“Let a smile be your umbrella.” I do not know where that saying came from, but I have heard it many times in my long life, often from people encouraging me to shake off the after effects of one of the frequent disasters in my life.
You know something? It works. It’s hard to keep feeling bad when you’re smiling. In fact, it’s nearly impossible. A smile, according to some, has special powers. Smiles can calm fears, insecurities, hurts, and anxieties, and not just in the person who is feeling those negative emotions. Have you ever watched a mother soothing a child who has fallen and hurt himself? She smiles, and if she can get that child to smile, the crying stops.
But, a smile is more than a way of easing pain.
A smile can be a potent weapon to deploy against people. There’s even an old saying from an unknown source that goes, “A smile is a powerful weapon, you can even break ice with it.” A smile, I’ve found, is also a great tool (weapon) for public speakers as a way to gain control over an audience. A mentor of mine, who also happened to be a fantastic public speaker, once told me that if you can get your audience to smile or laugh you’ll have them eating out of the palm of your hand. That’s not just a cliché, either; it works. I’ve tried it successfully on a number of occasions.
But the aforementioned uses of smiling still put smiles in the category of useful tools, like smiling when you meet a stranger as a sign of peace or smiling to those you work with or who are serving you as a sign that you see them as a fellow human being. Those are all positive things.
When I talk about using a smile as a weapon, I mean as something with which you vanquish your opponents.
Let me give you an example.
Once, many years ago, a person who as I do with all the people I mention in these columns I will not name, was harassing me over something or other and really getting on my nerves. This particular individual was trying to goad me into reacting violently—verbally, not physically—in order to prove a point he had made that I was an emotionally unstable person who should not be given a particular job that we were both competing for.
Fortunately for me, I recognized what my ‘friend’ was doing and decided not to take the bait. It was still very annoying, though, and I wanted desperately to disengage. I couldn’t just turn and walk away because that would be seen as an emotional response, and this pest would have seized on it immediately. As I stood there, enduring his taunts, I remembered something someone said to me once: ‘when people are bothering you, smile at them. It will drive them crazy trying to figure out what’s on your mind.’ So, I did. I just looked at this individual and smiled.
Stopped him in his tracks. He stopped hectoring me and looked puzzled for a few seconds. Then, he asked me, “What’s so funny?” “Nothing,” I replied, still smiling. “Why are you smiling?” he asked. I merely shrugged. But I kept that loopy smile on my face.
His face turned red. He sputtered. He called me loony. But I could tell he was getting extremely nervous. It was then that I realized that he had no idea what I was thinking, or what I might do, and he couldn’t complain to our boss about it. Imagine going to the boss and saying ‘Boss, Charlie’s smiling at me.” He would’ve sounded like my six-year-old grandson who, when angry at his sisters about something goes to his mother and whines, ‘Make them stop looking at me.”
That ‘friend’ failed to ace me out of the job, but there was an even bigger payoff of my little stratagem. From that day on, whenever I sensed he was about to pull one of his little shenanigans, I would smile, he would get a spooked look on his face and remember that there was something he had to do someplace else, far from me.
It caused me to coin a new saying: ‘smile, and the world will leave you alone.’ – NWI
