S. 2 Ep. 9 – More Humor Equals More Business. Find Out How.

Taylorr: Welcome to another episode of Technically Speaking. We’re your hosts, Taylorr and Austin, and today’s episode we are talking about humour, even if you proclaim to not be funny and how we can use it to better our results. AKA, make more money. To help with this, we have brought in Andrew Tarvin. Andrew is the world’s first humour engineer, teaching people how to get better results while having more fun. And he’s helped thousands of people across clients like GE, Proctor and Gamble and Microsoft. He’s a best-selling author and has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, TEDx, and has done presentations and 50 states, 18 countries, and three continents. He also loves the colour orange, especially if you check out his website, and he’s obsessed with chocolate. Andrew is going to share with us how humour can better our businesses, and he also drops five puns throughout the episode so as you’re listening, let’s see if you can find them as always stick around until the end for some awesome resources. And we hope you enjoy this one. 

Austin: Okay, we are live. Andrew, welcome to the show, man.

Andrew: Thank you. It is an honour to be here. I’m excited to chat with the two of you.

Austin: Oh man. We’re excited too. Not only are you just a wonderful human being, but I also love the topic of humour and I feel like it’s something that I could improve upon. 

Taylorr: Certainly. 

Austin: So I’m excited to learn today from you.

Andrew: Well hopefully. I think the goal will be that we’ll have some fun we’ll hopefully learn a little bit and I will probably share at least one pun. So I’m going to give a fair warning to anyone listening now that there’s going to be at least one pun coming your way.

Austin: Okay.

Taylorr: And that is pun intended. So we’ll put that warning on the label.

Austin: I’m kind of thinking that this is less of a warning and more of a promise so [cross-talk 02:00]. Don’t disappoint me.

Andrew: Exactly. Well, you have to do wordplay because it’s a pun thing to do. It’s just wonderful.

Taylorr: Oh, there is its.

Austin: We’re getting started hot you guys. You’re just such a cool person and I will never forget the first time that I was looking at the Humour That Works website, And I landed on the about page as you do when you’re looking into somebody and we talked about this, I think when we first met, but I saw that line about you being R2D2. If you’re a star wars character And I laughed to the point where I almost cried, it was so funny and I think it speaks to you, but also why R2D2? He’s the most in conspicuous character. You’ve got a huge personality, obviously, but that’s just not the one that would come to mind for most people, I don’t think.

Andrew: Right. Personal, it’s a very scientific result because I did a Buzzfeed quiz to tell me that. 

Austin: Oh, right.

Andrew: So that’s not just me picking it. This is pure science. [Cross-talk 02:58]. Exactly. [Inaudible 03:00] I think it is appropriate in some ways because R2D2 is the glue that keeps a lot of that stuff together but subtly behind the scenes, the one that has a code that sends a message, et cetera and I think that’s how sometimes I am. I’m more of an introvert so sometimes a little bit more behind the scenes. And then the most important part that I’ve realized now is that technically I can be RdrewDdrew.

Taylorr: Oh wow. 

Austin: Okay. 

Taylorr: Dang.

Austin: Landed in thick already. Here we go. That’s number two. 

Taylorr: That’s perfect. So this whole idea The Humour That Works, why is this the brand? Where did this come from?

Andrew: This came from, I was working at Procter and Gamble. Short background and have a degree in computer science and engineering and from the Ohio State University. And you have to say that the, otherwise they take away the degree and started working at Proctor and Gamble as an ID project manager and realized that humour was helping me be more effective because as a computer science engineer always really good with computers, less good with humans and I needed something to kind of build that skill set. And I started doing improv and stand-up in college and realized improv and stand-up was helping me. So I proclaimed myself, the corporate humourous to P and G started blogging about it, got business cards, kind of assume someone would stop me, at P and G and be like, Hey, you can’t just create your own job title, but no one ever did.

