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Sharad Lal: Hi, everyone. Welcome to how to live. Podcast that explores ways to live a good life. I'm your host Sharad Lal. This is episode 80. Our guest today, Andrew Tarvin Discovered something surprising. His engineering skills made him stand out at work. It helped him connect better with people and get promoted faster. And eventually inspired him to start his own company.
Humour that works. Today Drew's company has worked with over a hundred organisations, including IBM GE and even the FBI. Drew's TEDx doc has reached 14 million views and he's the author of multiple best-selling books. He's been featured in the wall street journal and fast company and was named a visionary under 40 by the P and G alumni network. In this episode, Drew and I break down how Umer makes you a more effective leader. We talked about how you were at work different from Yuma with friends. We'll explore different types of humour and Drew will even share some easy templates you can use to bring a bit more humour into work and life. As someone who usually talks about serious topics like purpose and living a fulfilling life. I found this conversation to be both insightful and a fun reminder that humans can enhance even the most serious messages. But before we jump in, thank you very much for your incredible support. With all your support we're in the top 3% worldwide. And I listened to 40 countries. If you haven't already, please do subscribe. Now let's dive in.
Here's the amazing Andrew Tarvin.
Sharad Lal: Hey, Andrew, welcome to the How to Live podcast. How are you doing this evening?
Andrew Tarvin: I am doing very well.
Sharad Lal: Where do we find you?
Andrew Tarvin: I am currently located in Panama city, Panama.
That's so exciting. Our first guest from Panama. Maybe we get into that. What brought you, I knew you grew up in the United States. What brought you to Panama?
Andrew Tarvin: Yeah. So the very shortened version we can dive deeper into things is born and raised in Cincinnati, Ohio, and went to Ohio state university in Columbus, moved to New York for 12 plus years, met a wonderful German woman, and got married. She works for the UN, which is based here in Panama city.
Sharad Lal: We thought we'd be here for maybe two, three years. We're going on four already and seem to be here for at least the next few years before we make any other decisions. It's a little bit like Singapore. People come here for six months and then 10 years later, they're still around.So Andrew, both of us got our start at P& G and P& G is a very structured company, a huge organisation. And then at some stage you left PNG and thought, let me go into the humour space and humour at work.
How did that happen?
Andrew Tarvin: Yeah, so it's not your traditional career journey for that,with a computer science and engineering degree. And so I'll give the context that growing up in PNG was like my dream job, right?
so for me to go to Ohio state university, get a degree in computer science and engineering, and get very fortunate that I get a job at PNG afterwards, it's like. Okay, I'm set. This is my life for the next 40 plus years. I'm going to rise to the ranks.
But for me, while I was in university, I started doing improv and stand up comedy. And not because I thought I was a funny person. I was forced to do it by a really good friend of mine. But what I realised is the longer I was at P& G, the bigger the roles that I got,
The more I ended up drawing on what I had learned and was learning in improv and stand up because I was still doing it after I graduated. And less what I was learning in my computer science classes, things like how to communicate so people actually listen and how to solve problems, how to not be nervous when I was pitching an idea to the CEO and how to manage my own stress a little bit better.
I realised that. This is crazy. Why did no one talk about how valuable humour is as a skill? Cause I started doing this research and realised there were a bunch of benefits to it. no one talked about it. I never learned it in business class or anything like that.
Andrew Tarvin: as Gandhi almost said, be the comedian you wish to see in the world. I realised if no one else is talking about it, maybe I should talk about it. because humour had just come to me. Completely transformed my life as an introverted computer geek and turned me into someone who is getting promotions and awards and things like that.
I feel like other, especially introverted nerds like me should hear this message. That started me, doing a humour that works part time in 2009. And then ultimately left P and G two and a half years later, when I realised it was a passion that I had and something that could be sustainable.
So that was, 12 plus years ago,helping people learn this wonderful skill of humour.
Sharad Lal: What a wonderful story. So I just want to click into it. Your technical skills after a point of time were not as useful as the improv skills you were learning, from the comedy club next door.
And as you started using those skills, you started doing better. Your leadership skills were better. You were able to present better and you went up. Are there any stories that come to mind, or maybe just a story that comes to mind where you used humour in a very difficult situation and that made you realise that, wow, this actually can work.
Andrew Tarvin: Certainly. there's a couple of prompts along the way that helped me realise how valuable humour was. One of them was actually the humour from my manager. Like I remember, relatively early on, we're working on a project We were behind a little bit on schedule and we're in a late meeting, it's after hours and me and this other coworker are just butting heads and the tension is rising
my manager came in, got a little bit of the sense of the room and he was like, hold on. At the end of the day, we sold soap. We are not curing cancer. We are not in an actual war, And we both started laughing about how ridiculously stressed out we were about this concept of, we sell soap and the idea wasn't. To trivialise what it is that we're doing.
But it was at that moment that we needed it. And so that was just for me, one of those first early ideas of Oh, wow. an offhand comment like that completely reset the room.
Another really big one was, I remember being in this meeting at PNG that was incredibly boring, like it was one of those days that I was incredibly overwhelmed and stressed out.
I ended up in this meeting late in the afternoon that was just so terribly dry that I wanted to cry, right?
I looked around the room. Other people were bored as well. I distinctly remember the woman next to me had written the word blah on her notepad and was just circling it over and over for five minutes. And the problem with this particular meeting was that I was the one leading the meeting.
Sharad Lal: Seriously? Wow, man!
Andrew Tarvin: was the one I was bored while talking and I had this realisation like if I'm bored while talking they're bored while listening and so to cut a longer story a little bit shorter I didn't know what to do. I called my mom, who in addition to being like a wonderful mother also spent, you know, her entire career in HR, and she was like You should try using some of the improv and stand up stuff that you're doing on the side at work.
I was hesitant to be taken seriously. I want people to know that I'm a professional and I don't want to offend anyone.
but she convinced me to give it a try. so what I did was the next day I went in. I wrote a status report for the boring meeting that I had the day before, and at the bottom, I just decided to include a pun, just like a terrible joke, cause I love wordplay.
I decided to keep doing that each week. I would send this email out, send a little joke at the bottom, don't really think too much of it. That goes by for six, seven weeks. One morning I send out that email, go to lunch and come back and I have a bunch of replies to that email. I'm like, Oh, I've offended someone.
I'm going to get fired because I said something incorrect, maybe the project. I don't know. I've made some type of error. And it turns out that I had made a huge mistake. And that I had forgotten to include a joke at the bottom of the email. So all of the replies in my inbox were like, Hey, where was this week's joke?
It was another light bulb moment where I realised that adding humour made the work more fun for me, which if that was all it did, that would be beneficial enough. But two, it was getting people to read my boring project management status update reports.
they at least had to open it and scroll to the bottom. And that gets us a lot further than other people. And as a result of that, I decided to write about it internally.
P& G had these internal blogs. so I proclaimed myself the corporate humorist of P& G. I wrote a blog about it. I got business cards made up. I assumed someone would stop me.
Like what are you doing? But it took great credit to PNG. My manager was supportive of it. HR was supportive of it. Legal was supportive of it. That blog gave me the excuse to start researching it more.
That blog became the starting point of humour that works later, which then became the business that I've been running for over a decade.
Sharad Lal: Very cool story. So as you started seeing humour working, and you said, all right, now I want to make this a business, How did you go about it?
