Survival Skills for People Under Pressure
C.W. Metcalf and Roma Felible

How would you feel after meeting with your manager to review your performance, if he or she recommended you attend a laughter workshop?

The enthusiasm, intensity and immersion that characterizes is often associated with fun. Humor and laughter help us lose ourselves in what we are doing.

Under pressure, top performers use humor to keep themselves on track - in ways that sometimes don't make sense to outsiders.

It can seem perverse for top surgeons to laugh and joke in the middle of serious operations. Yet that's what we watched the surgeon stars of the television program, M*A*S*H, do for a decade. Surgeons in an operating theatre cannot afford to be tense. Laughter helps them keep calm and focused.

Humor can help you thrive in change, remain creative under pressure, work more effectively, play more enthusiastically, and stay healthier in the process. But humor is also a set of specific, learned skills, and like any other discipline, these skills need to be developed.

Lighten Up shows you how to build these skills so that you can see the absurdity in difficult situations and take yourself lightly while you take your job, problem, or changes seriously.

C.W. Metcalf and Roma Felible are a husband-and-wife team as well as business partners. C.W. Metcalf and his company consult worldwide on the role of humor in managing oneself and others.

Metcalf's advice borders on the profound. I love to quote his line "take yourself lightly and your work seriously". This is advice all workaholics - including me - should heed.

Available for purchase from Amazon.com