by Hank Trisler
Jennifer, who teaches my "gentle" yoga class, recently returned from a month's excursion to India. Naturally, she was eager to teach us all she'd learned. After a half-hour of her forcibly dismembering us, I asked her what the Hindi word for "gentle" was.
She admitted she didn't know, which I allowed was all too obvious. Several of us had a little chortle and we went on to complete an hour-and-a-quarter of medieval torture.
After the class, a stern faced gentleman--unknown to me--strode up to me and told me that yoga was a meditative process and that comments like mine were not appropriate.
Well now, I'm not real accustomed to people telling me what is or is not appropriate and I don't wish to become so accustomed. I told him I was thankful to him for helping me correct my behavior in such a way as to be more acceptable to him, but I really didn't mean it. I had the jaws.
Now I should be a big enough boy to laugh this sort of thing off, but I guess I'm not. Every time I'd see this guy, I'd get the jaws all over again and fix him with the notorious "stink eye." He would return in kind and we'd stalk around the room like a couple of dogs with their backs up. I don't know if he was enjoying this, but I wasn't. I hate to spend all my time angry. Especially in yoga class.
Paul Castain wrote in his excellent Sales Playbook blog about having a grim expression on his face as a natural state. Well, I must admit to the same shortcoming. I think I'm just looking serious, but folks have told me I look like I just ate a piece of excrement. I thought about how I look when I'm with people who like me. I smile. They smile. We smile. I wondered how I would look at the fellow in my yoga class if I thought he liked me and decided to smile at him.
Yesterday, I smiled at him and bade him a "GOOD MORNING." He looked like I slapped him. Obviously he hadn't experienced the same revelation that I had. I decided to further enlighten him by telling others of my discovery. I pointed him out to several people in the class and told them that he liked me. He must like me, or he wouldn't go out of his way to help me correct my behavior. They all agreed that he must like me and we smiled. He didn't, but I'm sure he'll come around in the fullness of time.
I meet people while walking my dog and usually just nod. I figured that's enough for people I don't even know. For the past couple of days, I've been doing something different with those I encounter. As I approach them, I think, "He/she likes me," and it makes me smile. Almost without exception, everyone has smiled back at me. It's kind of fun. They're smiling, I'm smiling, we're smiling. Sure beats hell out of having the crimson posterior all the time.
If you're in a sporting mood, try thinking that everyone you meet likes you and see if it makes you smile more. I'd sure be interested in getting some more experiences to add to my research.
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