Andrew Tarvin: for a long time, I didn't know that it was a business, right? I didn't know speaking to you was a thing that you could do. I was doing a bunch of stuff internally at PNG. I'd be like, Hey, can I lead like icebreakers in the morning or,
Can I do like an hour-long improv and communication workshop? I love speaking because it's basically standing up with a message. And I love introducing people. to this skill.
so eventually I was like, if people at PNG who are smart and ambitious and type a and want to get results done, et cetera, if they're really resonating with this, if this is being beneficial to them, maybe there's people in audience outside of PNG that would enjoy it as well.
Sharad Lal: So as you were figuring out humour that works in the corporate world, what kind of humour works in the corporate world and how is it different for humour when you're sitting with friends and cracking jokes?
Andrew Tarvin: It's a great question. First of all, from a branding perspective for people listening to this, I did have to figure out that at the end of the day, no one in the workplace, no one really cares about humour. They're like, yeah, it would be nice if I laughed a little bit more, but that's not like at the top of the priority list,
people don't know that humour can actually solve each of those things. Humour can improve leadership. It can enhance presentation skills. It can help you to manage stress, yada, yada, yada. And so from a marketing standpoint, from a business perspective, I had to figure out how to, how do I market? Humour is a valuable professional skill.
The primary reason you're going to use humour with friends is just for everyone to have a good time. For you all to laugh and enjoy each other's company and kind of riff. And just because it's a whole lot of fun, the primary reason for using humour in the workplace should be, I think.
For a more strategic purpose to have a more specific idea in mind, right? humour that you use at the beginning of a presentation, because you want people to listen to you and think that you're a good speaker, et cetera, so that you can get buy-in on your idea a little bit later.
So the biggest difference from a strategy standpoint is that there is actually a strategy to using humour in the workplace, rather than with your friends. And then the second thing is that the style of humour that you use is going to be different depending on the context. Like with friends, you can use aggressive humour, sarcasm, satire, You can poke fun at each other, and
That's not necessarily a good mindset to have with clients in the corporate world where you're like, okay, we met for the first time. I'm gonna just poke fun at you as much as possible.
Sharad Lal: There's a strategic intent, as you said, and then of course there's a style and let's talk about strategic intent, the areas that it comes into work for people just listening who might think, Hey, how do I bring it on? One is like you said, diffuse tension, which is very clear.
The other is you're trying to sell something. and it's a presentation. You start with humour to build a connection. What are other ways in which humour can be useful?
Andrew Tarvin: We have built a list of over 30 benefits to using humour in the workplace Backed by research case studies, real world examples. And we realised that they really Fall into what we call the work pyramid. Cause if you think about any job, it really comes down to five core skills.
No matter who you are, what you do at the end of the day, first, you need to execute. You need to be able to complete a task. You need to be able to send emails the right way or respond to certain things. You need to be able to shave an alpaca. If you're an alpaca farmer, there are certain tasks that you just need to be able to execute.
Humour can help you to manage your energy better. So you can stay more productive and stay better able to execute. Next, the second skill is you have to be able to think. Both critical and creative thinking.
Humour and creativity are very closely linked because they're about making unique connections. And in one study, they found that. Students who watched a comedy video before trying to solve a problem were nearly four times more likely to solve that problem than students who watched no video or watched a maths video instead, right?
So humour helps to warm up the brain. So that helps you to take care of humour and thinking. The third skill is to communicate. You need to be able to effectively articulate the ideas that you have in a way that other people can understand.
This is a huge area that humour can help because one humour gets people to pay attention.
You can also use humour to better explain an idea, create associations, et cetera. So humour is really valuable for communication. The fourth skill is to connect, to build relationships.
This was one that I was not good at all, right? The emotional intelligence and empathy and basically dealing with other humans aspect of it. But, as Victor Borg said, the shortest distance between two people is a smile. So if you can get people to laugh, if you can get people to smile a little bit, then you feel like you're closely connected together.
And then the last skill is leadership. Is not necessarily even leadership as a position, but the ability to influence people to do something. And humour is incredibly valuable for that. Because one, if you make something more fun, people are much more likely to do it. Studies have found that leaders that have a sense of humour are seen as more in control and top of things.
So for us, we frame it around those five kinds of things. High level, what do you want to do? Because the humour that you use as a leader is different from what you might use when you're trying to improve your execution.
I'd love to dig into the communication part and let's say communication for leaders because that's a little complicated. I'm struggling. You have serious messages to give, you want to make sure that it's received right, but at the same time you want to use humour and it's difficult. Do I crack a stupid joke?
Andrew Tarvin: Do I crack a very intelligent joke that most people won't get? What should I do? How do I do that? For sure. So there's three kinds of humour techniques that I think are particularly valuable, especially if you're communicating as a leader. The first one, the most powerful one in general for anyone, is storytelling.
I should clarify that when we talk about humour, particularly in the workplace, we're not talking exclusively about comedy.
Humour is a little bit more broad, so it could be making them laugh, or it could be making them smile, or it could be making them kind of nod along in agreement,
That sometimes is all you're going to get in an office setting. So first of all, just using a story is already making things a little bit more engaging. And then two, the nice thing, especially if you have to talk about something serious, is that you can add humour in the story because of a mistake that you made or something that you did, or just the story itself is funny.
I think what's really valuable when you're meeting someone new is working on your origin story. Who are you? Why do you do what it is that you do? How did you get here?
Andrew Tarvin: So storytelling would be number one. The second strategy would be self deprecating humour. so self deprecating humour is a negative form of humour where your target is yourself. One, it's really good when you are in a high status position because what self deprecating humour does is says you don't take yourself too seriously.
that you're willing to poke fun at yourself. And so that's really valuable if you're in a high status position,
two watch outs with the self deprecating humour. One is you want to use it sparingly. if self deprecating humour is the only type of humour that you use, people will either get tired of it. Or they'll worry that you have self esteem issues, or they'll think that you're trying to throw a pity party, or they'll start to believe you that you're not actually good at what you do, right?
The second caveat is that self-deprecating humour should be something that's not about the thing that you should be good at. If you are a sales leader, you don't want this self-deprecating humour to be like, Oh my God, I'm so terrible at sales.
then the third strategy more from a broader communication standpoint, when I would say is associations. Is making the connection. If you've got something really serious that you need to communicate, or in the case of a lot of our clients, something really dry that you need to communicate. You can create an association for that stuff. I remember, when I was at p and GI was asked to help lead a, a three hour intern training, a training for interns on project management.
So we decided to say, okay, we're going to make this extended metaphor, this association about how project management is like a wedding, right?
Traditional project management is a lot like a wedding. So you've got a project charter. Which is,the kind of the vows of what you're going to do. You've got the project initiation document, which is the proposal to begin with. You've got stakeholders who are the family members or any potential kids that Mired already exists.
And then of course, we made the joke that 50 percent of both end in failure. Whether it's a marriage or project management stuff.
It's not necessarily funny But now we can make jokes about planning a wedding or now we can make jokes about marriage now We can make jokes about this stuff and we're not making jokes about project management, which can be important We're making jokes about the association and then later and this is what the feedback was from the organisation from the interns was
Like it just helps them actually understand it to begin with and then remember it longer as well. And there's actual research that shows both of those things are true.
Sharad Lal: I love the definition of humour out here. It's not necessarily always funny. It's interesting, like you said. And I love the last example of funny, where you are not supposed to make fun of the stuff the company is doing.
So you put a metaphor, you put an association and you make fun of that association, not the thing. So that's quite accessible. have you had, Jokes have just nobody's laughed, they've not landed.
Is there an example that comes to mind and how do you work through something like this? How do you recover from that when you're presenting to people?
