Tag Archive for: laugh at yourself

I put up with that for a whole year?! ARGH…..

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The day my printer taught me a life lesson!

I have to tell you something—and please don’t judge me… but it made me SO happy. 😄

🖨️ For almost a year now, my printer has been displaying an error message—“ADF Jam”—pretty much every time I tried to make a copy or scan a sheet of paper. Except there was never any paper jammed in it. Never. ARGGGG….. And two out of three times, I couldn’t make a copy or scan anything.

It’s been a YEAR since I got this message…

ONE YEAR!

Just a minor annoyance, you might say. Except that I put up with it. Week after week. Month after month. Because I didn’t have time to take the printer in for repairs, and especially because I couldn’t do without a printer.

Last week, I went there, and while it was being “repaired,” I finally decided to buy a new printer. And when I plugged it into my computer… nothing happened. No error message.

I scanned and copied some pages just for the fun of seeing if it worked. ✅

And then I felt something I wasn’t expecting: an IMMENSE sense of relief. It was as if an invisible weight had just been lifted off my shoulders. 🪶 I felt lighter. More at peace. Happy, quite simply. All because of a printer!

Why Do We Put Up With Little Annoyances?

It got me thinking for a long time after I closed the box for the new machine. How many annoyances do we drag around with us in our lives, telling ourselves, “It’s not that big of a deal” or “I don’t have time to deal with it”? 🤔

A piece of clothing that no longer fits. A chore we keep putting off. A leaky faucet. A “little noise” in the car that we’d rather ignore. A broken object we work around instead of fixing. A conversation we put off. A habit that no longer serves us but that we keep out of convenience.

We tell ourselves it’s not serious enough to justify the time, energy, or discomfort of dealing with it. So we just work around it. We develop habits to avoid it, work around it, or tolerate it. And it becomes almost invisible, like background noise we no longer pay attention to.

Except that it’s never really invisible. Every annoyance we put up with takes up a little space in our minds. Often just a tiny bit of space, but it adds up to all the other tiny spaces occupied by all the other little annoyances. And that accumulation—it weighs on us. Even when we don’t realize it anymore.

The Day We Finally Deal With It

And on the day we finally take care of it—even if it’s just a tiny thing—we feel that same sense of relief. That lightness. That little burst of happiness. 💫

It’s almost always simpler than we imagined. In our minds, we’d built a whole mountain out of this little pebble. The time it would take. The complications it would cause. And then we tackle it, and… it wasn’t so bad after all. The relief we feel isn’t just proportional to the size of the problem we’ve solved—it’s also proportional to the time we spent putting it off.

My friend Mimi once wrote this to me on a piece of paper: When you have a little pebble in your shoe, you don’t have to keep it there to keep moving forward!

I kept this little note in plain sight for years, on the bulletin board in my office, to remind myself that if something gets too annoying, I don’t have to put up with it. Since I moved, my office layout has changed, and that little piece of paper must be tucked away somewhere. And I had almost forgotten about it! Thanks to my printer for reminding me of it a year later—with far less subtlety than my little scrap of paper!

And above all, learn to laugh it off

Because there’s another option, while you’re waiting to deal with the annoyance—or even after you’ve dealt with it: laugh it off.

Laughing at the fact that we put up with an error message for a whole YEAR for nothing (laughing at ourselves). Laughing at all the energy you put into working around the problem instead of fixing it. Laughing at the mountain you imagined you’d have to climb, when the solution actually took just a few minutes.

This is one of the things I’ve been teaching for over 20 years in laughter yoga: laughter won’t fix your leaky faucet or your broken printer (what a shame! HAHAHA). But it completely changes the weight we place on the annoyance while we’re dealing with it. It creates a little breathing room, a little distance, between us and the problem. And that breathing room is often exactly what allows us to take action instead of continuing to endure in silence.

So yes, deal with whatever’s bothering you. But in the meantime—and even afterward—have a good laugh about it. You, first and foremost.

Your assignment for this week

🌀 Identify ONE irritant that you’ve been putting up with for too long. Just one. No need to tackle all ten at once—just the one that comes to mind right now, the one with a little voice telling you, “I should have dealt with this a long time ago.”

And take a step—even a small one—to free yourself from it this week.

It could be: making that call you’ve been putting off for months. Throwing away (or fixing) the object that annoys you every time you see it. Having that conversation you’ve been avoiding. Making that appointment. Making that change—even a tiny one.

