Leading a life filled with lightness is never a solo endeavour. What good is a smile or a laugh if you don’t share it with someone who needs it? Mark Twain once said, “To get the full value of joy, you must have someone to divide it with.”
Our guests on this season of The Humourology Podcast have some tips on how you can get the most out of your investment in joy by sharing it with others.
Share Your Gift with Others
If any of this season’s guests are an expert on sharing success with others, it must be Anne-Marie Imafadon. She is the founder of STEMettes, an award-winning social enterprise which encourages young women to learn Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics beyond the classroom. Imafadon knows a thing or two about spreading joy to others through her work as a mentor to young people interested in the field of science.
Mentoring a young person can serve as a valuable tool to both grow and share joy in your life. For Imafadon, mentorship can create a community of support that can help all involved.
“It’s about them being able to not only celebrate but commiserate together. And I think that also then helps folks to know that it’s different if you feel like it’s just you that’s being treated that way. It’s one thing if you know that there’s a group of folks that are being treated that way and there’s that common theme or string or characteristic, then it does help you feel a little bit better. You do have folks to joke with, but you also have folks to work with to change these things, to evolve these things and to allow others to thrive in these spaces where they need to.”
Unplug and Unwind
Both Julia Bradbury and Kevin Maguire know just how important it is to share your valuable time with others in person. Face-to-face communication is how real relationships are built to last. For Julia Bradbury, sharing a stroll with others can be the perfect way to build relationships while bolstering your physical and mental health.
“In walking, we have the power to change our pace. And when we do that, we can find union with nature, camaraderie with friends and a form of intimacy with self”
For Kevin Maguire, unplugging from social media can help strengthen relationships and improve political and social awareness. Kevin says,
“You might have a lot of friends on Facebook, but you haven’t got any real friends. It’s the atomisation in some ways. I know it connects us all, but it’s just everybody with their phones or their laptops or whatever and it’s not the same as meeting physically somewhere and chatting and talking…”
Sharing your time and space with another person is what humanity is all about. While a “lol” may be nice, nothing beats seeing the pearly whites of a friend’s smile.
Light up Every Room
Professor Richard Wiseman knows what it takes to light up a room. For the good doctor, likeability is the key to building trust and spreading joy. When you enter a room with lightness, you are sure to spread joy to everyone in sight.
“I think there is another type of humour which is about bonding people together, which is about helping the group, which is about laughing at something silly rather than other people. And most of the lucky people I met were certainly cheerful and some of them were funny people. But again, those two things are quite separate. Funness, the ability to really make other people laugh and be creative and so on, I think is one skillset. Cheerfulness, which is making other people just generally feel good and being so happy and so on is a different thing.”
To learn more about the value of sharing humour with those around you, take a listen to the first four episodes of this season’s Humourology Podcast. Hear how our exceptional guests use humour and positivity to connect to others.
See you next Tuesday.
Warmest,
Paul x
