Laugh, eat, drink…

… certainly sounds like the right thing to do at this time of year!  As per an earlier post here, the VPS-CIN ran a Christmas Celebration last Thursday, featuring Humour Australia.  You can read more about what happened on the CIN site. 

Since I attended this session, Troy Swindells-Grose of Humour Australia left some interesting comments on my earlier post.

It was a great session.  Like a lot of these things, it strongly reinforced a lot of what I already knew, and added in some new ideas as well.  I was reminded of one of my favourite quotes:

“You must be the change you wish to see in the world.”
 – Mahatma Gandhi

Of course, there is another great Gandhi quote:

Reporter: “Mr Gandhi, what do you think of Western civilisation?”
Mahatma Gandhi: “I think it would be a good idea.”

I was interested to hear about the existence of “laughter clubs” – groups of people that just get together and laugh!  A great way to release endorphins.  During the session, Troy referred instead to “dolphins”, and how when you laugh they swim around and tickle the pleasure centres of your brain…

Another relevant quote:

“Innovation is like humour – it occurs at the intersection of the expected and the unexpected.”
 – Charles Savage

This is all important stuff.  However, it does not have to be serious.  “Seriousness and Capability are not related.”

A key part of the whole topic is the concept of “Locus of Control”.  We can’t take on the whole world and its ills all at once.  However, if we start by making some impact on the stuff that we do have some control over, then we save ourselves the stress of worrying about the things that are outside our control, but we start to make a difference anyway!

At the session, I was the lucky winner of an autographed copy of the book: Eat Chocolate, Drink Alcohol, Be Lean and Healthy.  It looks like this should make good holiday reading.  This book, authored by Andrew Jobling, was the topic of a CIN post last month.