4 Ways to Use Humor and Storytelling in Your Nonprofit Training
Today’s episode is all about humor. I’m not talking about corny jokes or puns, but rather the lightheartedness and energy that you need in your nonprofit to get things done and to help teams work together.
My guest, Gita Kulkarni, explains why we need to care about humor and how to use humor as nonprofit Learning and Development leaders. Gita is a humor coach who helps people find and express their sense of humor to be more productive and effective in work and life.
Listen to the episode or scroll down to read the blog post ↓
Key Points:
02:29 Get to know humor coach, Gita Kulkarni
09:56 The psychology of humor and its effect on stress
14:33 Using storytelling for humor as a nonprofit L&D leader
19:55 How nonprofits can incorporate more humor into their existing training and leadership development strategies
23:21 Finding humor within yourself
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4 Ways to Use Humor and Storytelling in Your Nonprofit Training
What happened when the pirate attempted to recite the alphabet?
He got lost at C.
Why was the Scarecrow awarded a Nobel Prize?
Because he was outstanding in his field.
I told my doctor I broke my arm in two places.
He told me to stop going to those two places.
Okay, thanks for bearing with me on those jokes. I get it, they were bad. Episode 63 of the podcast is all about humor, so I thought I'd Google best jokes for work and that's what I got. That was the best the internet had to offer. That's the bad news.
The good news is that I'm not talking about that kind of humor. I'm talking about the lightheartedness and energy that you need in your nonprofit to get things done and to help teams work together.
Humor coach, Gita Kulkarni, explains why we need to care about humor and how we can use humor as nonprofit Learning and Development leaders. Gita helps people find and express their sense of humor to be more productive and effective in work and life.
In this blog post, we’re covering the following:
1) Humor Helps Learning and Development Leaders Gain Influence and Buy-In
As a humor coach, Gita takes something that we have played with all our lives and helps people shape it into something usable.
“I think we all know innately that humor works to our benefit as we interweave it into work and in our presentations.” - Gita Kulkarni
Gita explains that humor can be used to gain exposure, investment, and awareness of your cause. To do this, she helps people understand where their natural humor lies. This could be puns, witty stories, dad jokes, or gestures to name a few.\
“There are so many ways to be funny. I find what you naturally are and do and then we take that and exponentiate it. I add a couple of other devices and then you get comfortable with using it.” - Gita Kulkarni
2) Using Humor in Nonprofit Training Helps People Learn
Gita points out a few ways that humor can help you as a Learning and Development leader at a physiological level.
Humor helps reduce stress levels
Gita points out that people today have a basal level of stress which is produced by the hormone cortisol.
“We've got all these stressors. . . and what humor does, is it literally at the physiological level, moves through that same channel where that cortisol is being produced, and it shuts off the cortisol and it passes through dopamine and serotonin, and all these hormones that are good for you.” - Gita Kulkarni
What this means, Gita explains, is that when you’re laughing at a joke and genuinely amused, for that microsecond in time you are not stressed, because physically, your body can't be stressed and joyful at the same time.
There is such a new conversation happening around well-being at work, how that shows up, and what organizations can do to support well-being. Adding humor to your workplace can help reduce stress levels and increase well-being. Take a look at these past episodes if you want some more information on well-being at work.
Episode 38: Dealing with Corporate Burnout? One Easy Way to Manage Stress as a Nonprofit Leader with Jessie Pagliari
Humor makes people more receptive to new ideas
“People tend to proactively open up with humor because it's opening up the channels in the brain with your audience to reception to whatever you're about to say.” - Gita Kulkarni
Humor makes people more relatable
Gita explains that humor gives people a point of relatability.
“If I laugh at the same joke as you laughed at, we see commonality, and you have a positive bias towards me because of that.” - Gita Kulkarni
So if you think about creating psychological safety and trust within your organization, humor is one way you can do that. We need psychological safety and trust for our change initiatives and our training and leadership development to be successful. We need those relationships, we need the trust that's established and humor is a way to do that.
3) Storytelling Makes Your Training and Leadership Development Topics Relatable
When Gita thinks of nonprofits, the first thing that comes to mind for her is storytelling. This relates strongly to the nonprofit's mission and cause.
