Welcome to Love Mondays, a weekly newsletter designed as a 3-minute hit to fire up the other 10,077 minutes of your week.

Lighten your load with a little laughter

Everyone loves a good chuckle and laughter is widely known as being a 'medicine', 'cure', or 'therapy' - (insert your fave laughter quote here 😉)

The benefits of laughter and amusement go beyond simply the fun factor - laughter is not only good medicine, it's also good leadership.

When you laugh, how does it make you feel? Write it down 

Consider: how happy and productive do you feel at work when there is no laughter or humour?

Practice: not taking yourself too seriously.

Decide to: inject some humour into your daily routine.

Humour can be a superpower at work and in life

Remember being a child and laughing so freely and frequently? Why is it that as we get older we tend to forget the importance of making time for laughter?

Authors and Stanford MBAs, Jennifer Aaker and Naomi Bagdonas suggest that people fall off a “humor cliff” from the age of 23 — both in laugh frequency and self-perceptions of funniness - and we don't get back our uninhibited laughter until well into our 70s!

The good news is that humour can be learned AND it's a powerful tool that leaders can use to build a positive work environment. Not only does laughing feel good and is good for us, bringing some humour into the workplace has the power to build bonds, creativity, resilience, trust, motivation and can increase productivity.

Aaker and Bagdonas' research found that "Leaders with a sense of humor are 27 percent more motivating and inspiring, their employees are 15 percent more engaged, and their teams are twice as creative." Even a lighthearted line at the end of a sales pitch increases customers’ willingness to pay by 18%.

Don't worry, you don't have to become a comedian or have a bevy of jokes up your sleeve - bringing some (appropriate) humour into the workplace is about creating lightness and ease to balance the seriousness of everyday tasks.

Not everyone is funny in the same way - you can take this quiz to help you identify and understand your natural humour style, and how to wield it with precision and presence.

Try throwing in a few extra laughs this week - see how it makes you feel, and notice how others around you respond. As the saying goes - "laughter is contagious, pass it on".

Wishing you a fun(ny) week friends!


Love your Mondays.