Episode Transcript
[00:00:03] Welcome to the Making of youf. I'm Alexandria, founder of the Mastery Project, and you'd Transformation Hub. So, welcome to number 38 in our podcast series, and the title is Five Whys to Laugh at Yourself.
[00:00:19] Okay, so number one, let's dive in. Well, I love Audrey Hepburn, and even if you don't know her, maybe look up the film Breakfast at Tiffany's, a classic film. And Audrey Hepburn always quoted about the joys of laughter and contribution. And she said, to take your career seriously is important, but taking yourself too seriously can be disastrous. So what do I mean by that? Well, we, of course, want to be seen as being responsible, all right? And in the nature of responsibility, we need to have the capacity literally to respond. So if you're being responsible, that doesn't mean that you need to perceive that responsibility as a burden. Now, don't get me wrong. With our busy and very, very overloaded lives, it can feel sometimes that taking responsibility isn't a pleasure at all. But the key with not taking yourself too seriously is recognizing that responsibility actually a heartfelt state of being, because it's the capacity to respond. So if you can laugh at yourself, what you're doing is you're in a moment where you could shut your heart down. You're keeping your heart open because you're responding to a circumstance where you could just judge yourself and rush off into your head and beat yourself up or, you know, react to others and lose your 10th. But when you stay in your heart, you're keeping a vital connection alive and a very supportive flow of energy that gives you a lot of options and a lot of ways to think laterally, you know, to seek alternatives and to energize what you want to move towards.
[00:02:12] And so the heart is the central connection of your uniqueness and individuality. If you imagine a drain pipe going through the top of your head and coming out at the bottom of your spine, that drain pipe is a cosmic connection. And so when you're in your heart center, that drainpipe goes all the way through your heart and all the way through your embodiment, all the way through your capacity to create and all of the energy from your sacred and divine connection to all that is all right, the energy out there that's creating your life, it flows through, through you, and it energizes your thoughts and your conscious choices and, of course, your responsibilities.
[00:02:53] So when we laugh, we reset that heart mind alignment, that connection with that infinite energy, because we pop our mind back over into our heart space. So if you imagine two circles or three circles. You've got your physical body in the middle, you've got your mind on the right hand side and you've got your emotional body on the left. When you're, when you're happy, when you're embracing and going with the flow, then those circles are relatively imbalanced. They're kind of overlapping, you know, and they're sort of harmonizing even to the point where they're superimposed when you're really relaxed and also very fulfilled and very open.
[00:03:32] So the key with not taking your life too seriously is number one, looking at responsibility differently and realizing if you want to be responsible, then you are going to need your heartfelt connection. And that gives you a ton of options and a lot of energy in order to resolve any problem and still have time to have a good laugh. Okay, so number two, laughter is a great way of releasing toxic hormones and acidity in the body. When we laugh, it's like we're lubricating our cells with permission to release. So we're releasing pent up emotions, we're releasing adrenaline, we're releasing nervous and any, as I've mentioned before, any overextended elements in our heads, in our mental body and in the stress that can be created when we're literally trying to do too much.
[00:04:31] So laughing at ourselves again is another form of reset because it's helping us come back into a balance that is going to be supportive. And also, as I said, it gives our permission, it gives permission to our three body system of mental, emotional and physical selves to actually get into a balance and recognize and register the fact that we can't control everything. And that's the whole point in our lives. Because if we did, then we'd be perpetually living inside the cube and we'd have no transformation and no chance of evolution. So it's the fact that we go, hey, it's okay. It's okay to be perfectly imperfect. It's okay to get it wrong. Sometimes it's okay to actually spread that joy of the creative process which is a lot of persisting in different avenues and different ways of achieving things. So it is definitely very therapeutic and supportive to laugh at yourself and not to hold on to the stress or the worry of not doing it the right way or not being perfect.
[00:05:43] Okay, now number three, why is it easy to tumble into being a little bit shut down and taking everything way too seriously and taking yourself or your sort of level of responsibility too seriously? Well, number one, yes, there's a huge amount of pressure in our world. And we do have a tendency to judge ourselves far too readily and that particular culture, cancel culture. And all those sort of instant reactions, of course, have piled on massive pressure in the last 10 to 20 years.
