No matter what looms ahead, if you can eat today, enjoy today, mix good cheer with friends today enjoy it and bless God for it.

— Henry Ward Beecher

After my post on being cheerful, a friend of mine decided that being cheerful was a good idea.  For a couple of days, she bopped along and then, on the third day she said, “I don’t know what’s wrong – I’m losing steam on being cheerful.”  When I asked how she was putting her new cheerfulness into practice she told me that she kept telling herself to think happy thoughts.

On the surface, thinking happy thoughts seemed like a good idea.  The problem is that if she were already feeling happy, she’d probably be acting cheerful naturally.

This left me in a bit of a quandary.  How do you choose to be cheerful?

Making the Right Impression

The definitions of cheerful are very similar to each other.

Merriam-Webster:

1. a : full of good spirits : merry <a cheerful host> b : ungrudging <cheerful obedience>
2. :conducive to cheer : likely to dispel gloom or worry <sunny cheerful room>

McMillan Dictionary:

1. behaving in a happy friendly way
2. making you feel happy because of being pleasant or enjoyable

Wordnet:

1. pleasantly (even unrealistically) optimistic
2. being full of or promoting cheer; having or showing good spirits

Cheerful is a description.  It’s all about behavior.  What behaviors make us appear cheerful?

• Smiling
• Looking the other person directly in the eye
• Moving and speaking with energy

In other words, giving the impression that we don’t have a trouble in the world.

Bluffing Ain’t Just for Poker

Throughout our lives, we pretend.  In job interviews we pretend that we can do whatever our potential employer throws at us.  In poker, we pretend that our hand is good or bad depending on what works in our favor.  When we wanted to stay home from school, we pretended we were really, really sick.  Each of these is a form of bluffing.  We’re representing ourselves differently than we really are.

In the self-help industry it’s called “fake it ’till you make it.”  It’s the process of putting our best face forward.  And when it comes to being cheerful, it’s a matter of adopting the behaviors that convey cheerful.  And most of the time, when we convey cheerful, we receive cheerful in return.

Back when I first joined Corporate America, I attended a year of training.  Superior training was part of the reason I joined this particular company.  The cost of this training was being away from home for extended periods of time.  I’ve always been a home body and I really didn’t want to be away for a month at a time.  The longer my classmates and I were away from home, the louder we’d whine.  By the end of one class, my advisor took me aside and explained to me that while my close friends might care that I was homesick, none of my business associates really wanted to hear about my troubles.  He didn’t say this to be mean.  He was trying to help.

I decided that he was probably right and I changed my approach.  Instead of competing for the “poor me” award, I became cheerful and upbeat.  The change was amazing.  Almost immediately, I found that people smiled at me.  They greeted me and asked me how I was.  It not only changed how people saw me, it changed how I saw other people.  When people treat you as if they like you, it becomes reinforcing.  You like them because they like you and vice versa.  Soon, I was actually feeling better.

This is what I would recommend to my friend who was losing steam:  put a smile on your face; move with energy; look people in the eye; and treat them as if you like them.  You soon will.