How is your sense of humour?

I think the real test of your sense of humour is your ability to laugh at yourself.  Good leaders can laugh at themselves because they don’t take themselves too seriously.  If you can laugh at yourself and your own mistakes it means you have a strong sense of self-worth: making mistakes doesn’t threaten you.

A good sense of humour can empower you to press on through difficulties.  Laughing can give you strength to endure stressful situations.  It gives you the ability to see difficulties from a different perspective.  Laughter and levity of heart are powerful antidotes to self-pity and discouragement.

I will let this humourous story about a commercial diver convey my sentiments.  It is a letter from a brother to his sister…

“Hi sis,

Just another note from your bottom-dwelling brother.  Last week I had a bad day at the office.  I know you’ve been feeling down lately at work, so I thought I would share my dilemma with you to make you realize it’s not so bad after all.

Before I can tell you what happened to me, I first must bore you with a few technicalities of my job. As you know, my office lies at the bottom of the sea. I wear a suit to the office.  It’s a wet suit.

This time of year the water is quite cool.  So what we do to keep warm is this: we have a diesel powered industrial water heater.  This $20,000 piece of equipment sucks the water out of the sea.  It heats it to a delightful temperature.  It then pumps it down to the diver through a garden hose, which is taped to the air hose.

Now this sounds like a darn good plan, and I’ve used it several times with no complaints.  What I do, when I get to the bottom and start working, is take the hose and stuff it down the back of my wet suit.  This floods my whole suit with warm water.  It’s like working in a Jacuzzi.

Everything was going well until all of a sudden, my butt started to itch.  So, of course, I scratched it.  This only made things worse.  Within a few seconds my butt started to burn.  I pulled the hose out from my back, but the damage was done.  In agony I realized what had happened.

The hot water machine had sucked up a jellyfish and pumped it into my suit.  Now, since I don’t have any hair on my back, the jellyfish couldn’t stick to it, however, the crack of my butt was not as fortunate.  When I scratched what I thought was an itch, I was actually grinding the jellyfish into the crack of my butt.

I informed the dive supervisor of my dilemma over the communicator. His instructions were unclear due to the fact that he, along with five other divers, were all laughing hysterically.

Needless to say, I aborted the dive.

I was instructed to make three agonizing in-water decompression stops totaling thirty-five minutes before I could reach the surface to begin my chamber dry decompression.  When I arrived at the surface, I was wearing nothing but my brass helmet.

As I climbed out of the water, the medic, with tears of laughter running down his face, handed me a tube of cream and told me to rub it on my butt as soon as I got in the chamber.  The cream put the fire out, but I couldn’t go to the bathroom for two days because my butt was swollen shut.

So, the next time you’re having a bad day at work, think about how much worse it would be if you had a jellyfish shoved up your butt.  Now repeat to yourself, ‘I love my job, I love my job, I love my job.’

Whenever you have a bad day, ask yourself, is this a Jellyfish Bad Day?  May you NEVER have a Jellyfish Bad Day!

Life isn’t tied with a bow, but it’s still a gift.”

Good leaders maintain their sense of humour in the midst difficulties, and even amidst Jellyfish Bad Days.

Let’s choose to laugh more often – especially at ourselves.