I am a consultant. I help teams perform better. So I get to travel to a lot of places, work in a lot of organizations, and "start over" with each new gig. A fe

I am a consultant. I help teams perform better. So I get to travel to a lot of places, work in a lot of organizations, and "start over" with each new gig. A few years ago I thought I would try something different. I decided that no matter how I felt each day, I was going to smile and be as friendly as possible to everybody I met. At times, walking through the hallways of the new job, I felt like an idiot. But I didn't care. I just smiled and tried to be friendly. I know that many times I probably smiled and said hello to the same people twice -- as if I had never seen them that day. I know that at times I must have appeared simple-minded. It was a horrible feeling that first week. Then something strange happened. People started smiling back. I would be working off to the side of a large room, and folks would come over and say hello. People -- I had no idea what their names were or what their jobs were -- would ask me how I was doing. So I kept the experiment going. After a month, I had some really bad personal news and I know I came in to work very downtrodden. At this point, all of that "fake happiness" I had put in the bank came back to me. The anonymous people I had smiled at? They now made an effort to cheer me up. No effort was required on my part. If I came in upset, within a couple of hours of having other people smile at me, I felt like smiling back at everybody else. This went on for a few months. It was one of the most enjoyable jobs I've ever had, and when I left, about a dozen people came over and told me that I had done a great job and they would miss me. (I just did my normal job) Lesson? Smiles are very, very powerful social tools, even if they are forced. They cheer other people up, they cheer you up, and over time they provide some kind of weird social insurance that you can tap into when you're having a bad day. What blew my mind was that the fake part wasn't even important. Simply by trying you got all of the benefits.