George Gilbert’s Motivational Humor

I have an old friend who complains all the time. He complains about his coworkers. He acts as if he is the only one who knows what he is doing, everyone else is incompetent. Then he will wonder why no one likes him, why he is the one that gets passed over for promotion, why he gets fired and goes from one job to another.

Maybe he does know more that the others but he doesn’t create a positive work environment by always pointing out others’ mistakes, he doesn’t create a team atmosphere by belittling them in front of other associates. Not only will they not want to work with you but they aren’t going to trust you. You are only setting yourself up for failure.

If you want to be a success at work help others by mentoring them, point out their successes not their failures and stop complaining about everything. Instead of coming to work with a frown turn it around and smile. No one wants to work with someone who complains about everything. People want to be around upbeat positive people. People that make them laugh, smile, and feel good about themselves.

If you have to point out others’ mistakes all the time to make yourself look good, then you are only hurting yourself by alienating your coworkers and when you make a mistake they will be the first to point it out. Rather than embarrassing you co-workers, help them and find humor, but not derogatory humor, in their mistake.

I help companies with teambuilding. My objective is to help them create a fun team atmosphere with humor. Creating a fun work environment with humor can bring people together as a team.

The best way to ruin the team spirit is a gossip. You know the type; they are always in everybody’s business, having to know where everybody is and what they are doing. They go around telling everyone that someone left early, that person A is seeing person B in the finance department and generally getting other people in trouble. They go and tell someone’s superiors that that person isn’t getting their work done. Dividing the team.

Many improv exercises can be used to improve team building and customer service. One such exercise is “Yes, and.”

The purpose of this exercise is to improve customer relations. When a customer requests something which is not available or impractical, rather than responding negatively and putting the customer on the defensive or upsetting the customer, this exercise will train you to respond in a positive way.

Form a circle and start with an outrageous story. The first participant continues the story by saying “Yes, and…” Continue this exercise until everyone has had a chance to respond at least one time. This version has everyone participating, learning to respond in a positive manner, and also enhancing their listening and creative skills. You can also play this game where you eliminate those that don’t respond by saying “yes, and..” until there is only one left.

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.

“Your Fired!” On a recent episode of “The Apprentice” Donald Trump fired one of the contestants for hiring a comedian to entertain at a corporate function. The comedian’s humor was inappropriate and embarrassed the team that hired her. Many times you will see a comedian and they are hilarious in the setting that they are in, like a comedy club, but put them in a corporate setting and they are not only inappropriate they are embarrassing. Just like when I would go see a movie with my friends and think it was the funniest movie I had ever seen. Then I rented it to watch with my parents and realized after we were watching it that there were some scenes in it that were too graphic in language or nudity and I was embarrassed not only to be watching it with them, but that I would ever recommend it to my parents in the first place.

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.

“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.

“The most thoroughly wasted of all days is that on which one has not laughed.” - Chamfort

Experts tell us that as children we used to laugh on the average of 150 times a day, up to 400 times a day, but by the age of thirty-five we laugh on the average of 15 to 17 times a day. What has happened? We take laughter for granted. Doctor Albert Schweitzer didn’t take laughter for granted. When Albert Schweitzer had his hospital in the middle of the African jungle, he made a point of having dinner with his staff every night so that he could tell them a joke or a humorous story. Something to make them laugh because he knew if he could make his staff laugh they could handle the stress of working under such terrible conditions, day after day, with so many sick people. Albert Schwitzer said, “Laughter is the nutrient of the spirit.”

I don’t have to go to the African jungle to find stress, But I do understand the importance of laughter. I suggest you make a point of finding more humor in your life so that you don’t waste another day.