How to Use Humour to Elevate Performance
Facilitator Tips Episode 15

Top Tip: Inject Lots of Humour

This week’s Facilitator Tips episode explores the critical value of injecting lots of humour into your programs.

<< Go to Episode 14   Go to Episode 16 >>

Inviting group members to enjoy your program as much as you can will do more than just brighten their day. As this video explores, inviting your group to interact, share, trust, and laugh will reap multiple benefits.

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Useful Links & Resources

• Powerful Philosophy – a fuller discussion of the philosophical framework of FUNN and why you should inject lots of humour into your programs.
• Serious Fun – my latest book, which discusses the seriously fun approach I use to prepare my groups to achieve their peak performance.
• Serious Fun Audio Book – you can download the first 50 pages of the Serious Fun book for free.

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Video Transcript

Hello and welcome to Episode 15 of the Facilitator Tips video series.

My name is Mark Collard. I’m an experiential trainer and author. In today’s video, I’m going to focus on the value of injecting lots of humour.

This was one of those very early lessons I got from my mentors when I was being an intern and learning and training in this space, just the transformative effect of humorous moments in a program. Because what I saw is that it not only engaged people in what they were doing but it also helped disarm them to be able to build and strengthen relationships, which of course critically amplified the results of what I was doing no matter what the content was.

So it has become one of my most potent tools, but I want to be really clear, I’m not just talking about comedy. I am not a comedian. I am not telling a variety of jokes. But I think we can all understand there are moments that are just funny, and it’s often around observations.

It’s like the essence of what the TV show Seinfeld was all about. It was a show about nothing but it was about laughing at those really funny, ordinary day things that we just had to laugh at because often we were laughing at ourselves that were just so ordinary.

And here’s an example. Right now I would like you to think of your mobile or your cell-phone number but in particular the last digit of your cell or mobile phone number. My guess is you went all the way through the number before you got to the last number, right? Every time I share that with a group there’s always a bit of chatter and a bit of laughter because it’s fun. Most of us do that. We just don’t know the last digit off the top of our heads. So that’s an example of an observation. Just little things like that really are powerful.

And most importantly I’m going to leave you with this last-minute tip, F.U.N.N. This is actually the fun I’m referring to. It is a term coined by Karl Rohnke and I share more about this in Episode 17, but it means Functional Understanding is Not Necessary. That is you don’t actually have to understand what’s going on to have a good time, to nourish the soul and feel good about where you are within the group.

And that’s it for this particular episode. If you’ve got a comment to make or would like to be able to share this with your friends and colleges, please go ahead and do that and leave a comment.

And for further information and links go to www.playmeo.com Episode 15.

That’s it for now. I look forward to seeing you at the next episode.

Bye-bye.