Love Louder

April 4, 2016
Life coach Smiles presents a concise but unoriginal system of 33 tenets designed for creating a positive outlook and, consequently, a more fulfilling life. These tenets range from the abstract (“trust the journey of life”) to the more tangible (spend more time in nature). Smiles encourages living with gratitude, choosing forgiveness over resentment, and turning “wounds into wisdom.” Many tips involve mental retraining to enhance self-confidence, such as learning it’s okay to say “no” with the “People Pleaser Recovery Program,” respecting intuition, and ditching society’s warped standards in favor of authenticity, which involves creating a vision of success independent of those standards and designing a proper course of action towards one’s individual goals. The system is a pastiche, interspersing instruction with inspirational quotes and hashtagged “challenges” that encourage making necessary changes such as reorienting one’s “disempowering language” and identifying and eliminating bad habits. Smiles’s life amplification system is a noble pursuit and its sleek design makes it convenient, but it largely consists of material that has been covered well by others. Agent: Steve Ross, Abrams Artist Agency.