Vivian Giang

STOP SMILING: It Won’t Help You With Your Career

Posted February 18th, 2015 @ 12:56pm in #smile genderissues #career

Everywhere women go, men tell us to “smile.” Here’s a piece of advice: Stop.

First, you’ve done nothing to make me smile (telling me to do so certainly won’t help) and second, I don’t want to smile — even if every study in the world tells me I’ll be a lot happier if I was just, well, happier.

Research tells us smiling improves our mood and also finds our brains so out of it, it can’t distinguish a fake smile from a real one, so we get the same benefits regardless. Research also tells us if we smile around others, they’ll likely think we’re likeable, courteous, and competent, meaning you’re on your way to getting a promotion. Apparently, it’s also nearly impossible to frown at someone if they’re smiling at you so give everyone a fake smile and you’ll likely get a bunch of fake ones back.

If there are so many arguments for smiling and being happier, what’s the argument against it? I’m naturally a pessimist and having some form of anxiety works for me. Happiness while working doesn’t get me moving. In fact, it makes me want to stop working and head to happy hour.

I’m not the only one who feels this way.

Wharton professor Adam Grant wrote about the positive power of negative thinking in a LinkedIn post, arguing that forcing yourself to think positively if you’re naturally a pessimist might just end up hurting your career. Grant cites a series of studies where a couple of really smart psychologists concluded that “positive mood impairs the performance of defensive pessimists.” Here’s why: Optimists get their drive from the high expectations they set for themselves, which leads to confidence. Pessimists, on the other hand, get their fuel from the low expectations they set for themselves. The anxiety and negativity that swarms their thinking pushes these “glass half empty” people to get their shit done. The researchers found that both pessimists and optimists performed at the same level when it comes to their work, but forcing a pessimists to think positively — and vice versa — just doesn’t fit and their work suffers.

So the next time you see a woman charging down the street with purpose and no smile, leave her alone. Her career is about to really take off.