Andrew Tarvin: Yeah, I wish I could tell you that there is only a single example and that's the only time I've ever been not funny, but it happens all the time. It comes with the territory of trying humour So there's a great documentary that Jerry Seinfeld put out called Comedian.
He decided he was going to retire all of his material, never say any of the jokes again, and start completely from scratch. so this documentary follows his process of going from zero minutes of material that he's never said before, to building out like an entire hour long special and early in the process, he goes and he does a show in New York city.
a woman from another country who'd never heard of Jerry Seinfeld before asked him if it was his first time doing comedy. Because it just wasn't all that funny. He was certainly like a multimillionaire who had one of the most successful kinds of sitcoms on TV, et cetera, was clearly established in a community.
He's getting asked, have you ever done this before? Because he's still learning. And that's part of the process. But one of the things that it taught me is that there is no feedback. is a form of feedback, so the absence of laughter is feedback to say that was not funny, at least in that context, in that scenario, etc. The other thing is to recognize that I learned from improvisation is that failure is just data.Doesn't mean that you're never going to be funny ever and that you're awful and everyone hates you. It just means that joke that you tried in that moment with those people.
did not land. And so then what can you learn from that? Do you need to switch up the joke? Do you need to switch up the style? So it's just a little bit of data to say. That's what helped me to reframe how I think about comedy.
So I'll share the story. The fourth standup show that I ever did was a comedy competition. the third round was, they did a big show for it. so there's 200 people in the audience, which was the biggest audience that I had ever performed for.
They had guests. Judges.
Also added bonus, my mom and my brother were in the audience and they were seeing me do stand up for the very first time. I get about three and a half minutes into the six minute set and I am completely blank.
On what it was that I was going to say, I cannot remember it. I spent 30 seconds looking down at my feet, And then eventually I figured I would skip whatever joke I was trying to tell.
I got to the very end and afterwards the judges were very nice. I learned a couple of things from that one. I learned that I should not memorise everything word for word.
I couldn't remember one word. so that messed me up for remembering any of the words that followed it. And I had to get better at that improvisation. The second thing though, that it taught me was again, this idea that failure is just data.
It's this idea that, even though I bombed and in many ways, that's the worst. That could happen to me as a standup comedian, right? so I was like, okay, so it can kind of only go up from here, right?
I will tell you that very rarely, especially because of the humour that we're using in the workplace, very rarely, are you doing something memorised word for word that you're going to blank and look at your feet for 30 seconds. Much more likely is that you're going to say something that you think is humorous or funny.
And no one's going to laugh, but the reality in those situations, that a lot of times those situations are only awkward. If you make them awkward, if you stand there and you're like, come on, Sharad, that was a joke. Do you get it? And if you just say the statement.
and move on. It's great. And that's using positive inclusiveness. One of the things we talked a little bit about style and stuff, the type of humour that we use, it should be positive and inclusive, right? Because if you say a positive, inclusive joke that no one laughs at, it's now just a positive, inclusive statement.
And you can move past it and very few people are going to remember it.
One of the big things that I encourage people to think about is using humour for yourself first. It can be less about how do I make these other people laugh and it's like, how do I have more fun?
if you as a leader, if you as a communicator are enjoying what you do, the chances of other people enjoying at least their interactions with you, maybe you can't make them love all of their work, but they're going to at least enjoy it. One of the things that I noticed at PNG is that as I use my tumours more and more, I have less of a problem getting people to show up to my meetings.
They started to incorporate stories in their presentations. They started to do some of these other things, which was an added bonus. Cause now I'm not stuck. sitting through super boring presentations of other people.
That's such a good point. I love that where you do it for yourself and that's a starting point. You try it out and I also like the fact that you need to get laughs but if you're positive and you're saying something that's inclusive that itself is good and that could have a net positive effect on what you're doing.
Sharad Lal: That makes it accessible. Are there any tools from Improv that come to mind which could be useful to folks?
Andrew Tarvin: Yeah. There's a two word phrase from improvisation that's absolutely changed my life, especially as an introvert, but just as a general person to be more positive, to be able to better handle conversation, to be a better parent, basically every aspect of my life is improved by this two word phrase.
if people listening are familiar with improvisation, they've probably heard it at some point, but it is yes and. Yes, and the fundamental mindset of improvisation is how we as improvisers get on stage, make things up off the top of our head and make it seem like it makes sense.
So when we do our training, we do a lot of internal workshops and programs. We juxtapose it from a yes, but mindset and yes, and mindset. Maybe it's helpful to give a short demonstration.
So
you and I are going to brainstorm an idea. Let's say we're going to like to collaborate on some type of group for your audience, for my audience, et cetera. We're going to put together some type of event. you'll share an idea. And then after you share that idea, you and I are going to go back and forth and Just say yes, but after each one.
Okay. So we're going to do one round of yes, but first. Okay. you can go ahead and start. What's an idea for something that we could do for our collective kind of group of people that we feel like we could provide value, give them service.
Sharad Lal: Yeah, so maybe we look at folks in their 40s who are leaders. How do we make them more funny and effective at work? Let's just put that as an idea.
Andrew Tarvin: Yes, but some people like it if you're in your 40s. Maybe you're already past learning and development and so you're no longer gonna. You know, change your mindYes, but you need some new fire when you're in your forties. Like otherwise you're boring unless you think about it, like how are you going to do it? true, but I Only recently turned 40 and I don't want to put myself into this 40 club because I still feel younger than that
Sharad Lal: But some people want to own that forties that it's the next stage of life and they really want to take it up.
Andrew Tarvin: Yeah, I like it. So we could keep going back and forth. Yes, but etc. So what we're gonna do now, though, is we're gonna switch that to yes, and so you can share another idea. You can share the exact same idea.
All right. Same idea. So let's work with some folks who are in their forties to make them a little more funny. So they're better leaders.
yes, and part of what we can help them reframe is thinking about if they're feeling bad about being 40 or mid stage career, et cetera, we can help them to use humour to feel good about that and own it.
Sharad Lal: Yeah. And owning 40s doesn't make them think that, they're halfway through and very little to go. So that could work as well.
Andrew Tarvin: Yes. And, we can have multiple different ways that they could access that. So I love maybe a podcast as a component of it, but maybe there's also a summit that we do so that people can really learn this skill.
Sharad Lal: Yes. And we can always provide them content because these guys are on the move. So we can provide them content through mobile apps and stuff. They can explore it at their own time, find funny ways to do it and just simple ways to get started
Andrew Tarvin: Fantastic. Yeah, we'll stop there. So we do this workshop with a lot of teams, et cetera, because there's tremendous value in people learning this language a little bit. But one of the questions I'll ask you is, first of all, which one feels easier to you?
Yes, Butter. Yes, Ant.
Sharad Lal: easily. Yes. And
Andrew Tarvin: That's true for, I'd say probably about 70 to 80 percent of people, they tend to say yes, Ant is easier.
Sharad Lal: Yes, and we were building it together. but I felt like We were getting more argumentative, I thought. Hmm.
Andrew Tarvin: This isn't to say that yes, but it is a bad mindset that you can never have it. It's just recognizing. When it's valuable and when it's not, because what do you think in general?
Do you think people do more day to day? Do you think they do? Yes. And, or yes, but
Sharad Lal: I think yes, but.
Andrew Tarvin: Yeah, I would say the majority of people, especially the older you are, the more experienced you are, the easier it is to go. Yes. But, and this was one of the big learnings that I had at PNG was that I realised that there's a big difference between being efficient and being effective.
if you're a leader, especially if you're experienced, especially if you're an expert, all the things that are not going to work. If someone comes with an idea, it's but what about boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. It's an attempt at efficiency. Yes. And isn't always the most efficient, but it's about being more effective.