Instead people kind of referred to me as the corporate humourous, they enjoyed the meetings and all that got better result. And eventually I was like, okay, this is working internally with a bunch of really smart people at P and G, there might be other people external to P and G that this could benefit from. And that’s initially where it started was it was just a blog. I liked the name Humour That Works because it’s a little bit of a double meaning in the sense of humour that is actually effective and humour in the workplace, and also [email protected] was already taken but humourthatworks.com was not, so I could register the domain and that’s where it all kind of sprang from.

Austin: Yeah. I love that. It’s like some people get tattoos because they like the design and then they apply a meaning to it afterwards, I’m not saying that’s what happened here, but maybe elements of that, like the domain happened like, oh no, that’s what I meant in the first place.[Cross-talk 05:13].

Andrew: Humour that works is way better than humour at work. And it’s what I want from the very beginning I guess, maybe.

Austin: Yeah, action oriented. I’m a fan. So is there a contradictory point of view here? Is there humour that doesn’t work?

Austin: Oh, for sure. That’s the number one question that people get from me, especially like when, you know, as a speaker, you speak to a lot of different groups and I have the benefit or for whatever reason, I’m very fortunate to a lot of the groups that I speak to are not the stereotypical. It’s not Google and Southwest necessarily where you’re like, oh, they’re already a fun culture, they’re going to bring you in. It’s like, no, it’s the FBI, it is the UN it is emergency first responders, it’s like some of those groups and a lot of times the feedback that I get from senior leaders is this [inaudible 06:01] hey of like, you can’t say humour anymore because we’re in a too PC culture, people are too sensitive these days. And so inappropriate humour is definitely is humour that doesn’t work. And so part of the skill of humour is knowing what is appropriate, what’s not and how you adapt to it. So that’s part of what we train on. It’s not just the idea that humour is good. Most people are on board with that, but then how do you actually do it well?

Taylorr: Gotcha. Can you share some of that science with us? How do we do humour well? Do you have a methodology to this?

Andrew: It’s a great question. There’s a couple of things and I love the framing of methodology because some people are like, you have a formula and humour partially predicated on the idea of surprise and so if there was a formula for funny, it would inherently become obsolete. Because it would become expected and become known, the closest you get to it as something kind of like a comic triple. We can say that there’s an art and science to humour. We can teach you the science part, and then part of our programs is about learning the art. And so you might learn something like a comic triple, and then that can kind of help but if you then were to only use that, that would become a little bit too old or not work anymore. The framework or methodology is a great way to frame that. Probably the bigger frameworks that we think there’s two, one is around unlocking your natural humour persona, and as part of that, when thinking about the humour to use is then using what we call the humour map.

Taylorr: Gotcha. Are there multiple personas out there for humour and then we have to identify that? And then what is the humour map then? Is that like the process you walked through to develop the humour? Can you share more info on that?

Andrew: Sure, absolutely. The idea is that just like we have a different regular personalities, if you know your personality assessments, I am a type A, blue square, conscientious IMTJ with the sign of Aquarius. It means that I am a stubborn…

Austin: That’s a surprise.

Andrew: Ambitious introvert who likes long walks on the beach by myself. I’m also R2D2, I know pretty much all of these different assessments. So just as we have different personalities, we have different ways that we show up when it comes to our humour. And if humour is a skill, it means it can be learned, which means the question then isn’t are you funny? The question is what kind of funny are you? We think that there’s seven primary humour personas that people kind of adopt, and then based on that persona, that’s going to show up differently when you’re talking one-on-one with a client, versus when you are following up after an event, versus what you say on the stage versus what you say when you’re in the event itself and someone asks you a question, et cetera. The personas are very intentionally, not personality types are not set in stone. There’s one that you probably naturally gravitate towards a little bit more, but then the people that are good are able to adapt to all of these different personas depending on the context of the moment or kind of what’s needed.

Taylorr: Gotcha. 

