Fake it till you make it

Ha ha Aristotle started it all. He had said to be a virtuous man, you must first act like a virtuous man, and he was an intelligent man .. must say. 

I had heard people say it but I never believed in it and so never gave it the right weightage. My face was an exact reflection of my mental state. If I was upset my face would say it. If I tensed and worried my face would say. If I was happy my face would say until one day I realised I was becoming such an obvious factor. In addition I also realized I hardly smiled because 90% of the times I would either remain sad or tensed or worried or irritated or upset about something or the other. All started noticing this and commenting on it. I kind of not liked it. I thought to myself why should the world know my state of mind. So, in order to hide my state of mind, I started faking a funny smile at others so much so that I faked a smile at times when smile had no business in my life. With this, one good thing started happening, I started getting compliments for my smiles and started getting replaced to the comments. I started looking happy and joyful. The outer expression started impacting my inner world and I actually started remaining happy and joyful. Then I realized oh wow it seemed to be working ;). I started faking more smiling faces and more happy looks. 

Then slowly and gradually, just for the fun of it, I started faking on many other things. The more I faked the more I was getting convinced that it was working on me. For eg: I had fallen in to the practice of thinking negative. But I knew that if somebody would know my thoughts they would comment and so to hide my negative thoughts, I started faking positive thoughts. Two things started happening - One, my folks started complimenting on my thoughts and citing me as an example for positive thinking and second, my thoughts actually started bringing in positive results because as they say Universe always takes things on face value only. 

My ability of faking started becoming more frequent. I started faking almost on everything that I wanted to do but I was not being able to do it in real life for some reason, like building that inner confidence, living the happy state of mind within, taking everything in positive stride so on and so forth. I had my own reactions and secret confessions to that. 

Then one day I realized faking was not helping in the long run and perhaps it was wrong to fake a false thing and I should not be doing it. So I stopped faking. I was sure people would get to know my real nature and they would again start passing comments and judging me. But to my surprise came in no comments but all complimentary things. On introspection I realised, I actually was doing a lot of things which I wasn't doing earlier. In the process of faking, the subconscious mind had started picking it up as its own nature and now by default it was no more a fake .. I could actually make it. 

Without any debate I admitted there is a great benefit in faking and yes Aristotle was right - to be a virtuous man, you must first act like a virtuous man. Today modern science admits it and the notion is used in cognitive behavioural therapy (changing behaviour patterns). So yes Fake it till you Make it ... ha ha :)