Eye contact without a slower smile is like a crackle without a pop. It has no effect at all. You can’t just flash your teeth at someone and think you’re done.
How your smile feels from inside your cheeks can be very different from the smile other people see. You feel like it’s as wide as a watermelon. But to recipients it can look like a dill pickle.
The slow-motion phenomenon comes into play here, too. You think you’re smiling interminably long. But in actuality, it can be so quick that they’ll miss it if they blink.
Maybe you’ve become successful at giving longer smiles to people. However, you feel as though your smiles are forced and unnatural. I have received many e-mails from people who said they’d tried to smile but didn’t get much response from people. Could they be suffering from what I now call “Stephen’s Syndrome”? He wrote…
I didn’t date very much, but I had some good friends in college. When I moved to Boston for my first job, I was lonely and wanted to meet some women. I’d go to bars and clubs and smile at some attractive women, but they’d never smile back. So I never dated much there, either.
Then I got transferred to Los Angeles. I love California. It’s much more friendly than Boston for me. Women actually ask me to dance with them. I started going regularly to a club in Long Beach. One night, a woman I was dancing with asked me what I always looked so sad about. I was surprised and asked her if I looked sad. She said she’d been watching me for several weeks at the club and I always looked sad. I remembered that several other people had told me that over the years, too. I decided to try to look happier, because maybe I looked sad even when I wasn’t.
—Stephen S., Los Angeles, California
I never met Stephen, but it sounds as though he thought he was smiling. However, women didn’t see it that way.
To remedy the situation, all you need is a well-lit mirror, say the bathroom mirror. A sense of humor definitely helps, too. Lock the bathroom door lest your family see you grimacing like a monkey on a banana boat. Now, look at yourself and smile big. Smile small. Smile sexy. Smile sad. Smile sarcastic. Smile salacious. Smile scared.
Then top it off with a pretentious smile and a phony smile. Why? You need to know how even the nasty ones feel from the inside. That way you don’t run the risk of flashing one of those creepy smiles when you mean it to be friendly.
Once again, practice from simplest to scariest, just like with your eye contact. Start smiling at your cat, your dog, your goldfish, and babies. As with eye contact, you can then jump to smiling at that sweet little elderly lady on the bus or the old codger who lives down the street. Not only are these “beginner smiles” crucial in your antishyness campaign, but they give joy to everyone you smile at.
Realize that inside every wrinkled old lady lurks a beautiful young girl. Inside every tattered old man lives a college football star. When you smile at them, they feel like you’re smiling at their inner selves. It’s a win-win situation.
In fact, make a game of it. Count the number of smiles you are able to give in a day. Then try to top your quota the next day.
Now it’s time to make your smile a “reality show”—smiling at people you know. First smile at people you don’t find threatening, like the intern who works at your company. Work your way up to those who intimidate you slightly, say a colleague at work or a nice-looking person whom you’re not personally attracted to. Then your supervisor. Then your supervisor’s supervisor. You get the idea. Keep smiling at scarier and scarier people.