Laughter Is The Best Medicine

I had another life coach tell me one time that I didn’t take life seriously enough, especially as I was supposed to be helping people make positive improvements in their life.  She went on to say coaching was a serious business and it was unprofessional to be joking around with my clients and they could hire a clown if they wanted to laugh.

Her remarks caused me to slowly stroke my chin whilst gazing at my naval for some time. I then went and sat in a darkened room for 8 hours to conduct some serious soul searching as to whether I’d been a very naughty boy.

After some deep reflection and a brief nap I came to a profoundly shocking realization.

She was wrong!

My reality (and that’s all I can ever offer you by the way) is that I take life as as seriously as it needs to be taken, which is not very.

I had a strong urge to phone Eckert Tolle and tell him to come and help because my ego was running amok, but my ego wouldn’t let me, it insisted I tell the whole world (or at least the good readers of the How To Be Rich and Happy blog) about this somewhat startling revelation.

The last I heard everybody ends up dead and it doesn’t matter whether they take what happens prior to that seriously or not. It’s a bummer of a script that you can’t ‘serious’ yourself to a longer life, but that’s just the way it is and I’m afraid we’re going to have to live (and die) by it.

I am going to give you a massive Rich and Happy trick now, one I frequently use with life coaching clients because of its awesome power.

To change your behavior you have to change your state.

With the possible exception of intense fear which I never recommend to my clients, what do you think the biggest state changer known to the human race is?

That’s right, it’s laughter.

Have you ever been in the middle of an argument and the other person has started laughing? Presuming they’re not laughing at you, what did you do? I’ll wager a tidy amount that you started laughing too or at the very least softened your outlook.

The reason being, laughter is more contagious than Swine Flu and definitely a lot better for you. It improves mood, aids the immune system, reduces pain and absolutely obliterates stress. If you don’t believe me try and feel stressed whilst your laughing out loud and you’ll find you can’t.

In Rich and Happy we talk about having a laughter list. This can be either a literal list that you carry with you at all times or a mental list that you can recall at will. On that list should be a number of things (between 5 and 10) that are GUARANTEED to make you laugh.

Then when you start to take yourself or even life a tad too seriously or you are just feeling stressed, you ‘look’ at your list and give yourself permission to laugh off that stress.

Now I do realize that there are occasions when it won’t be appropriate, but they are far fewer than you think.

Rarely if you start laughing will people not laugh with you even if they haven’t got a clue what you’re laughing at. The reason for that is, when you laugh you give other people permission to laugh too.

Isn’t that a cool thing? That by laughing, you make yourself feel better and give the rest of the world permission to feel better too?

This always makes me laugh from a classic old UK TV series, I’d love to know what’s on your laughter list?

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