George Gilbert’s Motivational Humor

The other day 11^th seeded George Mason University knocked off the number 1 seed University of Connecticut in overtime in the NCAA tournament to reach the final four. This was a huge upset. ESPN.com’s Andy Katz said, “This was the greatest run ever to the Final Four.” Others have said it is the biggest upset in the tournament’s history. Before the tournament many felt that George Mason University wasn’t a good enough team and shouldn’t have been chosen to participate in the tournament. Obviously they have proven them wrong. But what makes this team different than the rest. They are having fun!

George Mason’s coach Jim Larranaga made sure that his players continue to have fun during this remarkable run. A run that has seen this team upset sixth seed Michigan St.,  third seed University of North Carolina, and seventh seed Wichita St. Just before they took the court to face the University of Connecticut, Larranaga reminded his players they were from the CAA — not the Colonial Athletic Association, but from the “Connecticut Assassins Association.” The players broke out in laughter.  Before they played North Carolina coach Larranaga told the team North Carolina is “Superman and we’re Kryptonite.” The coach’s goal was to keep the players loose and not stress out for the games.

Does this mean coach Larranga and his team isn’t taking these games seriously? Just the opposite they are taking them very seriously. Being able to find fun and humor in your endeavors can free you up to handle the momentous task at hand. I see a coach like Larranga get his team to overachieve because he reminds them to have fun and then I have seen Bobby Knight’s teams on occasion underachieve. I sometimes think coach Knight’s style of intimidation backfires. I think his players tighten up because they are afraid of coach Knight. I don’t think we will ever see Coach Larranga throw a chair across the court or choke a player for making a mistake.

There were other teams in the tournament that succumbed to the pressure. After being up by 9 points with 3:27 seconds left in the game and leading until the final 10 seconds, Gonzaga lost their bid to go to the final four for the first time in school history. It was obvious that Gonzaga’s players started to feel the pressure in the final moments of the game. They couldn’t score and turned the ball over to give up the lead. With two seconds left Gonzaga’s Adam Morrison overwhelmed with emotion started crying before the game was over. He is a great player and will indeed have a great career ahead whether he stays in school or decides to go to the NBA. Obviously no one enjoys losing, but maybe Gonzaga who has never been to the final four should have focused on having more fun throughout the tournament. I believe they put too much pressure on themselves and in the end they tightened up and couldn’t finish unlike George Mason University whose team was able to not make mistakes and close out the game with a win.

Just when we need to focus most is when we tend to loose our focus. Why? Because we get too serious, thus impeding our concentration. The harder we try, the harder it is to concentrate, choking off any chance we had of accomplishing our goal. This is the time to find something to laugh at. Humor and laughter can help bring back our focus and see the challenge in a different light. Joking that the George Mason team were the Connecticut Assassinations Association helped lighten the fact that they were going to play what many pundits picked as the team to win the tournament. Humor in this case enabled the team to see the opponent as someone that can be beaten.

Sometimes we take ourselves too seriously. We let our stress beat us before our opponent. It doesn’t matter whether it’s on the basketball court, at school, in business or any other aspect of life. We too often forget to have fun. We forget to laugh. Because we get too serious. We tighten up. Coach Larranga used humor to, as he said, “to keep his kids loose.”  When I find myself starting to tighten up before a speech I remind myself as I am walking up to have fun. I know if I’m not having fun I am not going to perform to the best of my ability.

In college students look forward to going on spring break. They have been hitting the books all winter, writing term papers, and cramming for mid-term exams. They need a time to let go and de-stress. Unfortunately we can’t all drop our responsibilities and go to Palm Springs or Fort Lauderdale, but we can find ways to recharge our energies.

Unlike the college kids we can’t totally shed our inhibitions. What we can do is loosen up so that our performance at work doesn’t deteriorate. Actually, the work will improve if you are in a relaxed frame of mind and having a little fun on the job. There’s nothing wrong with hard work but constant hard work without a little levity can lead to burnout.