Sharad Lal: And did feel like clearly collaborative. We were feeding off each other and building something big. It was more like, Oh, this idea is more powerful than I actually thought because we were building off that idea and it is a very powerful idea.
Andrew Tarvin: Yeah, exactly. It builds. So yes. And it seems like it tends to have more momentum in some ways. It feels a lot more positive. And the feedback that we get from a lot of people is that it makes you more willing to take risks.
a powerful application I think of improv, this yes and mindset is how do you learn to yes and yourself a little bit.
Sharad Lal: One of the other videos of yours that I saw, I really liked it. I think an improv technique is probably this rule of three, where you have two normal things and the third thing is ridiculous, which makes it funny. If you can just talk a little bit about that.
Andrew Tarvin: Sure,yeah, that's a technique that I learned in stand up comedy. And so when I first started doing improv and stand up, I realised that There's an art and science to humour, Cause I thought it was you've got to just be blessed to use you. It's no, there are techniques that people are using.
And so you can learn the science piece. That's what I did over the course of 10 years of reading a bunch of books and watching videos and taking courses and all that kind of stuff. You learn the science part of it. And then you need the time to practise the art part to figure out your style, your kind of components and things like that.
there's 10 kinds of comedy techniques that we teach for more influential, communication. One of the nice ones is the comic triple. Which is a variation of the rule of three. And essentially the comic triple is the idea that you can create a list of three things.
Andrew Tarvin: And you can do the third thing, something unexpected. a lot of times it'll generate a laugh or a smile. So one of the examples that I used to do in standup is, as a kid, I used to like to take things apart and put them back together again, things like clocks and radios and my parents' marriage, which never got that one back together.
Parents' marriage is something unexpected, but still logically fits with taking apart, putting back together again. What's really nice about the comic triple as a technique is that it's very easy to recognize when it could be valuable.
So if you go to a networking event and you introduce yourself Hey, i'm a vp sales at this organisation and also pun enthusiast Now some people might skip that pun enthusiast thing and gloss over it and be like tell me who you're sales for What's that or they'll just do nothing but there's gonna be a handful of people and be like
Sharad Lal: Yeah.
Andrew Tarvin: Oh, you like, I like puns too.
What's your favourite pun? You got one for me. and now you're starting a conversation in a very different place. So comic triple is one of 10 comedy techniques, but a super easy one to get started and to recognize now that you know it you'll probably start to see it.
If people are interested in learning science and these techniques, what's a good place to start?
Yeah. Certainly we're biassed and to say that we have a bunch of free resources on these types of things is what we do. and there's plenty of other books out there. So for example, the new comedy Bible by Judy Carter is a great book on actual humour techniques. There's a great book by Scott Dickerson on how to write funny.
So if you like it very much I want to write comedy. Then it's great. Go, those are the books that I studied from. And then I took what works the best in a corporate area and then applied that to the workplace.
And so through our research, we've identified seven primary ways that people tend to express their humour in the workplace. And that's what, so an inventor is someone who's going to sit down and do like this type of writing and is really good at it. You might have someone, maybe you don't do that, but maybe you're someone who constantly likes to see funny stuff online, funny videos, funny memes, funny cartoons, et cetera.
And when you do, you share that with friends. Or you share that with clients or you put that into a presentation. That's what we call the curator.
So there's five other personas out there. we encourage people to really start with one, if you're really interested in the inventor, we've got, like I said, we've got resources on those types of things, But also start with. Finding out what is your primary persona, right?
and we have a free assessment people can take on our website if they want to Learn our process for it. But if you don't want to think about how do I naturally use humour with my friends? or when i'm with myself what makes me laugh what makes me smile?
And how could I bring a professional version of that into the workplace? How could I bring that and start to incorporate a little bit more?
Sharad Lal: We will drop the links to your personal quiz as well as the free resources that you talked about in the show notes, because I think it'd be very useful to people. a lot of people like you and maybe a little bit like me are also nerdy, so we just want to get a little bit into the science, get a little understanding, awareness, And that makes it easier to then use a few techniques that you talked about to get some momentum around it and then build it over a period of time.
Andrew Tarvin: Exactly. And that's the intent, that's why we call them personas. They're not set personalities and you can learn how to use all seven. I had to learn how to do all of these different things. But if you start with the one that you're already naturally good at, you'll see success earlier, you'll find out what's fun.
Start with what you're good at. And over time, use that as a small starting point. Because I think one of them, we have things ranging from keynotes that we do to in person workshops, et cetera, the biggest benefit to our keynotes is that they're really funny. They're going to make the audience laugh.
But two, part of it is just giving people permission. It's letting them know that it is not only okay to use humour. But there are tremendous professional benefits to doing so. And so hopefully from people listening today, the world needs more humour out there.
This is your permission to go out and to try to do things at a minimum for yourself. Even if you don't expose it to anyone else, there's things that you can do to bring a little bit more joy and positivity to your own life.
Sharad Lal: That's such a wonderful message. I was wondering as we end, is there any other bottom line message that you'd like to end with?
Andrew Tarvin: I think that's the biggest one. You choose every single day how you do your work. So why not choose to make it more fun, right? Why not choose to make it more productive, less stressed, happier? Why not choose to get better results, have more fun? and ultimately why not choose to bring a little bit more humour to your life?
So that's what we encourage people to do. One habit that I've instilled that helps me is to simply think one smile per hour.
If I'm doing a keynote, then Yeah, I hope that I get more than one smile and get lots of laughter and stuff like that. But at any given moment, if I'm getting ready to go into an hour long thing, how do I smile? If I'm going to do an hour long podcast, what's going to make me smile? Oh, telling certain stories makes me smile.
that ultimately creates a habit. And then you start to recognize how quick and easy it can be. B to add humour. Sometimes it's big and takes time to plan.
Other times you're like. Oh wait, I've got an hour long commute that I'm getting ready to go on. I could listen to a comedy podcast or I could listen to some standup. It'll start small and it gets a little bit bigger and maybe, at the end of the day you become a humour enthusiast like myself and.
Find more joy and positivity in the world.
Sharad Lal: Thank you very much, Andrew, for spending so much time with us, sharing your wisdom. I got more than one smile, I'm sure the audience would have gotten a lot more of this. You're doing a great job in making people's lives brighter and happier and letting people access their brighter side and bring it out.
So thank you very much for all you're doing. And thank you very much for such a great conversation.
Andrew Tarvin: Absolutely. Thank you for having me.
Sharad Lal: Thank you Drew for such a fun and useful conversation. For more Andrew, you can check the show notes. Here's something all of us could try, especially me. Next time you're in a difficult situation. And you're charged with emotions and angry and really caught up in it. Try and take a step back and think of something funny.
It could be a really poor joke. It need not be that smart, intelligent joke that you need to get across. It could be a dad joke, any kind of a joke.
Just try and do it and see what happens. Maybe diffuses the situation, maybe not. But let's try it out. And if it works. Maybe even if it doesn't get a smile, but if it just diffuses some of the tension that could give us a starting point of trying humour in different places and seeing how it works for us. I'm going to do that. I hope you do that as well. Best of luck as you try to bring humour to work and life.
I hope you enjoyed the episode.
The next episode will drop two weeks from now on November 19th. Please do join us for that till next time. Have a wonderful day ahead. Bye bye.
