“We must laugh before we are happy, for fear we die before we laugh at all.”

– Jean de La Fontaine

Fake it ’til you make it.  There was a time in my life when I thought this meant being phony and denying who I really was.  I thought that people who faked their way through life were dishonest, with themselves and with me.  Why, then, did I find myself advising someone I love to “fake it ’til you make it?”

Have you ever felt really conflicted about what to do when you face uncertainty and change?  When the change involves something that you really love or something that you really aspire to, that’s the time to fake it ’til you make it.

There is a very good reason for this kind of faking it.  When we feel stressed over something that we know makes us happy, if we choose happy behavior in the midst of the stress, we can rekindle the energy of happiness that we associate with the activity we love.  It is far too easy, when life becomes overwhelming, to allow stress to spill over into areas that should feed our souls.  When this happens, we can find ourselves stumbling through life and feeling defeated.  Even the things that have brought us joy in the past seem to rob us of our energy, and we begin to see them as stress-producing rather than enjoyable.

Fake it ’til you make it can be a great asset in these situations.  If we look around us at the other people who are enjoying what they do, if we make the effort to be a part — not only physically, but also emotionally — we soon discover that our behavior is not fake at all.  When we invest in the energy of enjoying life, that same sort of energy comes back to us.  Before long, we are feeling energized again, and the depleted feeling is gone.

Fake it ’til you make it.  Good advice.  Truly, we must laugh before we are happy.  Happiness is a choice.  We are the ones who make it happen.  It is no accident.  Fake it ’til you make it happen.