Noticing When U are Happy

One or two people said,”Great!” I thought at the time how unusual that was. One woman was happy because she had just had her first grandchild. She was beaming and the whole world could share in her joy. Another one was just happy for no particular reason that she would name. I thought it odd because it was so atypical.

I think it’s great when we can say we’re happy and that we can acknowledge it. Sometimes I think people don’t want to say they are happy because not everyone at work is. Maybe someone has a health problem. Maybe it is that someone is dealing with a relationship problem at home. When we work with a lot of people, there are so many stories and inevitably some of those stories are sad, tragic or terribly unfair. It is part of our enviroment at work.

I also see that on the flip side, there are a lot of great stories. People are in love, they’re having children, getting a new puppy, hearing good news from old friends. Maybe we don’t hear these stories enough. Maybe we should celebrate the good news more often.

Maybe even if we don’t share it with our co-workers, we should acknowledge to ourselves and our friends when we feel things are going well. Maybe it’s a big project that you have finished and you don’t have to worry about it anymore. Maybe it’s you can exercise longer than you could before, or even touch your toes. Maybe it’s you’re just feeling better about everything including work.

Notice when you’re happy, it might mean that you can look back in your journal in two or three months and see that a) you were happy and b) what you were doing that might have contributed it that euphoria.

That way if in July or November or even next May, if you’re in a bad place, thinking everything stinks, you’ll be able to go to your journal, remember writing about these good feelings you’re feeling and what you’re involved in now and go about re-creating it to see if you can recapture that great feeling.

A by-product might also be more esprit de corps at work. More people being happy can help elevate the morale of everyone.

Good Luck and remember ’smile’. It confuses people as to what you’re really thinking and it actually makes some of the people looking at you smile back.

Margaret Greenberg and Senia Maymin, in Manage Your Team’s Energy, Not Just the Work in Positive Psychology News Daily, write that “human beings are hard-wired to mimic the facial expressions and moods of those we come in contact with. Sigal Barsade, associate management professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, claims we can unconsciously “catch” both good and bad moods. And you can “catch” these emotions in a matter of milliseconds according to Elaine Hatfield, psychology professor at the University of Hawaii and co-author of Emotional Contagion.

Researchers at Uppsala University in Sweden showed people pictures of both happy and angry faces for a fraction of a second and observed how people reacted. When participants looked at pictures of happy faces, their own facial expressions mirrored the picture – they responded with a smile. Similarly when participants viewed pictures of angry faces, they responded with a frown.”

So smile and spread that virally, who knows you could start a pandemic of good will. Wouldn’t that be something?