LEARN TO LAUGH “WITH” YOURSELF

I owned a personal & professional development school in Alabama for 12 years before moving to Florida.  I used to tell my students “when you wake up in the morning, put a smile on your face and say out loud, IT’S A GREAT DAY AND I AM A BEAUTIFUL PERSON!!”  Now I always warned them….don’t look in the mirror first because that bed hair can really scare you!

Try it tomorrow morning.  It can shift your attitude for the entire day.  I don’t care if you are a young teen or an old grumpy grandpa it will change your attitude.  You just can’t say that with a smile on your face and not laugh.  It just makes you happy even if you are attempting sarcasm.

Laughter is good for the soul and we all need to learn to laugh WITH ourselves.  Too many people make mistakes and then get mad because others are laughing about it.  They think people are laughing AT them and their self-esteem goes down the toilet and suddenly nothing else matters.  Their attitude turns sour or they shut down.  They live in “perfection hell”.

When you can learn to laugh WITH yourself – laugh WITH others at stupid things you might do, life will be a much happier place for you.  I have a group of girlfriends we call “The Twisted Sisters”.  They are my best friends in life – the ones you know you can always count on.  On this one particular canoeing venture, I boldly commented that “I know how to do it – I used to teach canoeing”.  I failed to tell them it was at Girl Scout camp 45 years ago and I hadn’t been in a canoe since!

You know what happened next….the minute I got in that canoe I flipped it over dumping all the supplies in the water along with myself and my girlfriend.  The rest of the trip was a continuum of that story.  They were belly laughing and so was I.  To this day, years later, they still tease me about “teaching canoeing” and it is still as funny today as it was then.  It was a stupid thing for me to say because I knew nothing about canoeing!!

Point is, I could have gotten mad, gotten my feelings hurt and let it ruin my day or I could have done what I did and just laughed about it with myself and with my friends for all these years.  That famous statement will forever be a metaphor used anytime someone in our group thinks they know how to do something.  We made a life memory that day – actually we made a lot of life memories that day but we will save those for another story!

Can you learn to laugh WITH yourself?  Repeat after me:  IT’S A GREAT DAY AND I AM A BEAUTIFUL PERSON…..IT’S A GREAT DAY AND I AM A BEAUTIFUL PERSON….say it every day for the next 21 days as you put your feet on the ground in the morning (it takes 21 days to create a habit).  You will begin to really believe it and live it and you will start your day off laughing WITH yourself instead of AT yourself.

When is the last time you laughed WITH yourself?

Related articles

• Never Stop Laughing (tadams4u.wordpress.com)
• Laughter is the Best Medicine (judithmcguinness.wordpress.com)

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