The way I grew up, I learned to look serious and tough. So at some stage I had to learn to smile and also I had to learn to appreciate to see others smile. There was a time where I did not see many smiles if not those who were laughing to a joke I had made. Instead I was often rude to people. So instead of smiling, I made people cry!
At first I became aware about the importance of people smiling. I realized that when I see people smile, that is a reflection of the quality of my life, and theirs. Also I realised that all I had to do was to smile, and there was a response in like. So I became aware of the value of a good result, but also of my power to create the cause for that particular result.
So I started to cultivate those causes, for example by asking everyone “how are you today” with a smile on my face. And people started to smile. All I had to do was to create the cause, which was to show just a little care and to smile. Until to this day, this approach almost never fails to work in delivering the result of more smiles.
Awareness about the causes and results is the first step in progress with anything. Without awareness, improvement would be hard. With awareness we are able to remind ourselves to correct our actions as they happen, or at the very least right after they’ve happened. With commitment to improvement, the awareness becomes part of our everyday life.
This can only happen through our own deliberate action. Just like the wind has to blow first in order for me to feel it. The same way I have to create the causes for the results I’m looking for.
By choosing the coarsest aspects of our life first, we can easily identify what is happening now and what we would like to happen instead. This way we start to use our volition to everyones benefit.
Once we know what we want to happen, we have to know (at least roughly) how to measure the result. In this way there will be a kind of an anchor, something that gives us a little tug whenever we’re drifting away from where we want to be. Also this will give us the motivation we need in order to really change things.
In this way we seek gradual improvement, small changes here and there that appear consistently with our changed actions, and we start to see the interplay of cause and effect taking taking place. When I do this, that happens. When I do that, this happens. There is a tremendous motivation to be found in this kind of realisation about our own ability to change things.
As part of this natural process, we learn to deal with our setbacks in a different way. We no longer see failures as more than part of success. Actually we will be better off learning a new word to replace “failure” all together. For as long as we are willing to learn, there is no such thing as failure.
It takes a long journey to know the horse’s strength and many years to learn the man’s heart.
— Chinese Proverb