This is the fifth post of a thirty-blog series devoted to examining Dale Carnegie’s 30 principles of How to Win Friends and Influence People. I will be writing these blogettes with the intention of educating and inspiring NarraSoft’s 60 employees in Manila with specific focus on our customers in the software development, mobile development and 3D/2D art outsourcing industries. I hope they will also be useful to other companies and individuals. Thank you very much for reading and please reach out with any comments, questions or ideas you may have. My email is phil@narrasoft.com. And thanks again!
1) Your smile is a harbinger of good will. It begins any human interaction on a positive note. If you expect others to be happy to see you, you must show you are happy to see them.
2) A smile can be disarming in tense situations. When approaching a difficult or adversarial conversation, a smile can disarm the other person. Most people find it difficult to return a smiling person’s visage with a scowl.
3) A smile can literally change the way you feel by improving your attitude and disposition. Psychologist and philosopher, William James put it this way…
“Action seems to follow feeling, but really action and feeling go together; and by regulating the action, which is under the more direct control of the will, we can indirectly regulate the feeling, which is not. Thus the sovereign voluntary path to cheerfulness, if our cheerfulness be lost, is to sit up cheerfully and to act and speak as if cheerfulness were already there…”
4) A smile can be seen, but a smile can also be heard in your voice. Call center companies all over the world pay training companies to teach this lesson to their agents.
5) A smile generally makes your face more attractive. There have been numerous scientific studies and surveys which show a person’s attractiveness increases with their smile and decreases with a frown. (The exception to this rule is that women find men who brood slightly more attractive than men who smile…oh well, nothing is 100%!)