[00:06:17] So fortunately, I think we can see that we're coming around to a greater balance. And I don't want to get into politics or get into what's right and what's wrong about our situation at the moment, but I do believe that there is a beautiful sacred balance point that we can all benefit from. So when you laugh at yourself as a leader, then what you're doing also is you are of course taking responsibility for what hasn't worked out. But again, what you're doing is you're going back into that heart connection, you're getting that energy and the fuel in order to correct whatever's happened. And also you're giving your team or those who are in your department the opportunity as well to laugh a bit too. And I think it's really important with leadership to be very comfortable with your team laughing kind of with you and at you. So I think laughter is all about acknowledging the ridiculousness and the beautiful chaosity of our universe. And it's an instantaneous thing that we can't change in the sense of. It's, it's. It's almost like a natural response to things not working out, actually, or things going in a completely different direction than we expected. So please give your team the gift of laughing at you and with the chaos, you know, chaosity circumstances, because that gives them the permission to be in their hearts to have the energy to connect beautifully in a line easily and flowfully, and also in a weird way, for them not to put too much pressure on themselves in their kind of perfection paralysis mode, or in perhaps that situation where some management people find themselves micromanaging and they actually don't want to, but they've taken themselves so seriously, they end up, as I said, kind of helicopter parenting their team rather than allowing them to show them how fabulous they are.
[00:08:27] So when we are not going to take ourselves too seriously, but we're taking our job seriously in the sense of responsibly, then it's, I think, to remind the team as well that it's a really important thing to be able to benefit from that degree of balance and relaxation. Because it's always with crises or with difficulties or with mini problems, that it's about how we respond to them that matters. It's actually they're going to happen. And as we know, creativity is a journey. It's not just a sort of A to B, get it done. Perfect repetition. It is a journey, particularly if we want to create great innovation or we're attempting to achieve some pretty impressive and evolutionary targets. So yeah, definitely with the capacity not to take oneself seriously. When you can show that you're happy to laugh and you're happy to laugh at yourself, then that gives everyone else permission to do it. And it just creates a beautiful place where there is that endless and constant flow of options rather than people tightening up with even more stress.
[00:09:47] Okay, so number four, if you're a leading person then you will of course have a lot of opportunities to find how you laugh in the sense of how comfortable you are and the sense of humor. Now I'm just going to say that laughing at ourselves comes in all shapes and sizes. And one of the funniest things is that different people have different senses of humour. And so don't be surprised if you end up laughing at yourself even more because others actually maybe don't quite cue into your sense of humor. Humor. So the key is to keep on laughing. And I think laughter is a beautiful place of releasing self judgment. All right. And also the fact that the pressure in, you know, productivity sense can be incredibly high. And so ironically, when we laugh again, I go back to this heart mind alignment reset. What can happen is we actually become more productive after it because that whole pressure and potential, you know, oppression of having to, you know, deliver on time within budget or to deliver a far reaching innovation, all of that pressure just is released and goes. So again, you're going to be a lot more productive if you can laugh at yourself because you're not actually transferring any of your personal pressure onto your team and you're giving yourself the opportunity to step back and to look at your circumstances differently. So what laughter does is it really shakes it up for leaders in a positive sense and allows them to step back because when everyone's laughing there's not a lot you can do and also that you don't need to judge yourself. You can just be in the allowance of, you know, everyone takes all sorts to make a world and everyone has a unique sense of humour.
[00:11:58] Okay, number five, well, humour is a great way to engage your audience. And so I actually quite like it when people give presentations and they're actually kind of a little bit tongue in cheek. They're laughing at themselves with the presentation. And one of the most fabulous ones I've ever seen was when I was working in a corporate training contract and I saw someone talking about A particular presentation they were very passionate about. But the way they sort of won the audience over in the first slide of their presentation was the fact that the slide was actually a slide of their holiday in Scotland. It wasn't a slide of the flow diagram of the electronics that they were selling. So immediately the person went, oh, oops, I think I've got the holiday snaps, not the engineering slide. One moment everyone just, you know, burst out laughing, thought it was really funny. So I do believe, whether it's slightly on purpose or not, I think in presenting styles and when you find yourself looking for an in to engage your audience, I think that sort of little bit of a muck up, mix up, unintentional, harmless sort of laughing itself can be actually an incredibly effective way to engage your audience and also to understand and relate and come across as being very relatable. So a lot of people, again, when they're laughing during a presentation, it again opens their hearts and it actually makes them a lot more in the receiving mode, if you will, of what you're saying and just generally more balanced, more relaxed, more receptive and they will actually listen in a much more effective way to what you're saying because of that gift of laughter.
[00:14:04] Okay, well, I hope you've enjoyed five ways to laugh at yourself and that you'll be able to see the benefits of that in your daily life or in leadership or presentations. If you like this content, then please don't hesitate to go to your transformationhub.com There are, gosh, probably, I think it's about 50 episodes available there, please, they're on the site, you can listen to them. They're just like two clicks away. And if you would like to get a fresh perspective on your life, if you would like some help with your next step and a life strategy, then please check out the Life Alchemy sessions and you can see how you can make your next step and how you have so many options and wonderful ways to move forward. And again, just a couple of clicks away. Okay, thank you very much for joining me.
