basis?” The answer is literally right under our nose.?

Thomas Paine, one of the Founding Fathers of the United States, said: “The real man smiles in trouble, gathers strength from distress and grows brave by reflection.”

Smiling improves your health

I’m not certain whether or not, Mr. Paine was aware of the scientific accuracy of his statement, but the act of smiling, the activation of the smiling muscles in the face, release neuropeptides! And neuropeptides, alter your mood and alleviate negative stress. Neuropeptides are tiny molecules that support communication between the neurons that tell the entire body if we are happy, angry, nervous, excited…everything! The feel-good neurotransmitters are dopamine, serotonin, and endorphins,

and they are all released when a smile crosses our face. These neurotransmitters also lower blood pressure and regulate our heart rate. Many of today’s pharmaceutical antidepressants contain synthetic concoctions that imitate the positive effects of these feel-good chemicals and often come with have several unpleasant side effects. So am I seriously asking you to start smiling more often? Yes I absolutely am, Maximal Achievers. Seriously.

And, as an added bonus, Smiling makes you better looking!

Did you know that several studies have proven that we are better looking when we smile?

It’s true. And when you smile, people treat you differently. You are regarded as more attractive, and sincere. Smiling opens doors where there were only walls in both business and in our personal relationships. A study published in the journal, Neuropsychologia, reported “Seeing a smiling face, activates your orbitofrontal cortex, the part of your brain that processes feeling rewarded.” This means that when you give someone a smile, it is neurologically processed in a way that signals to someone else they are being given a reward. Have you cracked a smile yet? Come on, let’s see those pearly whites, already! It’s really that easy.

Stephen Hawkins said, “Life would be tragic if it wasn’t so funny.”

Emotional Contagion is a powerful key to our sphere of influence and a smile is about THE MOST contagious emotional response that can be elicited between people. There is an actual part of your brain that is responsible for your facial muscles. It resides in your unconscious automatic response area. This means, just as quickly as you would automatically pull your hand back from a scalding flame, you are just as likely to return a smile. In fact, it requires a conscious effort not to smile back at someone.

When you smile, it biochemically boosts your mood.?

According to Marco Lacoboni, we all possess neurons called mirror neurons. Lacoboni says “The way mirror neurons likely let us understand others, is by providing some kind of inner imitation of the actions of other people, which in turn leads us to simulate those actions.” In an interview done by Scientific American, Lacoboni stated, “When I see you smiling, my mirror neurons for smiling fire up too, initiating a cascade of neural activity that evokes the feeling we typically associate with a smile.”

What this means, is that when you smile, the pathways in your brain will automatically release hormones that are typically associated with the feelings that accompany a smile.

Your facial expressions send neurological signals to your brain, and the brain releases the hormones that correspond with the feelings being expressed by your face. WOW, that is some powerful influence!

Just by changing the expression on our face, we can reinforce positive emotions, or even transform negative ones.?

Maximal Achiever and spiritual guru, Thich Nhat Hanh, said: “ Sometimes your joy is the source of your smile, but sometimes your smile is the source of your joy.” And science proves that he is absolutely correct. Hanh also said, “We can smile, and everyone in our family, our entire society, will benefit from our peace.” In all my studies, I have never come across a simpler or more rewarding way to have a positive influence on my family and my team, than by sharing a smile.??

Whenever I come across information that really stirs me to make a shift, my children often come in to focus. According to some amazing research coming out of Boston College, two new studies examined how being absent while at work effects a child’s psyche. As Maximal Achievers, we have a tremendous responsibility to our family and often to our community. Here’s some great news: this study showed that our children’s sense of well- being isn’t affected by how much time we spend at work. But what does affect a child’s sense of well-being? Their parent’s mood at the end of the workday.

A brilliant philosopher and educator named Shinichi Suzuki said: “Children learn to smile from their parents.”

So, at the end of the day, It’s vital to your Maximal Life, to walk into your home with a smile.

Anytime I think about getting home at the end of the day, I can hear my kids in my head saying “Daddy’s Home! Daddy’s home!” That always makes me smile. But sometimes, when we walk through the door still distracted by the details of the day and often exhausted, we can breeze right by our loved ones without realizing what we are missing.

Remembering back to when I started my first company, I was working crazy long hours. Sometimes I don’t get home until 10 or 11 o’clock at night. My wife is pregnant with our first child, and while we are both really excited to start our family, I notice that she doesn’t quite seem herself in the mornings. (Which is becoming the only time I really see her). I think about her often, and she and my unborn child are a major driving force in my desire to be successful. I want to provide for her, give her an abundant life, make her happy, make her proud. She tells me often how proud she is of me, and lets me know she appreciates me. Still, when we see each other for a few hours in the morning, I can see that the sparkle in her eyes is gone. She had mentioned before that she’s been missing me, but what can I do? I have so much responsibility to my career and to my team, and I am trying to secure a future for our growing family. I tell myself she’s just tired. She is pregnant, after all. Maybe it has something to do with the hormonal changes, maybe it was something I said, maybe I’m imagining it. Everything was fine, basically. We weren’t fighting. Things had just gotten quieter between us.

