If you are having fun you will look silly to someone. Better to be having fun than being a judgmental voyeur.

Are you having enough fun in your life? What gives you enjoyment? Do you look forward to anything the way you did as a child or has life become serious and mundane?

Here are some activities that I have tried to increase my FQ (Fun quotient).

Visit a magic shop
I visited two magic shops yesterday and bought some hats, a whistle that sounds like a siren, a brick that is really a sponge and a gun that fires soap bubbles. They are all for a conference in Brisbane where I have an audience of over two hundred to educate and entertain.

Take up dancing
My wife and I are attending a dance class for Swing Dancing. It is great fun but we do increase the average age. We are attending with another couple who are close friends and it is a highlight of the week. Something to look forward to.

Develop your sense of humour
I cut out and keep unusual headlines like ‘Iraqi head seeks arms’ or ‘Prostitutes appeal to Pope’. There is enough humour in everyday life if you look closely. Just watching barristers dash around the city in their wigs is comedy enough. I also read humour books often to get new ideas for stories or humour activities. Put up a humour notice board at work and seek contributions.

Your sense of humour and fun is very much a part of who you are. Your sense of humour is your shock absorber and needs to be kept flexible with plenty of play. Watch children if you want to see a natural sense of humour and fun in action. Children laugh around three hundred times a day. Adults around thirty times.

So…find a way to let your sense of fun loose at least once a day and don’t worry about looking silly. Silly is good!

Paddy

FQ, fun quotient, silly, humour

I have read of many experiments to change attitudes to groups of people by forcing contact. If there is no enjoyment in the contact the attitude doesn’t change. It hardens.

The main implication here for us is that we can change the moods of others. The loop is open to outside influence. Be they customers, team members, peers, managers or family members, we can be a major influence in helping others to feel happy.

Some simple ways of doing this are:

• Greet enthusiastically. Don’t tell people how you are. Tell them how you’d like to be. Try some colourful words like: sensational, never been better, enjoying my life!

• Smile. Even if you don’t feel like smiling, others will react to your smile and smile back. You will see their returned genuine smile and react automatically with a genuine smile. Fake can become genuine.

• Shake hands warmly. Physical contact will help people feel better about themselves and about you. Match the strength of their grip and look them in the eye. Soft for soft. Hard for hard.

• Farewell warmly. People will remember the last words you say so make them memorable. ‘Hope to see you again’, ‘Great to see you’, ‘ I have enjoyed speaking to you’.

Humour and laughter spreads quickly to create an upbeat climate. Lose you sense of humour and the world becomes grey. Spread humour and colour returns. Look around you for humour and reasons to be happy. If you woke up this morning you are way ahead of those that didn’t! year.

Paddy

laughter, humour, sense of humour, attitude

There are two ways of reinforcing behaviour. Oh by the way, positive reinforcement is anything you say or do that the other person takes as positive reinforcement. It needs to be as close to the performance as possible.

Back to two ways of reinforcing behaviour. Positive reinforcement follows the performance – it can be a simple ‘thank you’, a gift, a note. The person is encouraged to repeat the performance. You noticed and you showed that you noticed.

Negative reinforcement also works.The person repeats the performance to avoid getting another negative reinforcement from you.This doesn’t work as well as the positive. They may only repeat the performance when you are around and they will only do enough to stay out of your bad books.

If you ignore good behaviour and only notice poor behaviour you run the risk of seeing the good behaviour disappear because it is not being noticed and seeing the poor behaviour reduced ‘when you are present’.

Have you noticed how careful people drive when they see a speed camera? No incentive to drive well, only punishment if you don’t. Same with seat belts. There is an immediate negative reinforcement- you need to take time to settle in and your clothing gets crumpled. The positive is in the future… if you have an accident. The negative is now and certain.

So… let’s get started on using positive reinforcement. Look for opportunities to apply positive reinforcement. When people behave well, comment immediately. Make your comment positive and as close to the performance as possible. Ignore poor behaviour, if you can, and wait for any movement in the right direction. Acknowledge and reinforce any approximations towards good performance.

Do you want your hands to smell like roses or elephant poo?

If you have any stories about the effectiveness of positive reinforcement, please send them to me. My most recent example was at a hotel. As I finished signing my name, the person at the desk commented ‘ lovely handwriting’. You won’t believe the care I took when signing for my meals.

Paddy

hand smell, elephant poo, smell like roses, good behaviour, bad behaviour

The secret is to replace the ‘um’ with a pause. It really is a pause filler that is supposed to make you sound well informed. Gaps are filled with nonsense sounds in case people think that gaps indicate uncertainty or ignorance. In fact, a pause can make you sound very reflective and learned. If you pause before answering a question, providing you look like you are mulling over the best way to answer, you will look and sound well informed.

So remember… put more pauses in your speaking instead of nonsense sounds like ‘um’ and ‘er’ and ‘y’know’ and ‘kinda’. Replace the nonsense sounds with meaningful silence. If you are relaxed, a long pause at the start of speech will have the audience on the edge of their seats with anticipation.

pause, speaking nerves, um, er, speaking

My wife and I recently attended a sales evening for time share and it was very obvious that few of the sales people looked at the audience except for glances. The impression they gave was of passing interest not real interest. You will notice when people look closely at your eyes. You will certainly notice when they don’t.

So here is a very useful exercise that will improve your listening skills and help you build rapport very quickly with everyone you meet.

For the next day, look closely at people’s eyes and identify the colour of their irises. It is especially important that you do this as you are first meeting them. Really look deeply into the colour and see how it varies from the outside to the inside of the iris.

eye language, listening skills, building rapport, positive impact

One speaker didn’t start with this predictable opening. This speaker started with a story about the courage of two people who started a company from a garage in 1976. It was a very different opening and had me wondering from the first words.

The other thing I noticed was that the speaker avoided using the personal pronoun ‘I’ and spoke in the present tense. The focus was on the story and the audience.  He  says to his partner ‘We need a marketing manager’. His partner replied’ What about the Marketing Manager of a large multi national company like Pepsi?’

Towards the end of the story, the speaker drew us into the story with the use of ‘You’. ‘What you can learn from such a story is that you need to believe in yourself’.

The lesson I learned was the powerful use of story to get a presentation  or conversation started and the importance of using ‘You’ to focus on the other person and their needs.

The company is Apple.