Austin: Okay this is so helpful for so many reasons. First of all, I love that applying a label to anything makes it instantly more practical because it contextualizes the things that you might be doing without even thinking about it, or maybe things that you want to improve upon that you’re naturally gifted at, but haven’t really had a box for so I like that. And I would love to be able to unpack all of those seven personas, although I imagine we probably need a lot more than a half hour to do that. Maybe you can give us an example, this is a challenge for you, okay. I’m putting you on the spot here, but I’m thinking of funny people like Ryan Reynolds. Ryan Reynolds, I don’t know what it is about his humour, that just makes me laugh so hard. He’s just one of the funniest people I can think of. Could you tell us about what maybe a persona like his would look like and maybe some of the characteristics that go along with it?

Andrew: Yeah, certainly. There’s seven primary humour personas, very, very high level just by name, too can kind of start to imply what they are. They are enthusiasts, curator, inventor, entertainer, engineer, advocate, or sceptic. Sceptic is the easy one. It’s the people who like doubt the benefit of humour. They’re the serious person, they’re the people that are like work as opposed to feel like work. Wipe that smirk off your face or whatever, they’re the people that are out there so we’re not going to ignore that that. Then the entertainers is kind of what Ryan Reynolds most like default is in some ways, because he’s just a great performer. The way that he delivers material as an actor, et cetera, the way that he is as Deadpool is what brings that character to life, is that performance. And that’s what we as natural speakers are, is a lot of times our humour is the entertainment piece.

But what’s really interesting is that Ryan Reynolds also has a great component when it comes to an engineer. If you look at what he’s doing for Aviation Gin or what he’s doing with his marketing company, where they’re effectively using humour, it is very much about how do we use humour to sell a product? Or how do we use humour to do product placement in a tongue in cheek ways? And that’s an engineer. An engineer is someone who is using humour to solve a specific problem. And that’s actually where the map comes into play, whereas a speaker you might say, oh, I had this one client, they reached out, they’re really interested and it’s been a week and I haven’t heard anything from them. Can I use humour as a way to somehow bring that conversation back to the fold? And you can say, okay, that’s an initial thinking as the engineer, how do I get someone to come back?

And then you might say, okay, well I can adapt the curator persona. The curator is someone who finds funny stuff out there, but they don’t necessarily have to create it. Let’s say they see a very funny commercial that Ryan Reynolds is in and it makes them think of that client for whatever reason, because maybe they’re in the same space or maybe they had talked about it or now if I wanted to get your attention for whatever reason, Austin, and we haven’t talked in a while and I know you’re super busy, next week I might send you an email and be like, Hey Austin, I just saw this great video from Ryan Reynolds. Not sure if you’ve checked it out, but it made me laugh. I send a link to that video. And then I might say, Hey, by the way, if you have a chance, let’s try to connect next week. 

So now I’ve sent something that is funny, a Ryan Reynolds video that I didn’t create, I didn’t have to get his permission because it’s a link to publicly something out there, and now you receive that. And the first thing you receive isn’t feeling bad because you haven’t responded. It’s a positive light moment in your day. And like, oh, this is fun. Maybe I should respond to drew. Maybe I shouldn’t get back to them.

Taylorr: Yeah. I love this conversation for a couple of reasons, but mainly because you said that humour can often be used in the engineer type. How can we use this to do product placement better. I think it was Ryan Reynolds, I might be completely wrong about this now that I’m thinking about it. I could be wrong, but it’s Mint. I think he just bought a phone company. 

Austin: That’s him.

Taylorr: Yeah. Right. Okay, great. Yeah. Just bought a phone company. I saw an ad on YouTube and he was like, so this business is basically going to suck because I’m running it. Oh, I’ve actually won’t. And it was he was basically using that engineered humour to do that product placement for Mint, so it was a real world example. You just shared with us to explain that that makes a lot of sense

Andrew: By explaining what other people do, that’s part of the curator. For the speakers listening, you can start to say like, oh, I do a little bit of that. I do a little bit of that. And that’s what we mean by this persona is you’re going to adapt even the first persona is that of the enthusiast, and this is someone who just appreciates humour. And it’s something that Austin is doing very well right now. While I’m talking, he’s nodding his head, he’s smiling a little bit, he’s laughing, et cetera. And same thing for you as well, Taylorr, just his is more crystal clear, that video is it’s bigger there, but that’s an example of being positive, showing that like, oh, I feel good about what I’m saying, because someone is now smiling to me. So if you’re in a virtual call with a client, you want to have your video on, you want to be engaged because they’re going to feel good about that call because like, oh, I made that person smile or laugh. So even something as simple where you’re not even saying a punchline, you’re just smiling or laughing a little bit more is another example of how to effectively use humour in your day-to-day work.