Come on! Get that little pebble out of your shoe.

Take care of yourself, and above all, get rid of one source of irritation this week. It’s a relief, and it feels SO GOOD! I know a thing or two about that! HAHAHA!

Linda 💛

Laughing at yourself, an underestimated skill

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Late Monday, I was walking out of a store – a little preoccupied by the fact that I had printed the wrong document I needed for the Laughter Yoga Facilitator Training I’ll be offering this weekend. Ishhhh… Not happy with myself and my distraction!

I leave the store and head for my car.

I press the handle.

It doesn’t open.

I’ll try again.

Still nothing.

I’m a little annoyed at the automatic lock, which doesn’t work.

That’s when I realize…
it’s not my car.

Same color.
Same model.
Same parking… or almost.

Celebrity gif. Jennifer Lawrence grimaces in front of a microphone during a panel as if to say,
OUPS!

Mine is identical, yes –
but, on closer inspection, much less clean! 😅

And then, on the parking lot, I laughed.

Not a little embarrassed smile.
A real laugh. Loud and clear!

Because deep down… it was harmless.
Human.
And frankly a bit comical.

Laughing at yourself is an underestimated skill.

We believe that credibility comes from constant seriousness.
We think we always have to look confident, in control, impeccable.

But the ability to see yourself stumble… and laugh about it?
That’s a form of inner strength.

To laugh at ourselves is not to diminish ourselves.
It’s to give ourselves the right to be imperfect.
It’s to release the pressure of always having to “do well”.
It’s to humanize our own demands.

And above all… it relaxes the nervous system.

Laughing in that parking lot immediately sent my body into safety mode.
No shame.
No self-criticism.
Just a light moment in an ordinary day.

And that changes everything.

I love it!

So I invite you to do this with me.

Watch yourself.

The next little mistake, the next little oversight, the next awkward moment…

Instead of judging you,
try smiling.
Maybe even laughing.

Notice how it affects your body.
Your breathing.
Your mood.

You can’t avoid every mistake.

But you can choose the energy with which you cross them.

And sometimes it all starts with a door that won’t open.

💛

With all my affection… and a big laugh!

Linda

What I’ve learned in my years of laughter yoga

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I started practicing laughter yoga in 2003. At the time, I was what you might call a serious, stressed-out manager. I’m not sure if the people who worked with me had that perception, as I’ve always been a fairly good-natured, smiling person.

However, I consider that to have been my reality. “Pressurized” by difficult objectives, tight deadlines, the amount of work required… In short, a pot under constant pressure.

When I sent in my registration for the training weekend in May 2003, I knew I was in for something different. But probably not this different!

Here’s what I learned

1. It’s not as hard as you think to laugh intentionally

Once I’ve decided to start laughing, once I’ve made the physical motion to laugh and I know I have to laugh for at least a minute, I do it. What’s more, when we laugh as a group, the simple fact of hearing others, seeing them laugh, knowing that we’re there to do just that – laugh – has a leverage effect on our laughter! Did you know that we have a special laughter sensor in the brain? So when the detector detects, guess what happens!

In a laughter yoga session, we all start laughing at the same time, on the leader’s signal. When he or she says GO, we all go. Even when I’m practising alone, I hear myself laughing, and every time I do, I catch myself thinking how ridiculous it must look to see myself laughing like that, and THAT makes me laugh!

2. Some exercises work better than others

I admit it. I have my favorite exercises. In the sessions I run at the laughter club, the same people often take part every week. I can’t have them doing the same routine over and over again. So I vary. Some evenings, all the exercises trigger my laughter quickly. Other nights, I look at the list I’ve chosen to do and make a note not to do it again in the future! Of course, I always ask the group if they liked a new exercise that I didn’t like so much. If their opinion is positive, then I bring it back for them. But not for me! Silent laughter, for example, is a must, and it’s terribly effective for me. Silent laughter appeals to the ban on laughter!!!! Mischievous you say!

3. It’s definitely an aerobic exercise

I’m hot, out of breath and red in the face! It’s not jogging, but it feels like it. It’s something I keep an eye on when I’m working with a group. How the participants’ faces look. The heart beats faster, the lungs are hard at work… in short, “ça y va aux toasts” as we sometimes say in Quebec! Which means it’s very energetic. Hence the importance of taking the time to breathe properly between exercises – or during my laughter meditation.

