Using Humor To Maximize Living

Using Humor to Maximize Living affirms, sustains, and encourages people in the practice of humor, not only as a personal tool to optimize a healthy life style, but also to maximize the benefits of humor in everyday life. Check out the research that includes a review on the use...

Humor gets very little respect! While references to the importance of having a sense of humor are liberally sprinkled throughout the popular media, and it is usually mentioned as one of the qualities of effective employees, it is rare to find purposeful humor practice. Humor is without a doubt the one quality that most of us agree is needed in life. However, it is rare to find serious applications on the benefits of applying humor in everyday life and in our world of work. When the federal government tried to incorporate humor into a staff development program of a federal agency, there was an outcry. It seems that humor was thought to be a waste of taxpayer money, and the program was axed. The purpose of Using Humor to Maximize Living is to affirm, sustain, and encourage people in the practice of humor not only as a personal tool to optimize a healthy life style, but also to maximize the benefits of humor in everyday life. Check out the research that includes a review on the use of humor to nurture creativity, to increase the capacity for memory retention, to support an optimal work environment, and to build safe communities that reflect the relational trust necessary for maximizing living.

The motto of this book is smarter through laughter. If you can laugh about it, you can probably change it. The authors use a heavy dose of humor (the laughing side), and a healthy measure of science (the learning side) to help you improve yourself, your relationships, and your surroundings. The book introduces the “I CAN model,” which stands for Interactions, Context, Awareness, and Next steps. Interactions are powerful determinants of health and happiness. There are two skills that can make our interactions healthier: the ability to connect and the capacity to communicate. Context is also a powerful but often neglected driver of change. The contexts of our lives consist of people, places, and things. To leverage context to our advantage we need to master the art of reading cues and changing cues in the environment. Awareness is the next driver of change. Regardless of where you are in the process of change, there is always a next step to strengthen your change, maintain your gains, and keep thriving. To do that, you need to make a plan, and you need to make it stick. The book will teach you how to use these drivers of change to flourish and thrive.

Drawing on the authors’ diverse backgrounds and expertise, this is the first academic volume dedicated to the rarely discussed topic of laughter and humour in positive psychology.

During these uncertain times, what people need most is a good laugh. Imagine what would happen if you understood there is an untapped force, contained within you, that has the power to totally change your life. And what if you discovered all you had to do in order to unlock this secret is simply to start using it? So it is with humor. The Sense of Humor is designed to demonstrate the sense that humor can make in the life of anyone who is willing to use it. Humor will deliver direct health benefits to the user. Outside of this primary benefit, humor will touch the lives of everyone around the user in positive ways for relationships, families, education, at work, in ministries, and so much more. The Sense of Humor cuts across social, economic, ethnic, and educational barriers. Music had been said to be a universal language. So, too, is laughter

The Humor Hack is an entirely different book about using humor to lead a more engaged life. It's a playbook filled with anecdotes, exercises, and discussion of topics that will provide readers a way to understand how humor works and how they can take this knowledge and enrich their personal and professional lives with more laughs, enjoyment, and mirth. The book's content is based in research, but not academic in tone or format, and is accessible to the general reader. The subject matter is broken into chapters that teach people how to understand, recognize, and produce more humor in their day-to-day lives. It is written in a friendly and warm tone and avoids being nothing more than a series of stories about humor or an overly theory-laden academic book. It provides readers with a book that is enjoyable to read, informative, playful, and educational. That's why this is best described as a playbook. The book is meant to provide a sort of text that is missing in the current books out there that profess to be humor how-tos. It takes research related to humor and discusses it in an informed yet accessible fashion.

Many authors have researched the connection between humor and education but as E .B. White said: “Analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog. Few people are interested and the frog dies of it. However, Dr. Peter Jonas takes a broad and practical approach examining the connection between humor and learning. The book uses a meta-analysis and meta-synthesis to identify nine areas where humor significantly improves various aspects of the learning environment. This book provides practical examples, as well as research on how much of an effect (effect size) humor has on Leadership, Learning, Stress reduction, Job Satisfaction, Relationships, Creativity, Culture, Communication, and Engagement. Humor needs to be taken seriously, because when you get people laughing you can transform learning.

Explores how humor can be explained across the various sub-disciplines of linguistics, in order to aid communication.