Relish the moment and smile...

"Hold your breath, make a wish, count to three"

This is my favourite line from one of my favourite childhood films – Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. Here's the clip in question (in case you've never seen it).

Ahead of the big reveal, it was Willy Wonka's invitation to the children (and their rather frazzled families) to pause before stepping into the magic in front of them.

When was the last time you did exactly that?

It's an invitation I put out to myself back in May. And what happened next is worth sharing.

Relish the moment and smile

I don't consider myself a grump, but I am mindful that my face doesn't always exude the positivity I'm feeling inside. Maybe it's because I'm naturally an introvert. Maybe it's RBF.

A few months earlier I had played two gigs over two consecutive nights. The first one was a corker. Two sets with two different bands, both new to me. I loved every second. I just hadn't told my face. I was concentrating, determined not to let anyone down, and so the joy stayed entirely internal.

I watched the videos back the following morning and spotted the gap immediately: the chasm between how I had been feeling and how I had been looking.

The second night, I tried something different. I concentrated less. Instead, I intended to exist in the moment. I looked up rather than down. I found the faces in the audience. And I smiled.

Well, that was unexpected

What happened next has a neuro-chemical explanation, which we'll get to in a moment. But in the simplest possible terms: I sat up taller. I played better. And then the ripple effect began.

The band played better.


The audience danced more.


I smiled more.


I played better.

You get the picture.

Guess which gig I enjoyed more?

What was actually happening in my brain

Here is the science, kept brief because it deserves to be understood (rather than just cited).

When you smile, even if that smile begins as a deliberate choice rather than a spontaneous one, your brain responds with a release of dopamine, serotonin and endorphins. Neurologist Dr Isha Gupta describes it plainly: dopamine increases feelings of happiness, serotonin is associated with reduced stress, and endorphins are your body's natural pain and anxiety relief. The physical act of smiling sends a signal to your brain that things are good, and your brain, being the extraordinarily responsive supercomputer it is, adjusts accordingly.

The scientific term for this is the facial feedback effect. A major multi-lab study published in Nature Human Behaviour, drawing on data from nearly 4,000 participants across 19 countries, confirmed that voluntarily smiling can both amplify and initiate genuine feelings of happiness. The effect is modest on its own. But here is what makes the second gig story interesting: the research also found that the effect is considerably stronger in a live social context, with a real audience present. Which is exactly where I was.

So the smile wasn't just making me feel better. It was, quite literally, the starting gun for something much bigger.

The ripple you didn't realise you were creating

This is where positive psychology earns its place alongside the neuroscience.

The reason the band played better and the audience danced more isn't simply that I was performing with more energy. It's that emotions are contagious in a measurable, documented way. The mechanism behind this is mirror neurons: nerve cells that fire both when you perform an action and when you observe someone else performing the same action. When you smile at someone, the cingulate cortex, the part of the brain responsible for facial muscle response, triggers an almost involuntary smile in return. They don't just see your happiness. At a neurological level, they briefly feel it.

The Art of Brilliance describe this as a 'hyper-dyadic spread': the idea that emotions pass from person to person beyond your direct social ties. Your positive emotional state creates a ripple that, according to the research they reference, reaches three degrees of people removed from you. Your friends. Your friends' friends. Their friends' friends.

They also reference something biologists call the heliotropic effect: the principle that all living systems grow towards the light. Applied to humans, it means we are naturally drawn towards what is life-giving and away from what is life-taking. A smile, in a room, is a form of light. People move towards it without even realising they are doing so.

That is what happened on the second night. One deliberate choice to pause, look up, and smile became a ripple across the room. And then it came back.

The pause is the point

None of this required a dramatic change in approach. It required a moment of intention. A brief acknowledgement of where I was and what I was doing.

Wonka's "hold your breath, make a wish, count to three" is, at its heart, an instruction to pause before the magic. Not to manufacture wonder, but to be present enough to receive it when it arrives.

That simple adjustment in mental focus made a measurable physical difference. Not just for me.

Wherever you find yourself as you read this, what difference would it make to your day if you relished the moment and smiled? What difference would it make to the people you are about to spend your day with?

Be a bit more Wonka. I double-dare you.

Mark Franklin is The Four Fears® Guy: a transformational mindset coach, speaker and author working with creative professionals and small business owners who are ready to close the gap between the business they have and the one they actually deserve.

What was the last moment you caught your face not reflecting how you were feeling? Share it in the comments.