I do different stuff with the "cheery" angle. I don't like being told to smile more, etc. either but I don't get annoyed at the other person anymore, I get alarmed because usually I don't know that I'm not smiling "as much" as I usually do apparently. If people notice and comment, I figure I must have slipped to being even more unhappy-seeming than I was before when they saw me last? I start paying more attention and if enough people say it over a couple days/week's time, I start working on it, seriously start looking for "fun" (seriously/fun? :-) and something to lift my mood.

But I make sure I get a wide range of "you are so negative" or "you should smile more," etc. whatever comment it is, from different people and not just certain people who have been telling me it all my life. If I have people who have been telling me all my life, I might hone in on frequency, if they've started telling me more often recently and try to adapt my behavior some.

I actually find it fun/helpful to pick on one incident that I got a negative comment about and see what I can do. My husband use to consistently get upset because when we got home from a car trip or arrived at another destination I'd unbuckle my seatbelt and the combination of me and the car not being designed well :-) when I let go of the seat belt it would retract the shoulder side too hard and smack against the window! He didn't like that for some reason so I made a decision and trained myself to keep hold of the shoulder portion and guide it up enough (to shoulder height) so it wouldn't smack against the window anymore. He didn't notice (or did but didn't comment) but I was really really proud of myself! I made sure to tell him how wonderful I was all for him :-) But it did feel good, working on a little, very specific incident and being able to make a difference.

I had a hard time when I was younger maintaining stuff like that (I'd pick a too hard project for my level at the time) but I use to occasionally do little things for my stepmother, get up early and unload the dishwasher several mornings in a row when she was expecting me to sleep in/be late/useless and was rewarded on the third day by her pleased comment. Of course I went back to my old ways, I was a teenager so needed my sleep and was a bit too self-involved yet but there are lots of things that are "easy" and it's interesting to work on remembering to do them. One simple thing is to pretend :-) you're listening to someone's negative comments about you and then thank them for their comments! That gets points :-) You don't even have to change, it just shows you're listening to their point of view. I'm a master of offering to help when I'm pretty sure the offer will be declined! You get the brownie points and the excitement of not quite knowing if you will be doing something you don't really want to do (but are willing to if you get tagged). Overall you appear "helpful" (or, worse case scenario, "pleasant"/polite) even if you rarely are.