This post called About Laughter came to me while I was in the shower the other day. I guess I was thinking about About Sleep, About Writing and About Car Paint when the word “laughter” popped into my head and then a blog post started forming.
Laughter is the best medicine is an age old saying and according to: Laughter is the ‘best medicine for your heart on the University of Maryland Medical Center, Laughter is the Best Medicine on HelpGuide.org, and Laughter is the Best Medicine on Science Daily, laughter can help prevent heart attacks, help the terminally ill, create great working environments, make your employees think you are more effective, relieve stress & anxiety, etc. A good laugh probably activates some feel good stuff (e.g., endorphins) in your body.
I have some funny people in my family. My late grandfather had this mix of British and Sri Lankan humor that had a high occurrence of bathroom (or lack thereof) references. Us kids thought it was gross and funny at the same time. Even after he had a sextuple bypass at the Cleveland Clinic as well as on his death bed a decade or so later, he was still being funny and irreverent about life and religion. I never could figure out if he was agnostic or not because he would quote the Bible, know hymns by heart, and later in the day make some funny derogatory remark about God, religion and some of his hyper religious relatives. My mother has a similar sense of humor. She also makes up words and describes people in caricature-ally true and funny ways. She even has animal nicknames for all of us kids. Sri Lanka was a British colony for quite some time and had a strong British influence for decades afterward and if you’ve ever watched Monty Python or Blackadder you know what I mean.
I also work with some funny people and a day doesn’t usually go by without a laugh or two or three. Our office manager and I have a similar sense of humor, so she and I send some pretty funny emails around that others can’t keep up with sometimes. We find many of the same things funny and find ourselves laughing at the dumbest of things. We also sometimes cross some lines but fortunately we work in a laid back environment. I have to say that I have met at least one of my 2009 non-resolutions which is to laugh more. I feel like I have laughed a lot more this year than in past years.
When I interned in college, I worked with a great bunch of interns and we were all in stitches often. That’s where I met my friend who I went to the beach with back in June. He, I, and others in our group would come up with practical jokes, say the weirdest things and email about roller coasters and bowling and how they related to life and certain parts of life that most people aren’t comfortable talking about. I remember laughing so much that summer.
Laughter is so important and can help through even the toughest of times. We just can’t take things too seriously in life, start-ups, and margarita’s. Maybe one day I’ll feel comfortable enough to show more of my humor on this blog, but I’m just not sure people will get it and then I’ll feel more stupid than I sometimes do!
An entrepreneurial endeavor without fun, social time, and laughter is not a place I want to be. To me any good company culture has to include smiles, jokes, and many LOL’s. 😀
Now go make someone laugh and if you find yourself laughing until your belly hurts, you can tell people you exercised and did some sit-ups/crunches too!
Author: Aruni |
Filed under: entrepreneurship,
Just For Fun |
Tags: company culture,
laughter,
laughter is the best medicine |
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Photo by my very talented 5 year old niece. She saw this shark outside of her window while they were driving on I-405 in Southern California and quickly took a picture of it!
I was talking to someone I admire the other day, and we were discussing how people are affected by certain things in their lives. Sometimes there is no easy explanation as to why things happen the way they do. There is no 1 + 1 = 2 with everyone nodding knowingly in agreement which can sometimes make post mortem analysis of situations and business projects complicated. She said the things that happen can be subtle yet so profound. Those words resonated with me. It can be very subtle, little things that over time have a profound effect on you.
The effects can be positive and negative. On the positive front, in the right company culture people can achieve more than they knew they were capable of. In those environments the positive reinforcement can be obviously observable or subtle, which is most often the case. The people often don’t realize the difference until months or years later when they look back and see what things they were able to achieve and observe how they feel about coming to work. It can even positively affect their home lives because if they are happy at work where they spend most of their waking hours, they take home less stress.
On the negative side, a friend of a friend of mine was recently telling me about an experience she had at work in a large organization where for three years she worked for a manager who yelled at her occasionally when something wasn’t going quite right. Since it didn’t happen frequently, she thought she would just take it and move on, but it took a huge toll on her psyche and her energy was drawn elsewhere making it hard for her to do her job as effectively as she would like because she never knew when he would start criticizing her. She started to be able to tell him that he should not talk to her that way, but it took a lot of her energy to deal with it. Even after leaving it took her a couple of years to get out from under the berating until her self confidence was up enough to find a job she really enjoyed and performed well in! I was proud of her for doing the work on understanding how she needed to build back up her self esteem.
One of my stay-at-home mom (I still hate that term and she calls herself a zoom-around mom) friends and I were discussing how our children’s behavior can affect our mood. She was telling me how she woke up one day feeling good and then her toddler was in a terrible mood most of the day and it affected the rest of her day. Of course that’s not so subtle but if there aren’t enough smiles and laughter to offset the “I want to pull out my hair” days then you find yourself depressed. And more importantly you find that you subconsciously establish a way of relating to your child or other people in your life based on the subtle and not so subtle cues you send to each other. If it’s not more positive than negative, then more often than not one or the other doesn’t want to be around the other and if it’s really bad they end up on the Dr. Phil or the Montel show. 🙂 This can happen at work or at home.
You often don’t even notice the effect of these little things until later. They can deeply affect your psyche and how you relate to the world. That’s why it’s so important to focus on the proper culture in the workplace and at home because if there is no one paying attention to the subtleties, you might just find yourself in a sharky situation. Yes, I know that was a lame attempt to tie the photo taken by my neice to the content of this post, but I thought it was so interesting that I had to find a way to use it in a blog post! 😎
Author: Aruni |
Filed under: entrepreneurship |
Tags: company culture,
shark picture |
1 Comment »
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