Taylorr: Wow.

Austin: Yeah, man. So approachable. What an approachable way to look at humour too. People are, I think maybe a little scared of it sometimes too. I feel that way sometimes because it sets yourself up for embarrassment. Nothing’s worse than making a joke that nobody laughs at. And actually…

Taylorr: Vulnerable.

Austin: I think that might even segue into like another question for you Drew. there’s a lot of people out there that would just say, I’m not funny, but just flat out. And maybe some of it comes from fear, but from your angle being the humour expert, why do you think that is? And is that actually true?

Andrew: Well, I think it is. I think the fear of it comes from, for whatever reason we conflate humour with comedy, right? When we think of humour, we immediately think of people who are funny. And so that part of it is understanding that humour is a broader depth and it’s very intentional why I talk about humour in the workplace and not comedy in the workplace because comedy can be very difficult. They think of, oh, I got to stand on stage and tell jokes. And it’s interesting talking with speakers because I’ve taken a number of speakers to do their first standup show and it terrifies them. They’ve spoken on stages all around the world to audiences of thousands people and then we go into a basement, open mic in New York city. And suddenly they’re like, I don’t know if I can go on. I don’t know if I can do that.

And people are intimidated by what they think that that’s what it means. But it’s interesting because it’s like, oh, that would mean like, oh, I’m never going to go for a run because I’m not a marathon runner or, you know, and I’m not going to pick up the guitar to practice, to play because I’m never going to become Jimmy Hendrix. There’s like, no, you don’t compare yourself to the top. There’s a lot of layers in between where there’s still a lot of value. So I think that’s part of it, And I think people are worried about the awkwardness and there’s two things I would say to that one is that a lot of times humour that isn’t effective usually is only awkward if you make it awkward. if I tell you a terrible joke, let’s think of a terrible joke.

Austin: Oh my God.

Andrew: We got another pun in here. A man once asked me if I wanted some free fish so I asked what’s the catch right. But no, because it’s a double entendre. It’s a catch because it’s a catch of this and it’s a catch 22, if I try to explain it, if I sit there and the awkwardness, it becomes a little bit more awkward. But if my humour is positive and inclusive and I say a positive, inclusive joke that no one laughs at now, it’s just a positive, inclusive statement. I can say, you know, man once asked me if I wanted some free fish and he asked what’s the catch. It didn’t work out in that scenario, but I’m going to keep on going on. You almost don’t even notice that it was an attempt at a joke. It’s only if I pause to make it awkward. And then the last thing, if we want, we can talk a little bit about this idea because it’s kind of big within the news of cancel culture. I can’t use humour because people are too sensitive and that kind of stuff, so I think that sometimes worries people.

Taylorr: Yeah. I would love to dive more into that topic cause I can, I can almost hear it in my head already. Let’s think about like speakers, coaches, consultants, we’re in this professional world, we think of using human where like all my audience, there’s no way that this is going to work. I think that there can be a default setting, and I think some of it can be fear around this idea of using humour in an improper way. Can you speak more to that?

Andrew: Certainly. Well, first of all, we have to be honest, I don’t want to sugar coat it or pretend like that it doesn’t exist. It’s a very real risk, especially as a speaker in a corporate audience, because in some ways you have to play to the most conservative person in the room. I don’t mean that politically, I mean in terms of their level of humour, because you might make 99% of the room laugh. If you got an audience of 100 people, you might make 99 people fall out of the chairs laughing, but if one person is offended by it and that person either is a senior leader, the person bringing you in, or someone in HR or someone that then goes to HR, that entire thing could come down. A lot of times I’ve heard from clients like we were told, we can never hire another comedian.