Sharad Lal: Hi, everyone. Welcome to how to live. Podcast that explores ways to live a good life. I'm your host Sharad Lal. This is episode 80. Our guest today, Andrew Tarvin Discovered something surprising. His engineering skills made him stand out at work. It helped him connect better with people and get promoted faster. And eventually inspired him to start his own company.
Humour that works. Today Drew's company has worked with over a hundred organisations, including IBM GE and even the FBI. Drew's TEDx doc has reached 14 million views and he's the author of multiple best-selling books. He's been featured in the wall street journal and fast company and was named a visionary under 40 by the P and G alumni network. In this episode, Drew and I break down how Umer makes you a more effective leader. We talked about how you were at work different from Yuma with friends. We'll explore different types of humour and Drew will even share some easy templates you can use to bring a bit more humour into work and life. As someone who usually talks about serious topics like purpose and living a fulfilling life. I found this conversation to be both insightful and a fun reminder that humans can enhance even the most serious messages. But before we jump in, thank you very much for your incredible support. With all your support we're in the top 3% worldwide. And I listened to 40 countries. If you haven't already, please do subscribe. Now let's dive in.
Here's the amazing Andrew Tarvin.
Sharad Lal: Hey, Andrew, welcome to the How to Live podcast. How are you doing this evening?
Andrew Tarvin: I am doing very well.
Sharad Lal: Where do we find you?
Andrew Tarvin: I am currently located in Panama city, Panama.
That's so exciting. Our first guest from Panama. Maybe we get into that. What brought you, I knew you grew up in the United States. What brought you to Panama?
Andrew Tarvin: Yeah. So the very shortened version we can dive deeper into things is born and raised in Cincinnati, Ohio, and went to Ohio state university in Columbus, moved to New York for 12 plus years, met a wonderful German woman, and got married. She works for the UN, which is based here in Panama city.
Sharad Lal: We thought we'd be here for maybe two, three years. We're going on four already and seem to be here for at least the next few years before we make any other decisions. It's a little bit like Singapore. People come here for six months and then 10 years later, they're still around.So Andrew, both of us got our start at P& G and P& G is a very structured company, a huge organisation. And then at some stage you left PNG and thought, let me go into the humour space and humour at work.
How did that happen?
Andrew Tarvin: Yeah, so it's not your traditional career journey for that,with a computer science and engineering degree. And so I'll give the context that growing up in PNG was like my dream job, right?
so for me to go to Ohio state university, get a degree in computer science and engineering, and get very fortunate that I get a job at PNG afterwards, it's like. Okay, I'm set. This is my life for the next 40 plus years. I'm going to rise to the ranks.
But for me, while I was in university, I started doing improv and stand up comedy. And not because I thought I was a funny person. I was forced to do it by a really good friend of mine. But what I realised is the longer I was at P& G, the bigger the roles that I got,
The more I ended up drawing on what I had learned and was learning in improv and stand up because I was still doing it after I graduated. And less what I was learning in my computer science classes, things like how to communicate so people actually listen and how to solve problems, how to not be nervous when I was pitching an idea to the CEO and how to manage my own stress a little bit better.
I realised that. This is crazy. Why did no one talk about how valuable humour is as a skill? Cause I started doing this research and realised there were a bunch of benefits to it. no one talked about it. I never learned it in business class or anything like that.
Andrew Tarvin: as Gandhi almost said, be the comedian you wish to see in the world. I realised if no one else is talking about it, maybe I should talk about it. because humour had just come to me. Completely transformed my life as an introverted computer geek and turned me into someone who is getting promotions and awards and things like that.
I feel like other, especially introverted nerds like me should hear this message. That started me, doing a humour that works part time in 2009. And then ultimately left P and G two and a half years later, when I realised it was a passion that I had and something that could be sustainable.
So that was, 12 plus years ago,helping people learn this wonderful skill of humour.
Sharad Lal: What a wonderful story. So I just want to click into it. Your technical skills after a point of time were not as useful as the improv skills you were learning, from the comedy club next door.
And as you started using those skills, you started doing better. Your leadership skills were better. You were able to present better and you went up. Are there any stories that come to mind, or maybe just a story that comes to mind where you used humour in a very difficult situation and that made you realise that, wow, this actually can work.
Andrew Tarvin: Certainly. there's a couple of prompts along the way that helped me realise how valuable humour was. One of them was actually the humour from my manager. Like I remember, relatively early on, we're working on a project We were behind a little bit on schedule and we're in a late meeting, it's after hours and me and this other coworker are just butting heads and the tension is rising
my manager came in, got a little bit of the sense of the room and he was like, hold on. At the end of the day, we sold soap. We are not curing cancer. We are not in an actual war, And we both started laughing about how ridiculously stressed out we were about this concept of, we sell soap and the idea wasn't. To trivialise what it is that we're doing.
But it was at that moment that we needed it. And so that was just for me, one of those first early ideas of Oh, wow. an offhand comment like that completely reset the room.
Another really big one was, I remember being in this meeting at PNG that was incredibly boring, like it was one of those days that I was incredibly overwhelmed and stressed out.
I ended up in this meeting late in the afternoon that was just so terribly dry that I wanted to cry, right?
I looked around the room. Other people were bored as well. I distinctly remember the woman next to me had written the word blah on her notepad and was just circling it over and over for five minutes. And the problem with this particular meeting was that I was the one leading the meeting.
Sharad Lal: Seriously? Wow, man!
Andrew Tarvin: was the one I was bored while talking and I had this realisation like if I'm bored while talking they're bored while listening and so to cut a longer story a little bit shorter I didn't know what to do. I called my mom, who in addition to being like a wonderful mother also spent, you know, her entire career in HR, and she was like You should try using some of the improv and stand up stuff that you're doing on the side at work.
I was hesitant to be taken seriously. I want people to know that I'm a professional and I don't want to offend anyone.
but she convinced me to give it a try. so what I did was the next day I went in. I wrote a status report for the boring meeting that I had the day before, and at the bottom, I just decided to include a pun, just like a terrible joke, cause I love wordplay.
I decided to keep doing that each week. I would send this email out, send a little joke at the bottom, don't really think too much of it. That goes by for six, seven weeks. One morning I send out that email, go to lunch and come back and I have a bunch of replies to that email. I'm like, Oh, I've offended someone.
I'm going to get fired because I said something incorrect, maybe the project. I don't know. I've made some type of error. And it turns out that I had made a huge mistake. And that I had forgotten to include a joke at the bottom of the email. So all of the replies in my inbox were like, Hey, where was this week's joke?
It was another light bulb moment where I realised that adding humour made the work more fun for me, which if that was all it did, that would be beneficial enough. But two, it was getting people to read my boring project management status update reports.
they at least had to open it and scroll to the bottom. And that gets us a lot further than other people. And as a result of that, I decided to write about it internally.
P& G had these internal blogs. so I proclaimed myself the corporate humorist of P& G. I wrote a blog about it. I got business cards made up. I assumed someone would stop me.
Like what are you doing? But it took great credit to PNG. My manager was supportive of it. HR was supportive of it. Legal was supportive of it. That blog gave me the excuse to start researching it more.
That blog became the starting point of humour that works later, which then became the business that I've been running for over a decade.
Sharad Lal: Very cool story. So as you started seeing humour working, and you said, all right, now I want to make this a business, How did you go about it?
