There are challenges every day and if not every day, at least from time to time in life. Knowing what tickles your funny bone is a great way to reset your emotions and to receive tension.
Today I have been writing a short biography, about my early history in preparation for a breakthrough session that I’m having. You might be thinking, ‘Hang on, Gemma knows all that NLP stuff why does she need a breakthrough session?’ Well the truth is life still shows up, and towards the end of last year, I had some significant challenges and I want to make sure that I have addressed those properly before go out there and spend my time training and coaching other people. The truth is, is that as much as I use my NLP on myself on a day to day basis, sometimes, when the issues are a bit bigger, it’s easier to work with someone else because they can be more objective about what’s going on for you.
So I write my biography, got to the end of it and kind of went “Urgh!” Sometimes when you look back on the challenging stuff, it can feel a bit emotionally draining. What you have to do then, is to get yourself back on track by making sure that you have plenty of LOL moments to reference back to pick yourself up – or at least to know where to go out and find them if your memories do not work effectively for you.
One of the places that go to to find LOL moments is something called DYAC which is “Damn You AutoCorrect.”
I would love to share some with you but they are a bit too rude very often. You know that thing when you are texting and then your phone autocorrects one of the words and changes it to something else and then the message has a whole different meaning. Well, I make a lot of those myself but other people who have made them too, upload them to this website, which is www.DYAC.com. I find it hilarious to sit there and read through them. So for me, if I spend a few minutes scanning through those after I’ve just done something which is emotionally exhausting, or draining, I’ll get a sense of re-energising from that and I’ll also have good a giggle at the same time.
There was another one that I saw recently, that particularly appeals to me because of having worked with children. Children that have said spooky stuff to their parents and, but they’re quite funny spooky things or kids that have done really silly stuff. So, you can go google that one to if you need a pick me up. But, the key thing is it that you need to be creating LOL moments in your life.
I’m really lucky, I’ve got some very good friends, we’ve got a very tight-knit group. And, we’ve got a load of case references, case studies of funny things that have happened in the past. And, I’ve shared one of them previously on the people building podcast, but I’ll share it again here with you today.
I went to Vegas with a couple of friends and there were 4 of us in total, and what happened was, we were going to a shopping mall one day. We’d got about 3/4 of the way to the mall and my friend Chris suddenly got up out of his seat, with all this certainty, as we approached a bus stop and he said ‘This is our stop.’
And we all said ‘OK Chris.’
We all got up and we followed him without hesitation or question, and actually it wasn’t our stop at all.
In fact, we were in the middle of the desert and we were probably half a mile away from the nearest building and it was a government building, so it was nothing like our stop whatsoever. We then had to stand in the desert for another half an hour waiting for the next bus to come.
I do like a quiz night once a month and every now again Chris will say an answer to a question. If we’re maybe not too sure that it’s the right answer and we just have to double-check that we’re not having another ‘following Chris off the bus’ moment. It’s just an in-joke within us and it’s probably not all that funny for anyone else but it’s always funny for me when I reflect on it.
So you want to make sure that what you’re doing in life is creating lots of LOL moments so that when there is a bit of a down day or an emotionally zapping moment, you’ve got some case studies to fall back to. Or, you at least have some reference points for yourself. Where do you go when you need to laugh out loud? It could be somewhere like DYAC or it could be something completely different. Whatever floats your boat. But, the key thing is, is that you must laugh out loud.
By Gemma Bailey
