SMILES IN THE BRAIN
I begin most of my lectures by asking the audience to break up into pairs. Then I say something like the following:
Over the course of your life, you have excelled in part because of your impressive self-discipline. You have used it to study so you could pass the classes you needed to, apply to the schools and jobs you needed to, and be successful enough that you are in this room to hear this lecture today. I want you to take all of that self-discipline you´ve been cultivating for the past couple decades to do the following. For the next seven seconds, no matter what your partner says or does, I want you to show absolutely no emotional reaction. Do not get angry, sad, or frustrated, and do not smile or laugh. Go completely blank. Show no emotion, no matter what.
I then ask each Person #2 to simply look their partner in the eyes and smile at them genuinely. I have done this experiment hundreds of times in corporate settings across the world, with everyone from nervous newbies to cantankerous lifers. The result is always the same. Virtually no one can refrain from returning their partner´s smile, and most break into laughter almost immediately. It doesn´t matter if I do this experiment during a week of massive layoffs or on a day when the stock market has plunged 600 points, I still see the same involuntary explosion of smiles. Even in parts of the world where smiling is less of a social norm, 80 to 85 percent of the participants cannot stop themselves from smiling.
If you think about this, it´s really pretty incredible. After all, if these people have the self-discipline and focus to work 10- to 16-hour days, lead global teams, and manage multimillion dollar projects, surely they can handle a task as simple as controlling their facial expression for mere seven seconds, right? But the fact is, they can´t. Because something is going on in their brains that they aren´t even consciously aware of. This mysterious force is the foundation of the ripple effect.
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