The only resolution you should make this year…

Dear MoneyMaking Friend,

In the past few years, I’ve made a whole lot of New Year’s resolutions.

Last year, I planned to read a book a week (that’s 52 books a year). It was all sparked by a quote I read by Henry David Thoreau: Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all.

Well, 52 books might not sound like a lot of books to read – but it is. I only managed to get through 32 (the best of which was The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova). If you haven’t read that yet – do yourself a favour and get a copy!

This year I have a new kind of resolution. It’s something a little different...

This year I urge you to put a little Ho! Ho! Ho! into your life. What, exactly, is Ho! Ho! Ho!? It’s a technique that will:

* reveal important truths to you about life and living well
* reduce tension and the troubles tension creates
* help you overcome obstacles, even seemingly insurmountable ones
* increase the dopamine in your system and make you feel better
* improve your blood circulation, respiration, and digestion
* greatly reduce the chance that you will die of cancer or heart disease
* make you a more popular person
* increase the speed at which you achieve your goals
* give you more personal power

And the best thing about this amazing technique is that:

* It won’t cost you a cent to implement it.
* You don’t need any special education or skills to take advantage of it.
* It takes only a few seconds of your time now and then.
* It gets easier to “practise” the more you do it

Are you ready to learn more?

In 1992, during the height of the rioting in Los Angeles, Terry Braverman was driving along the Hollywood freeway during rush hour. Looking through the passenger window, he saw fires blazing in the city. The odour of smoke was mixing with the familiar scent of smog, and it was making the bumper-to-bumper drive seem somewhat dangerous. He glanced at his fellow commuters, and could see in their faces that they, too, were feeling anxious.

Their anxiety made him feel even more anxious. He felt himself starting to panic. Then he remembered a simple maxim: You can’t control what you can’t control, but you are in charge of the way you react to it.

He decided at that moment, in the middle of the most nerve-shaking traffic jam he had ever been in, to lighten up. Luckily, Braverman had a way to do that. Being a professional comedian, he had a prop bag on the seat behind him. Reaching back, he pulled out a rubber clown nose. “This is just what I need,” he thought.

Donning the clown nose, Braverman again looked out the window. At first, he said, the drivers around him were doing double-takes, as if to say, “He’s a tourist. He doesn’t know what is happening.” But when he smiled, they got the message. “I wanted them to know that in spite of the circumstances we can take a moment to lighten up and suspend the downward spiral of distress.”

In his book, When the Going Gets Tough, the Tough Lighten Up, Braverman also tells the story of Jean Houston, a philosopher and the author of A Mythic Life, who was traveling with a colleague to Washington, DC to speak at a conference that was meant to inspire attendees to be more creative. The colleague was complaining about how impossible it is to inspire creativity in government bureaucrats. “They spend their lives rearranging chairs on the Titanic. They are not going to listen to us,” she said.

“We’ll have to alter their consciousness,” Houston replied.

“How?”

Houston explained that the best method she knew was through humour. So she was going to spend the first 10 minutes of her presentation making jokes. “At the peak of roaring laughter, one exists, as in mid-sneeze, everywhere and nowhere,” she said, “and is thus available to be blessed, evoked, and deepened.”

Houston’s “method” is one that many professional speakers use. Audiences are often ill at ease in seminar situations. When you are feeling that way, you are more judgmental and resistant. But if a speaker is good enough to get you laughing, you will open up to him a little. You will feel, “Okay. I’m ready now. Tell me what you want and I’ll listen.”

Braverman tells how Rich Little saved himself from being beaten up by a bunch of thugs. “I was pretty scared, but within 15 minutes I had them laughing. I was doing my whole act. … So I turned that around I don’t remember exactly how. I think I went into Louie Armstrong. … They didn’t know who I was, but when I started doing the impressions they lost their incentive to beat me up.”

In this case, Little’s humour did more than improve his own mental state – it improved his fate. At the end, he says, the thugs were applauding.

We’ve all been in situations where we allowed ourselves to be swept away by anger. When I have used humour in difficult situations, it has never failed to help. At the very least, it made me feel better by putting things in context: Life is short. We live. We die. It’s the same for all of us. Lighten up.

So that’s my wish for you this year – that, in the face of all this economic turmoil and the negative impact it may be having on your life, you find time, when you are stressed, to find some lightness in your soul. It may not change the direction of the country or even the economy (unless everybody lightens up), but it will give you the energy and flexibility to move forward with hope and happiness.

Pascale Barrow
Managing Editor of Money Making Insider