As the song lyric from ‘Annie’ goes “You are never fully dressed without a smile.” Since I was a young girl, I have believed in the magic a smile can bring a person. Besides from instantly brightening a person’s day and changing any negative, unhappy feelings the person may be having, a smile is also one of the few things that can bring people together. The overall positivity this simple action can create inspired me to make an effort in making people smile at a very young age. When I was just three years old I would put on little homemade shows for my parents where I would dress up in different costumes and tell a bunch of horrible knock-knock jokes. Even if these shows were truly awful, each time I put one on my parents would smile and laugh encouraging me even more. I began to love the happiness that a smile or a laugh would elicit. From that time on, I swore I would grow up to be a comedian because then my job would consist of making people laugh and smile all the time.
However that didn’t end up happening. Instead, in my sophomore year of high school, as I was becoming less interested in being a comedian and more interested in being a psychologist, I came across a psychology fact that was particularly unsettling. The fact stated that for the average person it takes about seven positive thoughts to negate one negative thought. As a teenager, a time synonymous with self doubt and low self esteem, this troubled me. How was I supposed to reverse these negative thoughts about myself with seven positive thoughts when I found it troubling thinking positively to begin with? My train of thought quickly shifted to my friends and other people I knew. If they were experiencing the same situation as me then they too must find difficulty in positive thinking. This reignited within me the passion I had as a little girl in making people smile. I soon made it a personal goal of mine to help combat people’s own negativity by spreading positivity. I accomplished this by complimenting someone at least once a day. The compliment could be on anything: their hair, their makeup, their nails, a story they might have told, or a picture they drew, or even the way they might have said something. I found anything and everything to compliment a person on.
Years later, I still believe in the act of complimenting someone at least once a day because of the possible impact it might have. We never truly know what other people are going through in their personal lives and most of the time this is a result of our own doing. We often go throughout our day only worrying about ourselves, never anybody else. What I am going to do for dinner? Will I have time to meet with Jane next week? When is my next doctor’s appointment? To actually take the time out of our day to uplift someone else is rare. However, it shouldn’t be. If we begin displaying more kindness to one another through simple comments than our world will be a more loving place. Spreading positive thinking not only improves your own outlook on life, but also somebody else’s. In a time where the world seems more divided than ever, it is reassuring to be connected through a smile.