Humor
- Home
- Skills & Tools
- Humor
Humor can be defined as a skill to understand, express and applaud something absurdly inconsistent. In easy terms, it is a skill of putting forth a difficult thing in an easy way and also understanding it. Humor mostly strikes people as the ability to crack a joke. However, from a more comprehensive point of view, it is also the ability to take jokes.
People who have this skill tend to be amusing, provide pleasant company and have this distinct ability to make everyone laugh. Humor is mostly perceived as an informal skill, but nowadays, it is extensively used in the business world as well.
Importance of Humor
So, how can humor be important to you? Well, even if you are a professional, humor can help you in many ways. Some of the most important ways in which humor can help you in a career are:
- Grasping attention: nowadays, every career requires public speaking skills. In such a situation, humor skills can help you grab attention of the audience.
- Reduction in stress: humor skills can help you bring down the stress by a notch or two. It also makes your speech memorable.
- Persuasion: when all other methods fail, a little humor can be very helpful to communicate the point to the counterparty.
- Humor in sales: many salespeople use humor as a tool to promote the product and extract the right buying decision from the customer
- Interviews: good sense of humor always contributes positively to your performance in interviews. Just make sure you don’t overdo it.
Improving Your Humor Skills
If humor is such an important skill, everyone should be bent upon developing it. However, to many people, humor skills occur naturally in a person and cannot be developed. Recent studies, however, suggest the opposite. Humor skills can be developed by carrying out some simple activities.
In some organizations, the humor skills of the employees are polished by conducting a humor session after every meeting. The idea is to ask the employees to find jokes in whatever they just heard. This simple activity reduces the stress of the whole meeting room and the employees end up developing something special in themselves.
To improve these skills on an individual basis, a person has to be fully aware of the situation he is in. Humor normally stems from the situation and depends critically on it. Something that is appropriate in one gathering may not be fine in another. So an important thing that can contribute positively to your humor skills is awareness of your surroundings. Typical surroundings consist of the following:
- Object: this is the target of humor. In professional sittings, one must carefully choose the object of humor or else the whole thing can go wrong.
- Intensity: this means the strength of humor. In some gatherings, only mild humor is apt whereas in others, everything is allowed.
- Audience: the most important part of the surrounding. Humor should be based on the audience and their preferences.
- Event: the humor you can use on weddings will differ significantly from the one in meeting rooms.
One can substantially improve his humor skills by keeping in mind the aforementioned points. Being aware of the environment generally helps in observing the funny side of things. In addition, one should also have a clear mind since it helps in focusing. By improving such skills, an individual can perform better in his career.
