Audiences Create Performances

I’m going to do something tomorrow I haven’t done in a long time. I will be teaching a workshop to a group of healthcare folks, mostly surgical and clinic nurses, on the topic of developing and using your sense of humor. Back in the mid 90’s, when I worked as an Employee Assistance Program trainer and counselor, I put together a whole series of seminars and presentations on humor and well-being, Through my job, I was able to market and book this seminar in all kinds of companies and organizations. It was some of the best work I’ve ever done and it feels silly to even call it work. Some of my  talents lie in the areas of public speaking, teaching and working with people as a coach or counselor, so this was a natural extension of other work I was doing at the time. What was different then was the topic--one’s  sense of humor.  I thought I had a good active sense of humor, but to teach others how to develop and activate their own sense of humor, that was new territory for me. And somewhat risky, I might add. Needless to say,  my creative juices got flowing. I read everything I could about humor, I talked to people about their sense of humor, I observed, reflected and integrated everything I had personally experienced about humor. Eventually, I built a  seminar that I could take on the road and over a 5 year period I must have presented this seminar in various settings and versions at least 200 times. When I look back at everything I’ve done in my professional career, this ranks at the top of the list. It was really fun and gratifying to do as you might suspect. But the most amazing thing to me was that I got paid for doing it.

In 1999,  I changed jobs and  my new company needed me to teach a curriculum other than humor. It was good stuff,  very positive subject matter  and I enjoyed teaching it,  but it just wasn’t  humor. So I set my humor program on the shelf. For a while, opportunities to teach humor workshops came from people who had been at one of my programs and I was able to dust off the my material and put it back to work. But eventually the requests stopped coming and the dust grew thicker. And while I never lost sight of my own sense of humor and how to use it on a daily basis, my days encouraging other people to develop their sense of humor took on a different, less focused form.

That will all change tomorrow. One of my peers, a nurse educator, was looking for something different to have as the topic for the quarterly clinical learning program at the hospital where I work. When I suggested humor as a possible topic, I wasn’t sure how she’d react. After all, people in healthcare are known to take themselves a bit too seriously at times. Needless to say, we are expecting a really good turnout tomorrow. Turns out, the most common reaction to the topic has been, ”We really need that here!” The pressure is on.

It seems to me that some of the same things that can keep a person from developing and using their sense of humor are some of the same things that block creativity, expression, authenticity and encouragement. You can also make the case that looking for the humor in almost any situation requires one to be creative and open to different ways of looking at things, to have the ability to see things through a different perspective. Here are the 3 humor skills for adults that will be presented as part of my seminar tomorrow:

1)      The ability to find the humor or absurdity in almost any difficult situation.

2)      The ability to take your “self”  lightly while taking your work seriously.

3)      The ability to live a disciplined life of joy and gratitude.

I promise to write a blog article about each one of these skills in the near future. I have a feeling that tomorrow’s program will be the start of a whole new series of opportunities and adventures and that excites me. Wish me luck. Here’s hoping I don’t take  myself too seriously.