“It's an easily accessible tool for leadership who are at nonprofits that want to inspire across their donor base, their volunteer base, their sponsor base, the people that work for them. Storytelling will be a strong pull-in.” - Gita Kulkarni
Gita encourages people to use theatrical and humorous elements like banter, voices, and gestures as they tell their stories.
“In the nonprofit space where you can kind of intersect humor and your cause, you're going to get people who look at your cause and want to give because they just stop in their tracks.” - Gita Kulkarni
Just like we use storytelling in marketing or fundraising, we can also use storytelling in training. This relates back to the psychology of humor.
“You're giving a point of relatability. It's almost like a sewing machine. You're stitching and when people laugh, there's a connectivity point that's happening. And that's going to give them a reason for why they want to relate.” - Gita Kulkarni
If you want to learn more about storytelling, check out this past episode
4) Applying Humor and Storytelling in Your Learning and Development Role
An example Gita gives is the Movember campaign which raises awareness of men's health issues, such as prostate cancer, testicular cancer, and men's suicide. Actor Nick Offerman, who plays Ron Swanson in Parks and Recreation did a piece for them that went viral. People who like Parks and Recreation are immediately drawn to the cause.
“The good thing is that people like things for different reasons. If you can find a really smart, bounded, funny thing to align with your cause, do it. You'll get a lot more captivation.” - Gita Kulkarni
As Gita was talking I couldn’t help but think that there are opportunities to do that with your own leadership within an organization. For example, building humor into things like training and leadership development so that others are experiencing it, and allowing your facilitators that are running your training and leadership development program to use humor. I think there's a lot of different ways to use that.
I also thought of Ted Lasso. So many people are using the leadership lessons from Ted Lasso in their organizations. That’s an easy way to incorporate humor into training and leadership development work in nonprofits.
Gita explained why this works is because people love Ted Lasso and it has a universal appeal to a lot of people.
“You see Ted Lasso on the screen, or you see a favorite piece from him and you’re immediately going to that safe place.” - Gita Kulkarni
Humor opens people up. It allows you to be more receptive to what you're learning. And so humor is a great way to help people prepare themselves to learn.
5) Incorporating Humor into Existing Training and Leadership Development Strategies
So, with all that in mind, how can you incorporate humor into training? Here are 4 ways you can use humor and storytelling in your nonprofit training:
Start your leadership development training with relevant leadership lessons from Ted Lasso. As Gita said, everybody sees Ted Lasso and immediately starts laughing. So that's a great and easy way to bring humor into your leadership development effort.
Use a ‘Yes, and…’ activity in your training. That's a low-barrier path to entry for people. So build that activity into the training.
Hold on to the ‘make no mistakes’ tenant of improv so that learners feel like they can really practice in a safe environment, whatever that new skill or new thing is that they're learning. Allow them to have that make no mistake mentality within the training in the learning environment.
Infuse a funny story into your training.
If you still aren't sure where to start, Gita recommends inviting the naturally funny people from your organization into your brainstorming sessions when you're creating that training and see what they come up with. And then it's not all on you. If you feel like this is just going to be too difficult or too overwhelming, invite some people around you to help brainstorm.
“There are people within your organization at a nonprofit level, whether they're on the payroll or they're just part of your community, that are just really funny, and they're also committed to your cause. And I would find those people, I call them your cultivators of that culture, and help them to cultivate humor, tap their brain, bring them into some of your brainstorming sessions.” - Gita Kulkarni
Gita emphasizes that you don’t have to be the funny one in your organization.
“You could actually gain humor points just from finding that person in your organization that just has this great resonance and magnetism. “ - Gita Kulkarni
In past episodes, I've had guests talk about using play at work and using improv in training and these are related ways of bringing lightheartedness and a new energy into your organization:
Episode 36: How Nonprofit Learning and Development Leaders Can Use Play to Create Organizational Change with Acey Holmes
Episode 07: Do THIS and You Will Never Have a Boring Virtual Training Again with Melissa Dinwiddie
Episode 05: Three Must-Haves in Any Virtual Training
To hear the full conversation I had with Gita Kulkarni on the Learning for Good Podcast, scroll all the way up and tune into episode 63.
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