Andrew Tarvin: for a long time, I didn't know that it was a business, right? I didn't know speaking to you was a thing that you could do. I was doing a bunch of stuff internally at PNG. I'd be like, Hey, can I lead like icebreakers in the morning or,
Can I do like an hour-long improv and communication workshop? I love speaking because it's basically standing up with a message. And I love introducing people. to this skill.
so eventually I was like, if people at PNG who are smart and ambitious and type a and want to get results done, et cetera, if they're really resonating with this, if this is being beneficial to them, maybe there's people in audience outside of PNG that would enjoy it as well.
Sharad Lal: So as you were figuring out humour that works in the corporate world, what kind of humour works in the corporate world and how is it different for humour when you're sitting with friends and cracking jokes?
Andrew Tarvin: It's a great question. First of all, from a branding perspective for people listening to this, I did have to figure out that at the end of the day, no one in the workplace, no one really cares about humour. They're like, yeah, it would be nice if I laughed a little bit more, but that's not like at the top of the priority list,
people don't know that humour can actually solve each of those things. Humour can improve leadership. It can enhance presentation skills. It can help you to manage stress, yada, yada, yada. And so from a marketing standpoint, from a business perspective, I had to figure out how to, how do I market? Humour is a valuable professional skill.
The primary reason you're going to use humour with friends is just for everyone to have a good time. For you all to laugh and enjoy each other's company and kind of riff. And just because it's a whole lot of fun, the primary reason for using humour in the workplace should be, I think.
For a more strategic purpose to have a more specific idea in mind, right? humour that you use at the beginning of a presentation, because you want people to listen to you and think that you're a good speaker, et cetera, so that you can get buy-in on your idea a little bit later.
So the biggest difference from a strategy standpoint is that there is actually a strategy to using humour in the workplace, rather than with your friends. And then the second thing is that the style of humour that you use is going to be different depending on the context. Like with friends, you can use aggressive humour, sarcasm, satire, You can poke fun at each other, and
That's not necessarily a good mindset to have with clients in the corporate world where you're like, okay, we met for the first time. I'm gonna just poke fun at you as much as possible.
Sharad Lal: There's a strategic intent, as you said, and then of course there's a style and let's talk about strategic intent, the areas that it comes into work for people just listening who might think, Hey, how do I bring it on? One is like you said, diffuse tension, which is very clear.
The other is you're trying to sell something. and it's a presentation. You start with humour to build a connection. What are other ways in which humour can be useful?
Andrew Tarvin: We have built a list of over 30 benefits to using humour in the workplace Backed by research case studies, real world examples. And we realised that they really Fall into what we call the work pyramid. Cause if you think about any job, it really comes down to five core skills.
No matter who you are, what you do at the end of the day, first, you need to execute. You need to be able to complete a task. You need to be able to send emails the right way or respond to certain things. You need to be able to shave an alpaca. If you're an alpaca farmer, there are certain tasks that you just need to be able to execute.
Humour can help you to manage your energy better. So you can stay more productive and stay better able to execute. Next, the second skill is you have to be able to think. Both critical and creative thinking.
Humour and creativity are very closely linked because they're about making unique connections. And in one study, they found that. Students who watched a comedy video before trying to solve a problem were nearly four times more likely to solve that problem than students who watched no video or watched a maths video instead, right?
So humour helps to warm up the brain. So that helps you to take care of humour and thinking. The third skill is to communicate. You need to be able to effectively articulate the ideas that you have in a way that other people can understand.
This is a huge area that humour can help because one humour gets people to pay attention.
You can also use humour to better explain an idea, create associations, et cetera. So humour is really valuable for communication. The fourth skill is to connect, to build relationships.
This was one that I was not good at all, right? The emotional intelligence and empathy and basically dealing with other humans aspect of it. But, as Victor Borg said, the shortest distance between two people is a smile. So if you can get people to laugh, if you can get people to smile a little bit, then you feel like you're closely connected together.
And then the last skill is leadership. Is not necessarily even leadership as a position, but the ability to influence people to do something. And humour is incredibly valuable for that. Because one, if you make something more fun, people are much more likely to do it. Studies have found that leaders that have a sense of humour are seen as more in control and top of things.
So for us, we frame it around those five kinds of things. High level, what do you want to do? Because the humour that you use as a leader is different from what you might use when you're trying to improve your execution.
I'd love to dig into the communication part and let's say communication for leaders because that's a little complicated. I'm struggling. You have serious messages to give, you want to make sure that it's received right, but at the same time you want to use humour and it's difficult. Do I crack a stupid joke?
Andrew Tarvin: Do I crack a very intelligent joke that most people won't get? What should I do? How do I do that? For sure. So there's three kinds of humour techniques that I think are particularly valuable, especially if you're communicating as a leader. The first one, the most powerful one in general for anyone, is storytelling.
I should clarify that when we talk about humour, particularly in the workplace, we're not talking exclusively about comedy.
Humour is a little bit more broad, so it could be making them laugh, or it could be making them smile, or it could be making them kind of nod along in agreement,
That sometimes is all you're going to get in an office setting. So first of all, just using a story is already making things a little bit more engaging. And then two, the nice thing, especially if you have to talk about something serious, is that you can add humour in the story because of a mistake that you made or something that you did, or just the story itself is funny.
I think what's really valuable when you're meeting someone new is working on your origin story. Who are you? Why do you do what it is that you do? How did you get here?
Andrew Tarvin: So storytelling would be number one. The second strategy would be self deprecating humour. so self deprecating humour is a negative form of humour where your target is yourself. One, it's really good when you are in a high status position because what self deprecating humour does is says you don't take yourself too seriously.
that you're willing to poke fun at yourself. And so that's really valuable if you're in a high status position,
two watch outs with the self deprecating humour. One is you want to use it sparingly. if self deprecating humour is the only type of humour that you use, people will either get tired of it. Or they'll worry that you have self esteem issues, or they'll think that you're trying to throw a pity party, or they'll start to believe you that you're not actually good at what you do, right?
The second caveat is that self-deprecating humour should be something that's not about the thing that you should be good at. If you are a sales leader, you don't want this self-deprecating humour to be like, Oh my God, I'm so terrible at sales.
then the third strategy more from a broader communication standpoint, when I would say is associations. Is making the connection. If you've got something really serious that you need to communicate, or in the case of a lot of our clients, something really dry that you need to communicate. You can create an association for that stuff. I remember, when I was at p and GI was asked to help lead a, a three hour intern training, a training for interns on project management.
So we decided to say, okay, we're going to make this extended metaphor, this association about how project management is like a wedding, right?
Traditional project management is a lot like a wedding. So you've got a project charter. Which is,the kind of the vows of what you're going to do. You've got the project initiation document, which is the proposal to begin with. You've got stakeholders who are the family members or any potential kids that Mired already exists.
And then of course, we made the joke that 50 percent of both end in failure. Whether it's a marriage or project management stuff.
It's not necessarily funny But now we can make jokes about planning a wedding or now we can make jokes about marriage now We can make jokes about this stuff and we're not making jokes about project management, which can be important We're making jokes about the association and then later and this is what the feedback was from the organisation from the interns was
Like it just helps them actually understand it to begin with and then remember it longer as well. And there's actual research that shows both of those things are true.
Sharad Lal: I love the definition of humour out here. It's not necessarily always funny. It's interesting, like you said. And I love the last example of funny, where you are not supposed to make fun of the stuff the company is doing.
So you put a metaphor, you put an association and you make fun of that association, not the thing. So that's quite accessible. have you had, Jokes have just nobody's laughed, they've not landed.
Is there an example that comes to mind and how do you work through something like this? How do you recover from that when you're presenting to people?
