Pretending to be invested in your work may help you advance your career

It is not easy to have a positive attitude at work every day, sometimes there’s a dark cloud following you around. So what should be done on days when you just don’t feel like working? Pretending to be happy may help.

Rebekah Bernard, a general physician based in Florida, cannot always empathise with her patients, yet she is a pleasant doctor to them. “You almost have to deliberately force yourself to act, and when you do. You’ll get better results,” she Bernard explains. “Maybe you don’t want to call it ‘faking’. I advocate acting.”

But it is not always easy to fake a happy environment for people to be comfortable in. Bernard emphasises the importance to body language to create a connection – leaning in, listening attentively, gazing into their eyes to make them feel heard. Bernard feels that while it takes a lot of energy, it pays off.



Here are some techniques that can help faking interest seem genuine:
Positive Attitude
A research conducted in 2014 found that deliberately bringing out positive feelings can actually make you happy.

According to a research scientist at the Stanford University’s Centre for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education in California, Monica Worline, “people pick up on when you’re not genuine way more than you might think”, she further adds that “motives for concern about colleagues tend to be mixed, rather than outright manipulation”.

Faking it the right way

Brandon Smith, an Atlanta-based psychologist who specialises in workplace culture, suggests finding common ground rather than pretending to be interested. He also recommends gestures like thank-you notes, appreciations, sending small gifts or even related links can be effective at conveying that you care. “Doing something for someone is better,” he says.

“When you are genuinely curious about another person, they experience that as empathy,” said Smith. “Compassion can feel like sympathy.”

Authenticity   

“Disingenuous expressions of empathy are easily picked up by people,” warns Worline. ‘It’s harder to fake it than you might think.”

While faking care may work, over doing it can always land you in trouble.  Worline said that “people who have to fake emotions at work, burn out faster”.

How to be a workplace superhero

“Being forced to act rather than show genuine emotions during the workday can make it easier to fall into depression, experience feelings of stress or be unhappy with the job overall,” she adds.

Dave Whiteside, a research fellow at Plasticity Labs – a platform that helps companies train employees to practice empathy, resilience and compassion, explains that the foremost thing in “learning to care about the problems of others is to simply listen to colleagues rather than jumping to help the other person solve a work problem”.

“If you don’t know what the issue is, you can’t relate,” Whiteside stressed. “It’s about building the ability to take on someone else’s perspective.”

This article appeared on the BBC.