Catching up with Karyn

Truth is, I don't watch TV much. Mostly it's bad for your health. And honestly most of us don't watch TV as much as we let it drone on in the background until something manages to cut through the clatter.

My stress level begins to climb after just a few minutes of listening to Natalie Morales telling me about the war raging in (name-your-location-here), or Norah O'Donnell telling me about the effects of global warming, or Jean Chatsky telling me I've invested poorly and am going to have to let my favorite child pick out my nursing home. I'll admit it, my chest feels a little tighter, my anxiety is a little higher, and I'm wondering if a glass of Merlot for breakfast would count as a fruit on my Weight Watcher points.

But yesterday something different cut through the clatter. I'm thinking, "Did I hear that right?!"  I stopped what I was doing and looked up. The commercial for Kmart’s gas savings was quick—and by the time I got to where I could see the TV, the ad was...

I'll admit it - when I first saw this restaurant sign featured in the Huffington Post, I laughed out loud. Chances are you did too!

Now imagine what your reaction would have been if, instead of encountering this sign on the internet, you saw it while you were driving through your neighborhood. It's still funny - and the fact that the restaurant shared a funny sign might just be enough to motivate you to turn in and have a taco (even though they're not free!)

Humor is Power: Building Your Business

Businesses that offer their customers a way to laugh gain a significant competitive advantage. Humor is disruptive. It attracts our attention and makes us change the way we think.  The Mexican restaurant advertising “Free Tacos – Yesterday Only!” will make us laugh, but they’re also planting that seed reminding us how much we like tacos. Couple that with the powerful emotional associations people have with humor, and you’ve got circumstances that...

Build The Humor Habit!

Are you looking for ways to add more humor to your life? You should be! Laughter has tremendous benefits for our physical well-being, emotional resiliency, and social connections. Humor is power! When we laugh, we gain both a broader perspective on the world and a strengthened sense of being in control of our life.

It's a great idea to laugh every single day! Here are four websites that made me laugh out loud this week:

Nurse Quotes & Pics This Pinterest Board collects images and sayings hysterical for nurses and others working on the front lines of patient care

The Onion Satire and parody based on today's headlines

xkcd A smart and funny webcomic - scroll over the comics to see hidden text that can make the gag even funnier.

ebaum's world Short funny videos you'll want to share with your friends.

What are your favorite humor websites?

You might not have an immediate answer to that question. Business is hard work. Owning and operating a business can consume your life.  Working for somebody else – whether that’s in operations, marketing, hr, or the dreaded accounting division – isn’t necessarily a piece of cake, either.  We devote tremendous amounts of time, energy, and resources to our work because so much depends on being successful.

Surely this is no laughing matter.

Laughing is the best thing you can do. We’d even argue that you have to laugh if you want to succeed. Don’t believe us? Just ask the people at Southwest.  Their uniquely humorous approach has earned them significant goodwill and provided them with a valuable differentiator in a crowded and competitive marketplace.

You see, it turns out that the strategic use of humor is one of the single most important tools businesses have at their disposal.  The ability to use humor:

• effectively attracts...

I stared at the headline in disbelief. This world offers up many strange things, I know. You can’t be a nurse for any length of time before you run headfirst into the impossible, the insane, or at least the definitively ill-advised.  But here we are, looking at the New York Times, a reasonably well-respected journalistic outlet, reading that Russian Prosecutors Probe Parasailing Donkey.

Somewhere, a Times editor is laughing his head off. Not at the story, which is little more than a questionable marketing stunt that left a donkey dangling above the Azov Sea, braying its displeasure as the waves crashed beneath its hooves for half an hour.

It’s the headline itself that’s funny – read it aloud to anyone at random, a colleague, a friend, a stranger on the street – and you’ll get at least a chuckle. The words are so absurd – the juxtaposition of donkeys and parasailing so unexpected – that the only thing you can do is laugh.

...

