by Sean Devlin, Front Rush
We are all adults here. We’ve been on this planet long enough to know that a sincere smile can go a long way. We know the qualities that a good smile can carry. It makes you happy, it relieves stress, it makes you feel good, happy etc. But it also induces these sensations and emotions on others…like when you are face to face with a recruit. Boom! Is your facial expression more often a smile or a frown? Are you embodying all that is positive? Are you showing the best that you’ve got? My assumption is that you are certainly trying to.
So what’s the technology spin? Well what about when you are on the phone? Is your smile coming through the phone or your cell? Are your emails smiling all the way to your recruit’s inbox? What about your text-messages (and I am not referring to smiley face emoticons*)?. *note on emoticons below.
Here’s the tech trick: put a mirror on your desk, yes a mirror. Before you send an email, before you pick up your phone, before anything else, look at yourself in the mirror and smile. That smile will carry through whatever technology you are conversing through. It’s weird, but smiles can defy physics and show up in your emails, and through your phone and every other medium. Face to face smiling is awesome but your mood shows up in so many other places. So give yourself every advantage. Invest in the low-tech and purchase a mirror. Smiling works. Smiling works everywhere!
*Emoticons (like smiley faces) are completely acceptable as a way to express emotion in text-messages. The counter argument is that they make the sender look “less intelligent” or “silly” or “informal”. Text-messages themselves are informal and if the person sending the message is intelligent and the content is not silly then the message will come across the way intended. The smiley face is a common form of expression that is understood and clarity is always good so I am down with it 🙂