Well, we saw your TEDx talk and we can frame you as not a comedian. It’s like, yes, I’m an engineer. First don’t even frame you as a comedian, I’m just an engineer who talks about humour. So there is certainly this risk, this fear about it. I think one to completely throw humour out as a skill because it can be used in poor ways is to say, I’m never going to talk because I might fumble a word or something that I might say, or I’m not going to use a CRM because I might forget to jump into it one day so I might as well never use it. You all know, no its practice is repetition, it’s changing, it’s improving. So the people who tell me that they’re like, oh, I’m not going to use humour because people are too sensitive or cancel culture to me, what I hear is either I am not skilful enough in my humour to adapt, to changing times, I’m too lazy to try or I’m so prejudice that I can’t get past that and move to humour that is appropriate to other people. 

And so part of it is learning what is appropriate and the last thing that I’ll say just kind of very high level is that there’s typically three reasons why humour is inappropriate when there is a risk. It’s either an inappropriate target and inappropriate topic, or it comes at an inappropriate time. If you’re poking fun at something, that’s where, where we talk about it, like you don’t want to punch down, so that means it’s an inappropriate target. Inappropriate topic, just because you’re using humour. Doesn’t mean it’s okay for you to then talk about sex, drugs and rock and roll and other things that you would maybe not talk about in a workplace and then inappropriate time. Yeah. If you just fired someone or if someone just went through a big layoff and then you come in, like, let’s talk about all the fun stuff and the audience is sitting there, they’re like, how can you possibly talk about humour when we just laid off half of my friends? It’s like understanding the right moment for it.

Austin: Yeah. There’s obviously pitfalls here. But I also think like situationally, sometimes making a joke when things are dark can be the thing that reignites the spirit and coping, [cross-talk 19:38] but also seems like a really fine line to be walking. Do you have guidelines for yourself in place that allows you to sort of poke down paths that maybe seem like they’re kind of teetering on the fence there, but in a way that really does end up being a positive experience for everybody?

Andrew: Well, I think one, it’s important to recognize exactly what you said. In comedy, there’s this idea that comedy equals tragedy plus time. With the intent of that, being that if something tragic happens after enough time as a last, you can find the comedy in it. This is why we’re allowed to make jokes about the Titanic sinking But it still feels very too soon for a lot of people with 9/11. Both are tragedy, Both are a lot of people died in terrible, tragic ways, but because enough time has elapsed or we’re now to the point, like we can make jokes about Abraham Lincoln and that, but not something else. So enough time has elapsed. That’s true for ourselves as well individually, I can laugh about how I was in high school. About me being the very nerdy person, and I had, I don’t know if you all ever did the spike tips with blonde hair, all that stuff, had that. I had a study earring at one point.

Austin and Taylor: Nice.

Andrew: I had a stud airing and Harry Potter glasses, which I realized is basically the mullet of facial accessories. Because it’s like, I’m all business here, but I’m party right here. I can laugh about that now, that was tragic when it was happening. So enough time passes, you get comedy. What I’ve realized though, is when something tragic happens, if you can find the comedy in it, it will make it feel like more time has elapse. It almost gives you more perspective. So exactly to your point in tragic times really important for us to be able to find that sense of humour, but how do you then do it well? Well, part of it, going back to this idea of the map, the map stands for a medium audience and purpose. And so audience is really, really key. Not only is it, what does the other person need? What does that person know? What do they expect? But also what is your relationship with them? 

I would imagine the humour that the two of you use with each other might be very different than with a client that you’re meeting for the very first time because your relationship is different. Because you know, oh, hey, I know Austin kind of likes this type of humour, Taylorr kind of likes this kind of humour, but this client, I’m not exactly sure of so I need to be the safest with that humour and then over time, I’m going to learn it a little bit more and it might refine or might change. I think that’s part of it, and also coming from a place of good intent. I think that for the most part, most people, if you say something that it does bother them or irk them, if they know it’s coming from a place of good intent, not that it was just a joke, but that you meant it in a positive way, I think people will often give that grace. A lot of times the things that you see in the news of where people are like, oh, this person needs to be cancelled, is a lot of times they show zero remorse for anything that they said or did.

