3 Secrets to Happiness: Secret #1 Smiling Part 1

Hi! I’m Stephanie McCannon. I help people all over the world to live happier, healthier and more meaningful lives. I’m going to share with you today in this little free video series the three most powerful tools used by the happiest, healthiest and most successful people on our planet. Talking about happiness, that’s what my client say they want more of. I’m a home and hospital teacher, my students say they want more happiness. I ask my parents what they want for their children and they want them to be happy, grow up to be happy.
Children say the same thing about parents; they just want their parents to be happy. So we all want to be happy. So how do we get happy? How does that happen? That’s what I want to talk to you today about and there are some very powerful tools that we can start using to increase our happiness, our joy, our satisfaction in life. So let’s start first with our little definition about happiness. What does happiness mean because it means different things to different people.

So a simple definition is feeling or showing pleasure and contentment. So we have feeling, and we have a display for somebody to see and witness that shows pleasure or contentment. I really do like the Merriam Webster dictionary definition because it uses one of my favorite buzzwords. So the Merriam Webster dictionary definition says, “enjoying or characterized by well-being and contentment.” I really love that word, well-being. That’s a great word, start using it in your everyday vocabulary, well-being.
So being a happy is first a feeling from within, and it’s displayed for other people to see, okay perfect. So what is the first sign of happiness? How can you tell if somebody is feeling joy or contentment? If you said a smile on their face, you would be correct. So this is our first tool that I want to share with you today. It’s actually smiling, I know it’s a little simple but there’s a lot of research and a lot of powerful feelings that come from smiling.
Mother Theresa said that “we shall never know all the good that a simple smile can do.”
That’s really great. So smiling really creates happiness.

Well, there are some very good studies that have been done. Let’s fall back to Charles Darwin, the father of evolution and all of those theories. He was the first one to actually begin doing studies on emotion.
Why is that important? Emotion is important because it affects our contentment and our happiness and our health and all of these other wonderful areas of our life. Happy people are healthy people and successful people, they live longer. They get lots of better stuff so happiness is a very important goal for everybody and smiling can produce that emotion of happiness.

Now, there’s been tons of research and case studies and our lives can testify to the effects of smiling and happiness. Smiling=happiness =healthy=long living. But why? What is it about a smile that frown turn upside down that is so compelling? Why is it so good? Well, smiling produces endorphins, it allows the release of serotonin in your body and those chemicals create good feelings, it alleviates our mood, it does a lot of good things for us. That’s produced by smiling. Smiling makes you instantly more attractive. You don’t have to lose 5 pounds, you don’t have to go and buy a new shirt, you just have to put a good smile on your face and you’re instantly attractive. It lowers blood pressure; it increases your resistance to illness. Smiling as a tool for creating happiness is very effective. Again, they’ve done a lot of research and studies on this.
Now, not just every smile will do. Not all smiles are created equal. According to research done by a very famous French neurologist, Gillaume Duchenne, we can use what we call an emotional social smile which a lot of us walk around doing. That’s not the smile that’s going to produce the release of endorphins and the serotonin and give you all those good feelings. The social smile is a little smirky smile; it’s just a little turn up at the corners of your mouth. That’s not going to cut it. You have to produce what I like to call a REAL DEAL SMILE. Now, Duchene, he was able to figure out that what produces those good feelings are the muscles that are engaged around your mouth and your eyes. So your the whole muscular of your face is involved in the real deal smile. So if you’re interested in some of the nitty gritty interesting things about the psychological facts of the smile, there’s a couple of other PhD doctors that have done really great research, Marty Frank and Paul Achman, they have some good research that you can check out.

But the end result of all the research is that smiling is the easiest, the cheapest thing that you can do to create a better life for yourself, instantly. So let’s put this first tool into practice.

The first thing that I want you to start doing is learning how to smile. Not all smiles are created equal so you have to get in front of the mirror and practice the real deal smile. You have to engage your mouth, and engage your eyes and if you need to close your eyes for a minute and think of something that you really like do it. For me, I close my eyes and I think of my little first born son or my husband or my girls. I can’t help but to smile, I love them and they make me feel good. I can feel my mouth and my eyes involved in that smile. I love my children, I love them and I can feel the engagement of my eyes in that smile.
Now I have just people passing on the streets and things like that and you just give them a hey-what’s-up-smile. That is not a good producing smile, that’s not the smile that all the psychologists are talking about, the doctors, Mother Theresa, your own mother that says smile it will make you feel better. It has to involve the muscular mouth and your eyes. So go in front of the mirror and do this for yourself so you can feel what it’s like and see what it’s like. Then I want you every time you see your reflection after you brush your teeth and while out you shopping and you see your reflection in the window, I want you to flash that good feeling smile.

What I’m trying to get my client to do is to have that smile on your face more throughout the day then you might be already doing. It will change your life, just by simply smiling. it will change your life and it’s one of the easiest thing that you can do. I tried to focus on my smiling face which can be your resting face. You can be smiling even when you’re working. I tried to smile when I’m washing the dishes, doing the laundry and definitely when I’m driving. Cause often when I focus on myself when I’m driving, I feel really tense and I started to notice that I’m very tensed so I smile and I immediately relax. Smiling relaxes your body. That is the biggest thing that I know for a fact that works is that smiling relaxes your body. So try to smile in front of the mirror and try to smile as you’re going throughout your day.
:)