The Ideas Community Wednesday email is six months old today and I’m celebrating! Thank you for being there, for reading and, in many cases, replying. It’s always a joy to hear from you and I am so very grateful for the ideas, experiences and encouragement you share.
Over the last few days I’ve been doing an unusual amount of listening. The new Adventures in Behaviour Change podcast is preparing to launch, which means there’s been a lot of interviewing, transcribing and editing to do – all listening-orientated activities.
Although I’ve done a certain amount of audio editing in my former life as a musician, I’ve never spent quite so much time simply listening to voices. And in the process I’ve noticed something interesting, closely related to what I wrote about last week in The smiling tree. It’s this…
When I listen to the conversations, I can hear smiles.
And when I hear smiles, I can’t help but smile back.
I wasn’t sure if this involuntary smile response was an individual peculiarity or not. “Perhaps it’s just me?”, I thought, so I looked it up.
It’s not just me.
It turns out that there are at least 50 different types of smile and we can recognise many of them by sound alone (read more here). Not only that, but when we hear someone smiling, even if we don’t consciously realise that they are, our facial muscles prepare themselves to smile back (more here).
So it’s not really surprising that I’ve been sitting here at my mixing software grinning to myself. After all, I’ve been editing things like this short video trailer for episode 1 of the podcast, in which I chat with Sharon Danzger, founder of Control Chaos and author of Super-Productive: 120 Strategies to Do More and Stress Less.
Wishing you a happy, celebratory* week ahead.
*Can’t think of anything to celebrate? This website is always a good source of ideas – you can even create your own!