Taylorr: Yeah. That makes perfect sense. On a lot of people’s minds or at least my mind just having this conversation about humour, especially like in the context of running a business, growing a business, how do we incorporate humour, not only just into the workplace, but into our marketing, into our sales, how have you found humour to be successful and actually growing a business? And have you found it to be not as impactful for the business in any scenario?

Andrew: I think it’s incredibly vital. If you look at the type of posts that often get shared or re blog, et cetera, it is either something so poignant, it’s never been said before, or it’s funny and something so poignant, that’s a great bar to go after, but really, really hard. Much easier for me to make a pun much easier for me to… let’s get to number four, much easier for me to say I think the secret to being a good ghost is to act super natural. 

Taylorr: Wow. Is that number four for the show?

Andrew: That was number four for the show. [Cross-talk 23:31].

Austin: Delivering our promises Drew, thank for that.

Andrew: Exactly. You got to set the stage and then over deliver. That’s easier to share than it is to like, here’s this thing that’s going to completely blow your mind. And you can do a little bit of both, but humour, absolutely helps with that process. The way that I’ll frame it is this Taylorr, and actually both of you can answer this question. It’s a very dumb question, but a very important question. And the dumb question is would you rather do something that is fun or not fun? 

Taylorr: Fun. [Cross-talk 24:04].

Andrew: So Taylorr says fun, Austin you on fun, yeah. People listening [cross-talk 24:07].

Austin: I think that’s what I landed on. 

Andrew: Yeah, exactly. As long as it doesn’t cost too much money or end up with me in prison or anything like that, you’re like, oh, I’m going to go fun. Well, that’s exactly true, so then if you were to make your marketing a little bit more fun, would people be more likely to engage with it? If you were to make your emails out to people a little bit more fun, would they be more likely to respond? If you were to make your programs a little bit more fun, would you get more interest, engagement, spin, et cetera? And the answer, the research around all of it says yes, right? That’s where humour can help and this is where being the engineer is very important where it’s not just humour for the sake of humour. It’s not like, well, okay, I listened to this podcast, I’m supposed to start with a joke so I’m going to read a joke off of the internet. I’m going to find something let’s see. I was sending something to some HR people today and so I said, you know, you can’t actually spell humour without HR because then it would just be humo.

Taylorr: Good joke.

Andrew: I think it’s a good joke. I actually got that from my mom who’s been her career in HR, but it’s not like you listening to that and be like, okay, I’m going to reach out to Sherm now, and I’m just going to start with that line. And then everything else below it is going to be boring. It’s not just that. It’s like, okay, how does this actually help me to do the thing that I already wanted to do? Maybe use that to capture attention and then that leads into something else. Or maybe you use a metaphor so that you can explain something that’s pretty complex in an easier way. Like, hey, a speaker CRM is exactly like blank and you make it more engaging, make it more interesting. And so I think that connection is really important also. It comes back to the why. Comes back to why you actually doing this thing.

Austin: Yeah. Are you ever surprised by people’s reaction to some of this stuff? When you first started going down this path, were you thinking that this was going to be embraced? Did you think that people were going to be sceptical of it? Because I’m hearing everything that you say and it’s very logical, but I question how often that it’s actually applied.

Andrew: It’s a great question, and I’ll say humour is very interesting as a topic. If we talk about the marketing in all of this, when people ask me kind of like, what would you do differently? I don’t know that I would have branded what I do around humour. I probably wouldn’t have called the company Humour That Works because there’s something nice about saying I speak about employer engagement and then showing up and being really funny because you’re breaking expectations. As soon as humour is part of the conversation, it does two things. One, it raises the bar for how funny the program has to be, because now they’re like, even if it’s like, we’re going to talk about humour and depression. People are like this better be a funny talk about depression, just because the word humour is in the title.

