English: Robert Plutchik’s Wheel of Emotions (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
“You don’t get what you want by doing what you want,” I told her. This might be a bit advanced for a six-year-old. This is the hand my kids were dealt. A dad who speaks in platitudes. A dad who tries to program his kids with a way of thinking that makes their life easier in the long run by doing what’s hard in the short run.
Sometimes I have to listen to my own advice. I wrote about what I learned about smiling last week. This weekend, I learned I need to persist when I don’t feel like it. I woke up Saturday. I was tired. My mood was cloudy, like the late March sky.
Putting a smile on takes effort. It takes emotional courage. I’ve been wearing the same scowl for at least 30 years. Trying on the smile is awkward. People aren’t used to seeing it. I mess it up. It looks or feels forced. Sometimes it turns into a “turd sniffing face” — The one where you crinkle your nose when you smell something that doesn’t smell right. Other times it turns into a terse smirk. Other times, yet, it can yield a strange contortion that shows an unknowable emotion. No matter what, it takes effort and attention. Cheeks get tired. Self-consciousness ebbs and flows.
There’s feedback telling me how unnatural this experiment is:
Co-worker walking up while I’m working: “Why are your lips pursed?”
Me: “I’m smiling.”
Co-worker: “That’s not smiling. Smile with your eyes. You look like a psychopath.”
Me: “—- you!”
There’s feedback from people who know about the smile experiment. The more who know, the more who let you know when you’re messing up. This week, my wife let me know I wasn’t smiling when we’re having “conversation”. A co-worker asked if everything was ok. She said I seemed angry. I appreciate the feedback. It’s how I get better. It’s how I build the stamina to keep smiling.
It’s harder when the mood isn’t there. The more I need to fake it, the harder it is to make it. The harder it is to make it, the more important it is to fake it.
“Fake it ’til you make it” leads to a question of authenticity. I ordered a hypnosis program when I was in college, “Happiness for Life.” I asked my mom before ordering, “What if I become one of those annoying, happy people who I can’t stand.” She just responded with a, “Really!?” She said implicitly, “you’ll be happy, so you won’t care”.
I authentically choose to shape my mind and mood to be more joyful, patient, peaceful, gracious, kind and loving. It means calling these things into my life even when I want to dwell in a short-lived, ephemeral and situationally based feeling.
I choose eternal emotions of character over fleeting feelings of a moment. This means asserting myself to shape my mind and my experiences. This means trusting that my faithful, repetitive calls will produce the fruit of their repeatedly sown seeds.
My intent is as real as my moment to moment feeling. I decide my intent. I choose and persist it. My feeling can change at any moment. They are informed by circumstances – sleep, diet, weather, people outside of my control. One is a thermostat. One is a thermometer. Both are real. One actively shapes your environment. The other passively reflects it.
Would you rather use your power to shape your environment or powerlessly reflect what it is?
I trust that my experiment will bear fruit within a season just like when seeds are sown and their garden is cultivated. The fruit will tell me whether I planted something authentic and real.
I’m choosing power. Even when I don’t feel like it.
