I’d Rather See this at Burger King than that Creepy King
A friend, Ian Percy, sent this video showing a unique way of providing customer service at a Burger King in Brazil. What a funny idea!
Ron
Humor Injections: A Humor and Healthcare Blog
Archive for March, 2010
What is Your REAL Goal?
On March 5, 2010, I spoke for the Florida Hospital Association’s Healthcare Human Resources conference. It was a great event and once again, I was reminded of how much I love healthcare HR folks. They truly understand the healthcare organization better than anybody else.
One of the other presenters was Jeff Wadsworth from the Franklin Covey organization. He shared a very important process that caused me to look at my work differently. I want to share it with you in hopes that does the same for you.
Jeff described two types of goals: Lead Goals and Lag Goals. For instance, if you set a goal to lose weight, and then measure your weight every day, you are measuring a lag goal. In other words, you’re measuring the outcome rather than the steps that lead to that outcome. If, on the other hand, you measure the things you want to change (exercise, type of food, amount of food, etc.) to help you lose weight, you are measuring a lead goal.
The significant difference is this: You can’t change a lag goal unless you change the lead goal. So, we should all strive to set lead goals and address them regularly. And eventually, the lag goals will change.
Let’s take this one step further and apply it to humor. Let’s say you want to add more humor to your day. Don’t just set a goal to add more humor. Instead, set specific ways of adding humor as your goal. For example, if you want to add more humor to your day, you could decide to watch more funny online videos, watch your favorite sitcom more often, or read a chapter of a funny book every day. By measuring those goals, you will always know if you’re achieving your overall goal. Plus, you have a better chance of making adjustments along the way when you know what your doing (or not doing).
So remember. Lead goals are the best way to get to your lag goals.
Ron
I Love a Good Joke
A participant in a presentation I did today for the South Carolina Society for Health System Pharmacists told me this joke:
A nursing supervisor walked into the nursing station and saw one of the nurses hanging by her arms from the ceiling. The supervisor said, “What are you doing?”
The nurse said, “I’m a light bulb.”
The supervisor said, “You are obviously overworked and need to go home.”
As the nurse was leaving, another nurse followed her.
The supervisor said, “Where are you going?”
The other nurse said, “Well, I can’t work in the dark.”
Ron
A Smile Among the Frowns
When I speak to healthcare audiences, I emphasize our tendency to focus on the negative and even our inadvertent desire to out negative one another. For instance, if someone says, “I’ve had this cold for a week,” we’re likely to respond, “I had a cold for seven years once.” We seem to thrive on pointing out the negative.
The weather is too cold except when it’s too hot. The restaurant food is not as good as the last time we were here. Our joints ache, our eyes are getting bad, and our hearing is worse but luckily, there’s nothing worth listening to anyway. Gas is too high, home prices are too low, and I can remember when a cup of coffee was a fifty cents.
There’s so much negativity out there, when I run into someone positive, I think, “Boy is he out of touch with reality.”
While I must admit that I too can be the King of the Whiners, it’s not completely our fault. We’re given a smorgasbord of negativity every single day in the newspapers, magazines, and television shows that we absorb.
I subscribe to USA today because it’s the McDonald’s of news and I can get a nice snapshot of the news and still have daylight left. Today, I glanced at the third page of the news section and here were a few of the headlines:
Colorado rock slide damages bridge, road
Inmate ODs on pills before execution
Conservative Calif. senator says he’s gay
Six hospitalized after bad injetions
Oregon couple get 16 months in son’s death
Train collides with truck
Is it any wonder we’re negative? All of these articles have a definite negative feel to them. Even though there might be positive stories, it’s the negative slant that tends to grab us and it’s the negative slant that sells newspapers.
As a side note, the inmate who OD’d on pills is now in the prison hospital. The medical staff said he was not yet ready to “be released” for execution. So, I guess if you take too many pills, you’re not in good enough shape to be given a lethal injection. Really?
Buried on the news page today amidst all the tragedy and destruction is a two sentence article that read, “Mary Josephine Ray, who was certified as the oldest person living in the United States, died at the age of 114 years, 294 days.”
OK, so it’s not necessarily a “positive” article but it has the potential of being one of the most inspirational articles in the entire newspaper. Yet, it only captured 2 sentences.
I don’t know Mary Josephine Ray, so I went looking for information on the internet. Here’s the photo I found of her 111th birthday party:
That picture says it all. I can guarantee that to make it to 114, you can’t focus on the negative. In fact, one obituary said that Mary “just enjoyed life.” Can you see it in her eyes?
It’s a shame when a woman who clearly figured out how to live is only worth two sentences in a newspaper while a state senator’s gay-ness gets a full paragraph and the rising price of gas gets half of the front page.
I want to live in a world where Mary Josephine Ray is plastered all over the front page of the newspaper and we have to look long and hard to find out that our home price fell another half a percent. If the world was like that, we’d all live to be 114.
Ron
When Humor and Creativity Collide
This is one of the funniest products I’ve ever seen. Imagine what this would do to your infection control folks!
Check it out with a few other creative products here: www.thinkofthe.com
Ron
Olympics Blunder is Raised with Laughter
For anyone that would like to see how a bad situation can be made better with humor, all you had to do was watch the closing ceremonies of the Olympics.
Canada had a black eye due to the botched raising of the Olympic Torch Thingy in the opening ceremonies. It was awkward and certainly embarrassing for the Olympic Committee. However, at the closing ceremonies, they used a clown to pretend that the problem was only an unplugged electrical cord.
Here’s a photo: 
It was funny and it showed that in the midst of problems, humor can still be found.
Let that be a lesson to all of us.
Ron