I’m at the airport again, and I’m people watching, as I often do. Among the people traveling alone, see tense faces, frustrated faces, sleepy faces and occasionally someone who looks amused. It seems that when people are concentrating on getting somewhere, their contenace reflects their mood. And more interestingly, if they simply sport a blank face, I seem to interpolate a personality.

Perhaps it’s just me, but my first reaction when I see a particularly downward sloping face is, “That person must be unpleasant to have over for Thanksgiving.” I assume a dour personality, and that’s a shame. Frequently my assumptions have been proven wrong when a
scowling person breaks into an infectious smile and ends up becoming a delightful friend.

Before you stop reading this post because it has nothing to do with success in business, let me link my reflections on expressions to happiness in life. Many years ago I read a study that showed that women in the 1950s who smiled in their yearbook pictures were more likely to have judged their lives as happy. And more recent study showed that the bigger the smile in an adult’s schoolage photo, the less likely that the person had ended a marriage in divorce.

So this tells me that perhaps my assuptions about people based on an unsmiling face may be true. Perhaps they’re harder to get along with, or maybe we assume they’re harder to get along with and don’t like to hang out with them as much.

Either way, this revelation has to have an effect on our business lives. People like to do business with people they like, and if your facial expression makes you less likeable, for whatever reason, perhaps you won’t get ahead like a more pleasant colleague.

Now I wonder how my theory relates to the differences between men and women in business. I’ve written before, as have many, about the fact that aggressive, even unpleasant men in the workplace can get things done and be perceived as leaders, while aggressive women are frequently considered bitchy. Not sure if the facial expression theory works there.

But I’d rather be pleasant than aggressive, and I’d rather wear a smile than a frown. And I’d like people to think I’d be a pleasing addition to a Thanksgiving meal. So I try to consciously relax my face and am ready with a smile in an airport and everywhere else. It’s tougher than I want it to be, and I often catch myself with a downturned mouth. Perhaps it’ll be permanently natural one day.

Look in the mirror one day when you’re just out and about. Would you invite you to Thanksgiving dinner?

It’s Saturday afternoon, and I’m sitting here trying to come up with, for lack of a better word, a bribe. I want to create a cool little freebie that I can offer as an incentive for people (umm — like you guys) to do all the wonderful things that help businesses in today’s world stay solvent:

• Enjoy our blog posts
• Tell your friends about us
• Like our Facebook pages
• Follow us on Twitter
• And, of course, buy our products

Some of you guys have been loyal fans since I started this blog in 2007, and based on other uber-supportive comments you’ve made, I imagine you might say, “Oh, Beth — don’t be silly — just stay sincere and honest and people will follow you.”

In all actuality, that’s the technique that has worked for me so far. But there are a lot of sincere and honest people out there,  creating fabulous products that people will love. The problem is no one knows about us yet, and we have to compete with all the other people with fabulous products for our potential audience’s attention. Thus we have to rely on your word of mouth and a little bit of luck to hope we catch on.

So, I’m coming up with cool freebies and incentives that will perhaps catch your collective eye. It’s a model I understand more than most, since many of the free tools that I discover are actually freebie versions of software and apps that their makers hope you will buy. I’m thinking of the following:

• If you become a fan on the new Facebook page, you get electronic version of a quick reference guide of about 75 of my favorite tools.
• If you pre-order the book on Amazon.com, you get a printed booklet of my editor’s top 10 picks OR a 15-minute one-to-one consultation to help you discover new tools that you need.

Now for your opinion… what do you think about all the techniques companies do to bribe you to pay attention to them? What works? At which techniques do you roll your eyes?

Butterflies in the stomach. My publisher is sending out what they call the Mondo Press Kits with advance review copies of my book, cupcake magnets and marketing material to about 60 people today, including THE Seth Godin, who not only has stopped by this blog a couple of times but who also contributed to the book and is generally an awesome, authentic guy.

It’s amazing that bestselling authors like Seth Godin, Chris Brogan and Dan Pink plus 57 more people will soon hold my work in their hands, and more amazing that they even agreed to review it.