There’s absolutely nothing funny about the BP oil spill. No one would argue that – yet people are still laughing. (For example, see BP Spills Coffee)  If there’s one lesson we can take away from this entire tragedy, it’s that humor can fill numerous roles, some of which aren’t immediately obvious.

Humor Provides a Framework for Processing Tragedy

“The oil spill is getting bad,” David Letterman said, “There is so much oil and tar now in the Gulf of Mexico, Cubans can now walk to Miami.” Confronted with an environmental disaster of unimaginable scope, we reach for ways to make sense of it all. Letterman’s joke captured the scale of the spill in an unexpected way – weaving in some social commentary guaranteed to get a laugh from his audience -  deftly informing and assuring his audience that the situation was indeed that bad.

In a similar vein, we see the quips about BP’s new bio-degradable oil...

An experience that makes your customers ‘Feel Good’ is an experience that is going to bring those customers back to you. More than that, “Feel Good” creates word of mouth: customers love to tell their friends, co-workers, and at least some of their relatives about the fantastic time they’ve had, so that their friends, colleagues, and family can enjoy the experience as well.

The problem is that not everyone wants your customers (or patients, if you’re in a healthcare setting!) to feel good. In a book I’ve recently written with two of the smartest people I know (T. Scott Gross and Greg Ayers), we examined the three types of people you’ve probably got working for you, and how they feel about creating a “Feel Good” experience for your customers.

Never Teach a Pig to Sing…It Wastes Your Time and Irritates The Pig!

Not everyone is psychologically capable of extending “Feel Good” to perfect strangers....

Humor as a Cost-Effective Means of Stress Management
Karyn Buxman, MSN, CSP, CPAE

(Originally published in Managing Employee Benefits, (1998).
Humor as a cost-effective means of stress management. Volume 6, Issue 2, pp. 74-78.)

U.S. workers consume 15 tons of aspirin a day. One in four workers suffers from an anxiety-related illness. Soon job stress may be the #1 reason for worker’s compensation. “Terminal professionalism” seems to be a sign of the times. But taking oneself too seriously can have some unpleasant side effects.

WHAT IS STRESS?
Stress is the body’s response to any demand or pressure. These demands are called stressors. Stressors include major life events, such as the death of a loved one or divorce. They entail chronic strains such as living in an abusive relationship. Stressors also consist of occasional strains, such as getting a flat tire in heavy traffic. (Source: Fact Sheet HE-2089, 11-91, Florida Cooperative Extension Service)

RESPONSE TO...

Answer: Pink slip… Bonus….

Question: What’s the difference between anxiety and excitement?

Seriously, though, what is the difference between being anxious and excited?

When you think about it, the two are closely related, but they differ by a degree of perspective. What is your mindset? Are you envisioning the situation you’re thinking about coming out with a positive outcome or with a negative outcome?

We know from studies that a little stress, sometimes known as eustress, can be a good thing. A little stress causes us to be alert, to be ready, to have our “game on.” To have absolutely no stress results in you being the equivalent of a puddle of protoplasm on the floor—no energy, no movement, static—not dynamic. No matter how tempting it may sound, it’s not really good to have no stress in your life!

Too much stress, however, clouds our thinking, muddles our memory, and causes us to make dumb mistakes—not to mention,...

“I’m brain dead,” my pal, Sheila, moaned over her coffee at our break. “I wouldn’t recognize a fresh idea if it jumped in my face and wiggled. I’m just not creative. Am I too left-brained? Where do you get all your ideas?”

What is creativity? Like humor, it’s a mindset, a process, a way of looking at things. Researchers once believed that creativity was found primarily in the right hemisphere of the brain; they believed “right-brained” people were more creative. Now researchers speculate that creativity involves both hemispheres, that it’s a combination of both analytic and intuitive thought.

Are you a creative person? Why is it that as children we’re able to tap into our natural creative abilities only to be stymied later as adults? Perhaps it’s because we’re taught early on to be logical, to look for the one right answer, and to be serious.

As we grow older, our creative tendencies are...