Is this one thing the key to skyrocketing your business’s success?

6-minute read

Did you know that the average child smiles more than 300 times a day while the average adult only manages to crack a grin 20 times?

What on earth has this bit of trivia got to do with affordable domains, powerful webhosting or your business you might ask.

Well, the answer is: more than you think.

Here’s why:

First things first: the benefits of smiling

You’d be hard pushed to find a single person in the world who doesn’t enjoy smiling. It’s an expression that’s understood all around the world, from the offices of London to the jungles of Sarawak where the remote Penan people live.

Science shows that Smiling can reduce stress. An experiment carried out by the University of Kansas found that people who smiled while multi-tasking had lower heart rates – and therefore lower stress levels – throughout the completion of their tasks than those who did not smile.

The same set of smilers reported feeling less stressed when they dipped their hands in ice cold water than the non-smilers.

Other studies have shown that smiling at others can have positive consequences, too. Neuroscientist Marco Iacoboni suggests that when you see another person smiling, the sight activates mirror neurons in your own brain.

In a nutshell, what this means is that you experience the smile just the same way as the person who smiled at you.

Even fake smiling has been shown to be good for people.

Research has shown that simply mimicking the muscle contortion involved in a genuine smile – i.e. turning up the corners of your mouth and squeezing the edges of your eyes – can spur a chemical reaction in your brain that’s the same as when you smile for real.

That’s to say, chemicals like dopamine and serotonin are released, regardless of whether you meant the smile or not.

Back to the point – what has all this got to do with business success?

If you read our recent blog on ‘6 TED talks every entrepreneur should watch’ you’d have seen that ‘The happy secret to better work’ made the cut of recommended watching material.

Presented by happiness researcher Shawn Achor, the talk begins by looking at a belief that’s commonly held across the western world – that happiness results from success.

In his talk, Achor suggests that the truth is actually the other way around – that success results from happiness i.e. having a positive mindset. He refers to this as The Happiness Advantage.

Of course, he backs his position up with research. He cites research that suggests that brains set to positive are 31 per cent more productive than neutral, negative or stressed brains. He mentions studies that show that brains set to a positive state are 37 per cent better at sales. He also says positive doctors are 19 per cent faster and more accurate at coming up with the correct diagnosis than negative or stressed ones.

In his TED Talk, Achor gives five tips for how people can make their mindset more positive.

These are:

Adopting the three gratitudes:Research by Emmons and McCullogh found that undergraduate students who made a list of three things they were grateful for at the end of each week had a heightened state of wellbeing than those who wrote a list of things that had hassled them or those who wrote a matter-of-fact list of events that they had been involved in.

Journaling: Psychologists Slatcher and Pennbaker found that writing about emotional experiences every day can improve the way people relate to others and make their communications with others more positive.

Exercise: You could write a dissertation on all the ways exercise has been shown to make people happier. Physical activity stimulates the production of endorphins, serotonin and dopamine, which are all classed colloquially as ‘happy hormones’.

Meditation: In 2008, the employees at a software company in Detroit were split in half. The first half were shown how to meditate and requested to do so five times a week for 15 to 20 minutes. The other half went on with their lives as normal. After seven weeks, the first half were recording that they were experiencing more positive emotions every day, which was further linked by the researchers to decreased symptoms of illness and the sense amongst participants that they had a bigger purpose in life.

Random acts of kindness: In 2004 a Stanford psychology professor called Sonja Lyubomirsky found that asking people to commit five random acts of kindness a day had the power to increase that person’s levels of positive emotions.

But what do you do if you haven’t got time for all these things?

The answer is the point of this entire blog post.

You should fake it until you make it and smile.

Feeling grinchy?

Don’t feel like smiling even if it’s a fake one?

Here’s a roundup of other factors that are often referred to as the ‘one thing’ you need to succeed in business…

Clarity: In a 2016 article entitled ‘The one thing your business must have to be successful’, journalist Parker Nash wrote:

“When confusion is rampant, the effects are deadly. Customers don’t listen, prospective buyers go to your competition, teams do duplicative work, and employees do the wrong work. “The answer to all your problems is clarity.

“If you had a clear message, customers would listen and pay attention. With a clear message, customers come calling.”

Patience: The 2016 Inc. article titled ‘The 1 Thing You Need to Succeed (Anywhere, Anytime)’ suggested that patience was the key to business success.

It read: “Patience--at the end of every day--is the most important quality a person could have, no matter which industry, office, or work force. Whether you're in the process of searching for jobs or simply figuring out how to be inspired by a position you've held for 30 years, patients will be what gets you through it.”

Show up every day for two years: According to business coach SeanMcCabe, this is the thing that’ll make you succeed in business.

Sean writes: “That’s the golden answer, right there. It will make you money, it will build an audience, it will solve your problems, it will develop tenacity.”

Our conclusion?

We’d rather smile our way to success.