But it’s that word that’s killing me: review. They are going to judge the book by its cover, its contents, its layout — everything. They’re going to catch typos (we spelled “charitable” wrong on Seth Godin’s page, and he caught it in the screenshot. Horrors!), examine my headshot (why is she with a piggy bank and a cupcake?), question my choice of tools…. whatever. Or they may flip through in a second, find it uninteresting and ignore it.

For whatever reason, I chose two professions with major exposure… author and speaker. An author prints thousands of copies of his heart and soul and spreads it around the world, completely open to criticism and perhaps praise. And a speaker puts herself on display in front of dozens or hundreds or thousands, has the job of entertaining people for an hour or so, then frequently gets immediate feedback in the form of evaluations about how she did. In both cases, there’s no shrinking away from how people feel about you. You’re putting yourself out there for them to tell you.

When I worked at McDonald’s in high school, the only person who really criticized your work was your manager during a quarterly review. I remember one time they said I was really good with the French fry machine but my uniform was too dingy so I wouldn’t get the full 15-cent raise I was due. I went home crying, and I started drycleaning my polyester uniform once every two weeks to keep it more spiffy. I ended up winning an award for my French fry prowess, but I still worried about the uniform.

After a presentation when I get my evaluations, I frequently read comments like, “Bring Beth back!” and “Most practical session I’ve been to in years!” But there’s always someone who writes something like, “Nice chick, but she talks about her ex-boyfriends too much” or “Session wasn’t what I expected.” And instead of focusing on the good stuff, I read and re-read the bad — obsess over them, even.

So now the books are out of my hands, and I’m inviting true scrutiny. There’s a chance that I won’t get unending praise from all 60 people. But perhaps a few people may really like the book, and a couple of people won’t. I have to remember to look at the big picture and not get hung up on a couple of bad reviews. And I also have to remember that Seth and Brian and Dan and the other 57 people are not judging me… they’re judging a book. And I am much more than this one book.

Yesterday was my monthly hair appointment, and my stylist says, “So, how did that Big Thing you were worried about turn out?” My mind started jumping about… What Big Thing was on my mind last month? A speaking gig? The book? A charity event?

I couldn’t for the life of me remember what I had been stressed about the last time I sat in her chair, in part because I’m worried about a whole host of other upcoming Things this month. There’s the book launch, the logo change, the potential speaking gigs I need to nail down.

Oh, and then there’s this little change I’ve made lately — I’m officially shutting down my copywriting biz and formally making the switch to being an author/speaker. Oh yeah. This is a Big Thing.*

When my stylist asked me about the Big Thing, I had two revelations:

1. Whatever I had been stressed about had come and gone, and the sun was still rising in the mornings and setting in the evenings. If you’re like me, you tend to see a Big Thing as almost insurmountable. It will come and consume you, and when it looms, it’s giant and all encompassing and it’s all you think about. But when it passes, it is over, and you forget about it.
2. My business life is a roller coaster with one Big Thing after another. This is an exhausting way to live. I get bunched up about the enormity of upcoming events and tasks without stopping to breathe, without stopping to plan. What if I planned ahead a little more to see those Big Things coming then recognized the tasks that would make those Big Things less big? I’d probably sleep better, stress less and be more pleasant to be around.

People tend to think other people think like they do and process information in the same way. So, in my opinion, all you guys are living on the same roller coasters with Big Thing obsessions and post-event forgetfulness. But I bet that’s not true. How do you handle the changes in your professional life? Do you live from peak to peak or coast along on a straight road, understanding that the Big Things you pass will come and go? What wisdom can you pass along to those of us who are getting a little dizzy from the ups and downs?

*More on the new career: I have been wanting to launch the author/speaker stuff for a while, but making a living as a copywriter was eating up my work energy. So I took the leap by taking a part-time temporary job with The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society, which forces me to wind down my copywriting and let it go. When the part-time job ends, the book should be in full swing, and the transition should be complete. Mixed feelings. Tough transitions. And a few tears and sleepless nights. But change is good. Here’s the new site for the new career: AskBethZ.com.