Is smiling in your job description?
When we smile our mood improves (try it). But some of us are required to fake smiles all day. Psychologists call this ‘emotional labour’ – manipulating our feelings in order to fulfil the emotional requirements of a role.
Some jobs require us to be nicer than might feel natural, especially customer-facing ones: think sales, food servers, flight attendants, hospitality staff, help-desk, support workers. All smiling to survive.
Some jobs require us to be tougher sometimes: barristers, magistrates, bailiffs, fraud investigators, police officers, parking attendants, military, social workers, managers and parents too.
There is a difference between emotional labour like this and emotion work, although many of us do both. Emotion work is the unpaid tasks that maintain relationships, like remembering birthdays, supporting others, arranging events, apologising first, and generally keeping the show on the road at home or work. This also takes its toll, particularly when unappreciated.
Of course everyone should learn to be emotionally intelligent and regulate their emotions appropriately. These soft skills are often hardest to learn. But struggling with daily emotional labour, feeling you can never be yourself, is unhealthy. It causes fatigue and mental health issues and has been cited as a cause of burnout.
Think more rationally and look for a win-win
The good news is that emotional labour becomes much less draining when we train our thinking to match our desired emotional state. This is called deep acting.
Surface actors fake a grin but still think negative thoughts. Deep actors train themselves to think more rationally and helpfully, which makes that smile much easier. They look for a win-win to keep everyone happy, but realise they can’t please everyone. They know they can’t control other people’s behaviour but they can control their own response. They attempt to achieve a positive outcome for all whilst remembering that this is just work and that their entire self-esteem doesn’t hinge on a customer or colleague’s behaviour.
The Help Desk worker coping with an obnoxious customer can visualise what they will do when their shift ends, or store this up as a good case study for their Team Leader interview, or think how lucky they are not to live with someone like this. Their thoughts help them to stay professional and seek resolution.
The colleague who doesn’t think flexibly like this is more likely to feel drained, cynical and powerless. Their boundaries are weaker so their work dramas will overspill into their personal life and cause stress. Their smile is fading fast.
Not everyone in a service role might feel naturally cut out for this type of work, but training them to adopt this problem-solving, ‘I’ll be as nice as I can, but I can’t please everyone’ rational attitude will help them to roll with the punches. ‘It’s not nice being shouted at, but slowing down my breathing helps me to stay calm and avoid unnecessary conflict.’
Healthy attitudes like this start at the top. Everyone has to have professionally boundaries and an appropriate attitude. If managers don’t, then we can smell the insincerity of that faked smile a mile off.