And so it raises the bar of what needs to be funny, you have to have more punchline stories, et cetera, and in part of it. But at the same time, interestingly enough, in some ways it lowers the perceived status of what you’re going to talk about. People are then like, okay, humour, this is a nice to have, but what I really need is leadership training. Or we’re seeing this a lot of like humour is kind of interesting, but we really need to do stress management. It’s like, oh no humour can help with stress management. Or we’re trying to create psychological safety. It’s like, well, humour is a great litmus test for your organization, for the company culture. And so a big part of it is making sure that I make that connection. No one hates humour, but no one is searching for it.

There’s maybe a thousand global, monthly searches for the phrase humour in the workplace, but people are looking for an engaging speaker. They’re looking for employee engagement or communication skills or creative thinking, all of which humour can help, so a big part of any brand or any, any marketing is being sure of how you connect, what you do to what problem you’re actually solving. That’s the key for us is making sure that we’re connecting it back to that solving the problem. That’s when people are like, okay, now I’m on board with this.

Austin: Yeah. Because humour, humour’s a vehicle, it’s a tool. It’s a tool that we can use to achieve whatever else it is that we want to achieve.

Andrew: Exactly. And that’s part of the intent for people to take away. Is this not meant to be that you’d have to make everything entertaining. I’m kind of tongue in cheek, adding puns as we go through, because I just think they’re fun and was out of the promise. I’m not saying every time you do it, oh, I would need to incorporate humour so I need to share a pun every single time. 

Taylorr: That’s not a takeaway here.

Andrew: That’s not the takeaway. Could takeaway. I’d be okay with that. I think the next person that you have on should have a pun as well, you should give them that challenge. What’s the joke that you like?

Austin: Okay, deal.

Andrew: But it goes back to that intent piece. And to say that it is just a tool, doesn’t mean that it’s the only tool that you use, but it’s another one in your tool belt, as a speaker, as a business owner, as an entrepreneur to help you do your work more effectively.

Taylorr: Yeah. Oh man, this is gold. We’ve been talking a lot about how we can use humour, I don’t know if the right word is externally, in our marketing company, in our relationships and so on, how can we use humour more internally? When we’re in the weeds and things are tough, have you found that the same frameworks apply just to yourself or?

Andrew: Absolutely. So the map still applies and that I think is that the helpful thing, if you want to be of the personas, if you want to be an engineer, the map is what comes into play and it helps you to do the other ones as well. But it’s basically like, okay, what is the medium, the scenario? If you’re okay, my medium is I’m speaking to the audience, that’s a little bit different versus the medium is me in my own head. The audience is me and maybe the purpose is I want to make emails a little bit more fun, so one of the things that I’ll do is when I’m reading emails, I’ll start to read each of the emails in a different accent in my head. Like what if Austin sounded like The Incredible Hulk? Or what if this was R2D2 and it’s me just beeping to myself as I read through the lines?

Taylorr: He changes tone to the actual beep.

Andrew: Yea, like beep, beep, beep. Beep, beep, beep. Ps I need [inaudible 29:28].But that’s just a way of playing my work of trying to make it a little bit more fun. Or one of the easiest things people can do is kind of combining that enthusiast and curator thing is just like, if you’re feeling stressed out, take a laughter break. I love like the work that I do, but I know that, hey, as a podcast, this is a little draining for me. Me talking with other people, me doing client calls is sometimes draining and so I’m intentionally like, okay, how do I make sure I have five minutes that I can go on Reddit real quick? Or I can go and see my daughter and give her a hug or whatever this small thing is that’s going to bring me joy. How can I be intentional that I’m relieving stress throughout the day? And that’s a simple way. Again, this is your prescription to go on Instagram solely if you are following people who inspire you, who make you laugh. If you’re going to go on there and it’s going to make you upset because you see all the news or because you’re going to see terrible lies or whatever else is out there, one change your social media feed and then go back to it.