If you’re in a meeting try to inject a little appropriate humor to lighten the atmosphere, reduce some of that stress, and put others in a more receptive mood. Not only will humor improve the quality of your work but it can lead to better interactions and communication with your fellow workers. Just like individuals coming together on the playing field can make a successful baseball team, sharing humor in the work place can enhance teamwork in business.

Everyone needs to take a spring break, but we don’t have to go to a different location to do it. When you’re finding humor, laughing with others and enjoying yourself, that is the essence of what spring break is all about.

If a new employee can laugh with the group it will bring them closer together and get them working as a team. Humor should be inclusive not exclusive. When my parents first joined Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In Tour everyone was professional and very nice but my parents didn’t really feel a part of the team until the time the bus drove up to the Westbury Music Theater on Long Island, New York. It was a dreary and rainy day. The parking lot was dirty. I was six years old and I looked out the window and said, “This is beautiful downtown Burbank?” Since this was a running joke on the television show, everyone laughed hysterically and that brought us all together as a team.

My parents toured military hospitals overseas During World War II and Walter Reed hospital during Vietnam. This was not an easy thing to do. It wasn’t easy being up, smiling, and trying to make wounded soldiers laugh. There were many acts that couldn’t do it, it was too depressing, but they realized that was the least they could do for the soldiers who risked there lives defending our country.

Comedian Phyllis Diller once told a story about the first time she went with Bob Hope to a military hospital. She said she started to cry and Bob Hope took her aside and said to her that she wasn’t there for that and she had to be strong for them.

In Jack Benny’s auto-biography, “Sunday Nights at Seven” he describes a situation when a wounded soldier went into an epileptic fit while he was playing the violin in his act. “I knew I had to say something to break the tension in that room. ‘Well,’ I ventured, ‘Here’s a guy who got sick only when I started to play the fiddle. Let me tell you fellows - This happens frequently when I play the violin to people who aren’t in the hospital.’ Everybody laughed. The tension was broken. Even the men who had been watching with grim faces during the monologue broke up and roared with laughter. The psychiatrist on the ward told me that that one joke was the equivalent of six months of psychotherapy.”

John Steinbeck describe it best in an article he wrote in the New York Herald.

“…Bob Hope and his company must come into this quiet, inward, lonesome place, and gently pull the minds outward and catch the interest, and finally bring laughter up out of the black water. There is a job. It hurts many of the men to laugh, hurts knitting bones, strains at sutured incisiions, and yet the laughter is a great medicine….”

“The thing I hate about an argument is that it always interrupts a discussion.” - G. K. Chesterton

My parents were in show-business for more than thirty years. One of the secrets to their longevity was that they had a rule that they lived by. They never discussed what happened on stage immediately after the show. They would wait untill the next day before they discussed what went wrong. They understood that talking about a mistake backstage while they were full of adrenalin from the performance wasn’t in their best interest. This gave them a cool-down period so when they did talk about the previous night’s show they could be more objective about it. They also realized that many of the mistakes weren’t very serious and many times funny. They were now able to laugh about something rather than argue about it. Many of the mistakes got a laugh and so they would put them into the routine making the act even funnier. If they had discussed those mistakes immediately after they would not have been so objective. They might have blamed each other for the mistakes and therefore neither the act nor the marriage would have lasted. Many acts broke up because they were fighting about the performance as soon as they walked off stage.

Next time a mistake occurs at work, if at all possible, don’t discuss it immediately while tempers flare. Take a cooling off period so that you can discuss the incident rather than argue about it.

After speaking to Axicon World Imports from Canada they wrote me and said they were going to make “laughter a part of our job description.” What a great idea, humor and laughter as part of a company’s job description

More and more companies are incorporating humor into the work place, companies such as Southwest Airlines, AT&T, General Electric and even the IRS. Lets face it, if the IRS can incorporate humor into the work place then any company can incorporate humor. But why are these companies using humor? To motivate their employees.

Harvey Mackay once said in an interview in Success Magazine that fun was the most important thing to keep his employees motivated. He said, “We manufacture fun, and there are a gazillion laughs around the plant all the time.” Good advice from a man who runs Mackay Envelopes Corp., a company with 550 employees, that makes 20 million envelopes a day, and has sales of $85 Million a year.