SPONTANEOUS HUMOR IN COACHING

You don’t need to make things up, the truth is entertaining enough.

To be a humorous coach does not mean telling jokes. Don’t even think about going there! Telling jokes in a coaching context will seem corny and ridiculous. The comedy that you want to access and share in coaching is not Stand-Up comedy where you present one gag after another. That obviously is artificial and would seem like something external and irrelevant jerry-rigged onto coaching.

If that’s not what I mean by a “humorous coach,” or using humor in coaching, then what do I mean? I am referring to the spontaneous humor that arises socially everyday from the funny things that happen to us. The great majority of humor, of laughs, of smiles does not occur via the telling of jokes. We mostly smile and laugh at the small surprises, incongruencies, and playfulness that springs up unintentionally and accidentally. Most humor occurs from the way we mis-speak, get things wrong, act in clumsy ways, bungle something, make funny faces, etc.