Taylorr: Nice. What a golden nugget.

Austin: The world would be a much better place if we were all focused on things that just made us laugh, as opposed to things that make us angry, because it’s a strong human emotion.

Andrew: It is.

Austin: Laughter, humour, it is. And honestly, I think that’s a good reminder to have. Things get tough and we face challenges as business owners, as human beings but laughter is a pretty strong antidote to a lot of those negative feelings. I know for me, like love stand-up comedy. We have dry bar comedy here in Utah and I’m a big fan of their YouTube channel and stuff. And I just know that no matter how crappy of a day it is, I can go watch a three or four or five minutes stand up bit and it just totally improves my mood, it makes me better with other people, it gets me out of my funk, it’s such a cool thing. I just love the, how comedy improves the world and humour as a whole. I’m glad you made that differentiation for me, by the way.

Andrew: Yeah, you’re exactly right. And I think, especially as speakers, it’s a double whammy because it’s research. Go and watch Hannah Gatsby and see how she, in Nanette special captures an audience and does comedy for 20 minutes and then the brings the room incredibly far down to make a point and then brings them back and takes them on this rollercoaster. Look at look at Tegna Tarro and some of the specialists that she’s done or Allie Wong and how she uses the stage or Chris Rock and how he delivers a story. Any of these comedians, it’s also researched as can I do those components as well? How is I… this is that entertainer component, but how is I as a speaker can I incorporate this? Or you can also just do it. I just need to laugh. So let me go laugh. One of my favourite subreddits is Contagious Laughter. You just go on there and it’s people like here’s a video of someone who gets for whatever reason into a fit of laughter and there’s something just so joyous about their laughter that you start laughing as well. That and wholesome memes or made me smile, there’s a lot of positive things out there if you know how to seek for it and it’s a great break throughout the day.

Taylorr: Wow. 

Austin: Shout out to Reddit.

Taylorr: Shout out to Reddit.

Austin: Thank curating so many funny things. 

Taylorr: Oh man, what an episode, Drew, thank you so much for coming on and as you know, you’ve provided a tremendous amount of value, but what are some of the things you’re working on right now that our listeners can benefit from?

Andrew: Well right now, mentally I’m head, I’m trying to work on a fifth pun so that we can…

Taylorr: Really wrap this up.

Andrew: So that we can end on that. I’ll try to wrap on that while I also wrap up.  Maybe more helpful, what I’m really excited about is this idea that the persona stuff. This is relatively new research that we’re doing that we’re building out. And so we have a completely free assessment. In fact, we have one up for humour.me/speakerflow. So just go to humour.me/speakerflow, take a free two minute assessment and help you understand what is your primary persona, because you can adapt all of them, but sometimes starting with the one that comes most natural to you as an easy starting point to getting into using humour and then from there you can expand. So just go to humour.me/speakerflow, check that out a bunch of free resources on the site and things like that as well. And speaking of websites, I thought about starting an optometrist business, I knew it was going be called A Sight For Sore Eyes. [Cross-talk 34:08].

Taylorr: Oh my goodness.

Andrew: There it is, number five, man. 

Taylorr: There is it. [Cross-talk 34:14].

Austin: That’s funny, good job.

Taylorr: Well Drew, thank you so much for coming on the show, man. This has been awesome. Hey, listen if you liked this episode, don’t forget to write it like it, subscribe to it. And if you want more awesome resources like this, go to speakerflow.com/resources. Thank you so much for chiming in. I just wanted to take a second to thank our sponsor Auxus. Auxbus is the all in one suite of tools you need to run your podcast and it’s actually what we run here at Speaker Flow for Technically Speaking. It makes planning podcast simple, it makes recording podcasts simple, it even makes publishing podcasts to the masses simple and quite honestly, Technically Speaking, wouldn’t be up as soon as it is without Auxbus. Thank you so much Auxbus. And if you are interested in checking Auxbus out, whether you’re starting a podcast or you have one currently get our special offer  auxbus.com/speaker flow, or click the link below in our show notes.