Andrew Tarvin: Yeah, I wish I could tell you that there is only a single example and that's the only time I've ever been not funny, but it happens all the time. It comes with the territory of trying humour So there's a great documentary that Jerry Seinfeld put out called Comedian.
He decided he was going to retire all of his material, never say any of the jokes again, and start completely from scratch. so this documentary follows his process of going from zero minutes of material that he's never said before, to building out like an entire hour long special and early in the process, he goes and he does a show in New York city.
a woman from another country who'd never heard of Jerry Seinfeld before asked him if it was his first time doing comedy. Because it just wasn't all that funny. He was certainly like a multimillionaire who had one of the most successful kinds of sitcoms on TV, et cetera, was clearly established in a community.
He's getting asked, have you ever done this before? Because he's still learning. And that's part of the process. But one of the things that it taught me is that there is no feedback. is a form of feedback, so the absence of laughter is feedback to say that was not funny, at least in that context, in that scenario, etc. The other thing is to recognize that I learned from improvisation is that failure is just data.Doesn't mean that you're never going to be funny ever and that you're awful and everyone hates you. It just means that joke that you tried in that moment with those people.
did not land. And so then what can you learn from that? Do you need to switch up the joke? Do you need to switch up the style? So it's just a little bit of data to say. That's what helped me to reframe how I think about comedy.
So I'll share the story. The fourth standup show that I ever did was a comedy competition. the third round was, they did a big show for it. so there's 200 people in the audience, which was the biggest audience that I had ever performed for.
They had guests. Judges.
Also added bonus, my mom and my brother were in the audience and they were seeing me do stand up for the very first time. I get about three and a half minutes into the six minute set and I am completely blank.
On what it was that I was going to say, I cannot remember it. I spent 30 seconds looking down at my feet, And then eventually I figured I would skip whatever joke I was trying to tell.
I got to the very end and afterwards the judges were very nice. I learned a couple of things from that one. I learned that I should not memorise everything word for word.
I couldn't remember one word. so that messed me up for remembering any of the words that followed it. And I had to get better at that improvisation. The second thing though, that it taught me was again, this idea that failure is just data.
It's this idea that, even though I bombed and in many ways, that's the worst. That could happen to me as a standup comedian, right? so I was like, okay, so it can kind of only go up from here, right?
I will tell you that very rarely, especially because of the humour that we're using in the workplace, very rarely, are you doing something memorised word for word that you're going to blank and look at your feet for 30 seconds. Much more likely is that you're going to say something that you think is humorous or funny.
And no one's going to laugh, but the reality in those situations, that a lot of times those situations are only awkward. If you make them awkward, if you stand there and you're like, come on, Sharad, that was a joke. Do you get it? And if you just say the statement.
and move on. It's great. And that's using positive inclusiveness. One of the things we talked a little bit about style and stuff, the type of humour that we use, it should be positive and inclusive, right? Because if you say a positive, inclusive joke that no one laughs at, it's now just a positive, inclusive statement.
And you can move past it and very few people are going to remember it.
One of the big things that I encourage people to think about is using humour for yourself first. It can be less about how do I make these other people laugh and it's like, how do I have more fun?
if you as a leader, if you as a communicator are enjoying what you do, the chances of other people enjoying at least their interactions with you, maybe you can't make them love all of their work, but they're going to at least enjoy it. One of the things that I noticed at PNG is that as I use my tumours more and more, I have less of a problem getting people to show up to my meetings.
They started to incorporate stories in their presentations. They started to do some of these other things, which was an added bonus. Cause now I'm not stuck. sitting through super boring presentations of other people.
That's such a good point. I love that where you do it for yourself and that's a starting point. You try it out and I also like the fact that you need to get laughs but if you're positive and you're saying something that's inclusive that itself is good and that could have a net positive effect on what you're doing.
Sharad Lal: That makes it accessible. Are there any tools from Improv that come to mind which could be useful to folks?
Andrew Tarvin: Yeah. There's a two word phrase from improvisation that's absolutely changed my life, especially as an introvert, but just as a general person to be more positive, to be able to better handle conversation, to be a better parent, basically every aspect of my life is improved by this two word phrase.
if people listening are familiar with improvisation, they've probably heard it at some point, but it is yes and. Yes, and the fundamental mindset of improvisation is how we as improvisers get on stage, make things up off the top of our head and make it seem like it makes sense.
So when we do our training, we do a lot of internal workshops and programs. We juxtapose it from a yes, but mindset and yes, and mindset. Maybe it's helpful to give a short demonstration.
So
you and I are going to brainstorm an idea. Let's say we're going to like to collaborate on some type of group for your audience, for my audience, et cetera. We're going to put together some type of event. you'll share an idea. And then after you share that idea, you and I are going to go back and forth and Just say yes, but after each one.
Okay. So we're going to do one round of yes, but first. Okay. you can go ahead and start. What's an idea for something that we could do for our collective kind of group of people that we feel like we could provide value, give them service.
Sharad Lal: Yeah, so maybe we look at folks in their 40s who are leaders. How do we make them more funny and effective at work? Let's just put that as an idea.
Andrew Tarvin: Yes, but some people like it if you're in your 40s. Maybe you're already past learning and development and so you're no longer gonna. You know, change your mindYes, but you need some new fire when you're in your forties. Like otherwise you're boring unless you think about it, like how are you going to do it? true, but I Only recently turned 40 and I don't want to put myself into this 40 club because I still feel younger than that
Sharad Lal: But some people want to own that forties that it's the next stage of life and they really want to take it up.
Andrew Tarvin: Yeah, I like it. So we could keep going back and forth. Yes, but etc. So what we're gonna do now, though, is we're gonna switch that to yes, and so you can share another idea. You can share the exact same idea.
All right. Same idea. So let's work with some folks who are in their forties to make them a little more funny. So they're better leaders.
yes, and part of what we can help them reframe is thinking about if they're feeling bad about being 40 or mid stage career, et cetera, we can help them to use humour to feel good about that and own it.
Sharad Lal: Yeah. And owning 40s doesn't make them think that, they're halfway through and very little to go. So that could work as well.
Andrew Tarvin: Yes. And, we can have multiple different ways that they could access that. So I love maybe a podcast as a component of it, but maybe there's also a summit that we do so that people can really learn this skill.
Sharad Lal: Yes. And we can always provide them content because these guys are on the move. So we can provide them content through mobile apps and stuff. They can explore it at their own time, find funny ways to do it and just simple ways to get started
Andrew Tarvin: Fantastic. Yeah, we'll stop there. So we do this workshop with a lot of teams, et cetera, because there's tremendous value in people learning this language a little bit. But one of the questions I'll ask you is, first of all, which one feels easier to you?
Yes, Butter. Yes, Ant.
Sharad Lal: easily. Yes. And
Andrew Tarvin: That's true for, I'd say probably about 70 to 80 percent of people, they tend to say yes, Ant is easier.
Sharad Lal: Yes, and we were building it together. but I felt like We were getting more argumentative, I thought. Hmm.
Andrew Tarvin: This isn't to say that yes, but it is a bad mindset that you can never have it. It's just recognizing. When it's valuable and when it's not, because what do you think in general?
Do you think people do more day to day? Do you think they do? Yes. And, or yes, but
Sharad Lal: I think yes, but.
Andrew Tarvin: Yeah, I would say the majority of people, especially the older you are, the more experienced you are, the easier it is to go. Yes. But, and this was one of the big learnings that I had at PNG was that I realised that there's a big difference between being efficient and being effective.
if you're a leader, especially if you're experienced, especially if you're an expert, all the things that are not going to work. If someone comes with an idea, it's but what about boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. It's an attempt at efficiency. Yes. And isn't always the most efficient, but it's about being more effective.