4. I rarely laugh this hard or this long on a daily basis

Vrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrratively not! In a laughter yoga session, I can easily laugh for 20 minutes. Not necessarily in a row, but certainly 20 minutes in total. On a daily basis, my laughter only lasts a few seconds. Here and there during the day. And then some! That’s on days when I’m not alone in my office or in a particularly good mood. Most of the time, if I’m focused on my work (whether administrative, editorial or creative), I won’t even smile. Unless, of course, I’m holding a straw between my teeth. I smile. I don’t laugh. So a laughter yoga session is great.

5. I can laugh even when I’m not doing so well

I’ve been through all kinds of personal storms over the past 20 years. Bereavements, job losses, physical injuries, arguments… you name it, I’ve been through it. I remember an evening when I had just learned of the death of a close friend just before leaving for the laughter club. I cried on the way to the community center, and then it was as if I’d put my grief on hold for the hour of the session. I was able to lead the meeting, and when I got back to my car, I started crying again. That evening, I realized that during the hour of the session, while I was laughing with the group, I hadn’t been thinking or suffering about my grief. I had been completely in the moment with the participants. The pain hadn’t gone away. It was just “a little on the side” during those moments.

 

6. I don’t feel like I’m forcing myself anymore

People sometimes tell me that they can’t tell the difference and don’t know whether I’m laughing “for real” or “as if”. And neither do I! HAHAHA! I don’t feel like I’m forcing myself anymore. It comes quickly and stays if I decide to keep going. I think that must be the body’s ability to train itself to do something easily and naturally. Once the habit is well established, the body reacts to the first signal to start! A bit like Pavlov’s dogs! It’s the best conditioning you could wish for!

7. After the sessions, I love everyone

You’re right. I look at people on the sidewalk and I just want to compliment them. I look at them and I SEE them! If I felt anger or impatience towards someone before (I’m normal! It happens to me, yes yes!), after the session, those feelings are gone and have given way to openness and tolerance. I’m not saying that I magically forgive everything. No. What happens is that my heart takes over. Not just my head. Notice how you look at the people who make you laugh. Or those around you after a good laugh. It’s like making room for… love after all! Less judgment and evaluation.

8. Laughing makes me creative

I need to take stock of my achievements over the last 20 years, and I have to admit that laughing makes me much more creative! Of course, I know that laughing activates the left side of my brain, the part linked to imagination, love and creativity. I think laughing does stimulate that part of my brain. On the other hand, I think all those exercises I created by improvising during the sessions based on what the participants shared with me, that’s all about PLAY. I’ve certainly started playing again by practising laughter yoga. Because laughter is a game! At least, the way we start the exercises, the way we interpret reality in a more playful light, is an invitation to play. And play means creativity!

9. I don’t care what others think of me when I lead a session.

HAHAHA! I know that many must look at me and think that I’m not doing anything serious! That I’m maybe even weird or strange or… a little crazy! I know because – I confess – that’s probably what I would have thought myself 21 years ago! As I lead a session, I’m focused on the participants. On their complexion, their faces, their smiles. When I’m with a group, I invite them all to start the exercise at the same time and follow me. No one can judge anyone… except maybe me, because I demonstrate before giving them the GO.

I KNOW how liberating and beneficial what I’m doing to them is. So what do some people think of me? I don’t really care! The important thing is to make sure things are done right for optimum effect. Am I wrong? I laugh! I say the wrong word? I laugh! And believe me, I do goof up sometimes! I’m probably the best example of how to LAUGH AT YOURSELF!

10. All are beautiful when they laugh

Certainly. I have no hesitation in making and statement! Eyes sparkle. Cheeks are rosier. A sparkle lights up the eyes. Even toothless mouths are more beautiful. I read a long time ago that laughter is good for sex appeal. Well, I don’t know, but what I do know is that I’ve never seen a serious face more beautiful than a smiling one. If you’re holding back laughter because you don’t like your teeth, don’t stop! You look at your eyes when you laugh! What’s more, it’s the energy the person gives off that is felt. A beautiful, positive, vibrant, loving energy. Don’t you think that’s beautiful? HAHAHA! I think just like you.

 

 

That’s all I’ve learned… and more! Because my main discovery is that laughing brings out the best in me!

Laugh with me, will you?

Laughter, joy and health

Linda