Still, a few days a week, on my drive to work, I find myself analyzing the past few interactions we’d had, searching for a reason why things between us, just felt off. Finally, it struck me like a pile of bricks! All this time, she’s been telling me quite clearly what the problem is: She misses me! 

At first, I feel defensive. I’m not doing anything wrong. I’m working. I’m securing our home, our futures. I feel angry. She tells me that she understands that my schedule is just crazy right now, and she knows it isn’t personal. I catch a glimpse of myself in my office mirror that day, and I’m not happy with what I see. I look tired. I’m over caffeinated. I’m not eating healthy when I even bother to eat at all. I still considered lunch “The Productivity Thief,” a joke I have with my colleagues.

But today, I stare right into that mirror and I recognize the look on my face: It’s the look of a man heading for a burn-out. I’d seen it before in my colleagues. I speak to my mentor, and he tells me to go home early that very day and notice any differences. And by“early”, I mean “on time”.”

That night, I walk through the door at 5:30 pm, and I will never forget my wife’s face. She is shocked at first, and then the shock gives way to a beaming smile. “There’s that sparkle!” I think it myself. As I watch her cross the room to greet me, I catch another glance of myself in our entryway mirror and this guy is waaaay different from the guy earlier this morning. He is grinning ear to ear.

The next morning, we laugh over breakfast, and we hold each other for a few minutes before I leave for work. All day long, I feel like I can take on the world! At the end of the workday, I can’t wait to get home.?I’d been so preoccupied with work, I hadn’t realized that I had lost my verve, my enthusiasm. And it was because I missed her too. I missed my wife!

Many couples experience strain from demanding work schedules, and it often devolves into blame and resentments. From my own experience, I learned that it’s a matter of priorities.

Dwight D. Eisenhower once said, “What is important is seldom urgent, and what is urgent is seldom important.”

Work often seems urgent, but my relationship with my wife is important. Today, I have three children to get home to at the end of the workday. I can’t always be on time, but it’s always a priority in my mind. The smiles on their faces when I get home from work is the same smile I take to work with me the next morning. It’s the same smile that motivates my team to give their best effort, and it becomes the smile on their faces as well. And it’s even the same smile that closes those big deals and opens the most exciting doors.

Even Maximal Achiever, and Entrepreneur Extraordinaire, Zig Ziglar says “Be helpful. When you see a person without a smile, give them yours.”

The quality of our relationships with our loved ones, our team members, and our community, feeds our power at its source.

We are human beings. We are neurologically hardwired to live longer when we feel connected to one another. Connection is a pharmacy! I often remind myself of this old African Proverb “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”

Ever hear the saying: “Fake it ‘til you make it?”

There is actual science behind this funny little saying. Now, we know that just activating the smile muscles in our face, can induce feelings of being at ease, even in the midst of the storm. With this in mind, scientists did a study of two groups, Group one was told to hold a pen in their teeth, which produces an expression somewhat like a smile. Group two held a pen between their lips, which is an expression similar to a frown. And guess what? Group one, the group that sat there with a pen in their teeth, were ALL consistently happier at the end of the experiment than the test group with the pen in their lips. Go ahead and try it! It’s truly amazing that holding your face in a smile-like position will lead to a significant biochemical shift in well-being!

Now, the moral of this story is that from now on, you should walk around all day with a pen in between your teeth. Just kidding. That would be weird. But, now that we know feelings follow behaviors, we can actively realize how important little things can add up to be. Stand up tall. Act the way you would act if you were feeling great, even when you aren’t feeling so great. You WILL find that your feelings will follow your behavior.

How do you get a mouse to smile? Say Cheese!

Smile more today, Maximal Achievers! This all-around boost is available to you every day at no cost whatsoever! And what you stand to gain, can be beyond your greatest expectations. Take advantage of your own power to create happiness.

It’s kinda supernatural to feel how quickly your whole mood can enliven, and elevate when you shift from serious facial expressions to a simple self-assured smile. Your family will smile with you, your team will smile with you, and sometimes you will feel like the whole world is smiling with you.

Thank you so much for joining me today! Leading a Maximal Life means leading a happy life. Smile, and then simply stand back in awe of your own ability to create happiness for yourself and everyone around you.

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