Sharad Lal: And did feel like clearly collaborative. We were feeding off each other and building something big. It was more like, Oh, this idea is more powerful than I actually thought because we were building off that idea and it is a very powerful idea.
Andrew Tarvin: Yeah, exactly. It builds. So yes. And it seems like it tends to have more momentum in some ways. It feels a lot more positive. And the feedback that we get from a lot of people is that it makes you more willing to take risks.
a powerful application I think of improv, this yes and mindset is how do you learn to yes and yourself a little bit.
Sharad Lal: One of the other videos of yours that I saw, I really liked it. I think an improv technique is probably this rule of three, where you have two normal things and the third thing is ridiculous, which makes it funny. If you can just talk a little bit about that.
Andrew Tarvin: Sure,yeah, that's a technique that I learned in stand up comedy. And so when I first started doing improv and stand up, I realised that There's an art and science to humour, Cause I thought it was you've got to just be blessed to use you. It's no, there are techniques that people are using.
And so you can learn the science piece. That's what I did over the course of 10 years of reading a bunch of books and watching videos and taking courses and all that kind of stuff. You learn the science part of it. And then you need the time to practise the art part to figure out your style, your kind of components and things like that.
there's 10 kinds of comedy techniques that we teach for more influential, communication. One of the nice ones is the comic triple. Which is a variation of the rule of three. And essentially the comic triple is the idea that you can create a list of three things.
Andrew Tarvin: And you can do the third thing, something unexpected. a lot of times it'll generate a laugh or a smile. So one of the examples that I used to do in standup is, as a kid, I used to like to take things apart and put them back together again, things like clocks and radios and my parents' marriage, which never got that one back together.
Parents' marriage is something unexpected, but still logically fits with taking apart, putting back together again. What's really nice about the comic triple as a technique is that it's very easy to recognize when it could be valuable.
So if you go to a networking event and you introduce yourself Hey, i'm a vp sales at this organisation and also pun enthusiast Now some people might skip that pun enthusiast thing and gloss over it and be like tell me who you're sales for What's that or they'll just do nothing but there's gonna be a handful of people and be like
Sharad Lal: Yeah.
Andrew Tarvin: Oh, you like, I like puns too.
What's your favourite pun? You got one for me. and now you're starting a conversation in a very different place. So comic triple is one of 10 comedy techniques, but a super easy one to get started and to recognize now that you know it you'll probably start to see it.
If people are interested in learning science and these techniques, what's a good place to start?
Yeah. Certainly we're biassed and to say that we have a bunch of free resources on these types of things is what we do. and there's plenty of other books out there. So for example, the new comedy Bible by Judy Carter is a great book on actual humour techniques. There's a great book by Scott Dickerson on how to write funny.
So if you like it very much I want to write comedy. Then it's great. Go, those are the books that I studied from. And then I took what works the best in a corporate area and then applied that to the workplace.
And so through our research, we've identified seven primary ways that people tend to express their humour in the workplace. And that's what, so an inventor is someone who's going to sit down and do like this type of writing and is really good at it. You might have someone, maybe you don't do that, but maybe you're someone who constantly likes to see funny stuff online, funny videos, funny memes, funny cartoons, et cetera.
And when you do, you share that with friends. Or you share that with clients or you put that into a presentation. That's what we call the curator.
So there's five other personas out there. we encourage people to really start with one, if you're really interested in the inventor, we've got, like I said, we've got resources on those types of things, But also start with. Finding out what is your primary persona, right?
and we have a free assessment people can take on our website if they want to Learn our process for it. But if you don't want to think about how do I naturally use humour with my friends? or when i'm with myself what makes me laugh what makes me smile?
And how could I bring a professional version of that into the workplace? How could I bring that and start to incorporate a little bit more?
Sharad Lal: We will drop the links to your personal quiz as well as the free resources that you talked about in the show notes, because I think it'd be very useful to people. a lot of people like you and maybe a little bit like me are also nerdy, so we just want to get a little bit into the science, get a little understanding, awareness, And that makes it easier to then use a few techniques that you talked about to get some momentum around it and then build it over a period of time.
Andrew Tarvin: Exactly. And that's the intent, that's why we call them personas. They're not set personalities and you can learn how to use all seven. I had to learn how to do all of these different things. But if you start with the one that you're already naturally good at, you'll see success earlier, you'll find out what's fun.
Start with what you're good at. And over time, use that as a small starting point. Because I think one of them, we have things ranging from keynotes that we do to in person workshops, et cetera, the biggest benefit to our keynotes is that they're really funny. They're going to make the audience laugh.
But two, part of it is just giving people permission. It's letting them know that it is not only okay to use humour. But there are tremendous professional benefits to doing so. And so hopefully from people listening today, the world needs more humour out there.
This is your permission to go out and to try to do things at a minimum for yourself. Even if you don't expose it to anyone else, there's things that you can do to bring a little bit more joy and positivity to your own life.
Sharad Lal: That's such a wonderful message. I was wondering as we end, is there any other bottom line message that you'd like to end with?
Andrew Tarvin: I think that's the biggest one. You choose every single day how you do your work. So why not choose to make it more fun, right? Why not choose to make it more productive, less stressed, happier? Why not choose to get better results, have more fun? and ultimately why not choose to bring a little bit more humour to your life?
So that's what we encourage people to do. One habit that I've instilled that helps me is to simply think one smile per hour.
If I'm doing a keynote, then Yeah, I hope that I get more than one smile and get lots of laughter and stuff like that. But at any given moment, if I'm getting ready to go into an hour long thing, how do I smile? If I'm going to do an hour long podcast, what's going to make me smile? Oh, telling certain stories makes me smile.
that ultimately creates a habit. And then you start to recognize how quick and easy it can be. B to add humour. Sometimes it's big and takes time to plan.
Other times you're like. Oh wait, I've got an hour long commute that I'm getting ready to go on. I could listen to a comedy podcast or I could listen to some standup. It'll start small and it gets a little bit bigger and maybe, at the end of the day you become a humour enthusiast like myself and.
Find more joy and positivity in the world.
Sharad Lal: Thank you very much, Andrew, for spending so much time with us, sharing your wisdom. I got more than one smile, I'm sure the audience would have gotten a lot more of this. You're doing a great job in making people's lives brighter and happier and letting people access their brighter side and bring it out.
So thank you very much for all you're doing. And thank you very much for such a great conversation.
Andrew Tarvin: Absolutely. Thank you for having me.
Sharad Lal: Thank you Drew for such a fun and useful conversation. For more Andrew, you can check the show notes. Here's something all of us could try, especially me. Next time you're in a difficult situation. And you're charged with emotions and angry and really caught up in it. Try and take a step back and think of something funny.
It could be a really poor joke. It need not be that smart, intelligent joke that you need to get across. It could be a dad joke, any kind of a joke.
Just try and do it and see what happens. Maybe diffuses the situation, maybe not. But let's try it out. And if it works. Maybe even if it doesn't get a smile, but if it just diffuses some of the tension that could give us a starting point of trying humour in different places and seeing how it works for us. I'm going to do that. I hope you do that as well. Best of luck as you try to bring humour to work and life.
I hope you enjoyed the episode.
The next episode will drop two weeks from now on November 19th. Please do join us for that till next time. Have a wonderful day ahead. Bye bye.
