[18.09.17]

As part of our celebrations of 20 years in business, we hosted a seminar for clients on Thursday 21^st September, entitled “Robots don’t have Personalities”.  This event built on the theme of our February seminar, where Futurologist, Mike Ryan, considered how the world will have developed in the next 20 years.  His predictions included that 14 million jobs would be at risk, primarily because of a new era of automation.

So for our September seminar, Laughologist, Kerry Leigh, helped us consider why people still like buying from and working with other people.

After encouraging a debate between our guests about which biscuits they preferred, Kerry set out how laughter changes the energy within any room, and how powerful this can be within the workplace and when speaking to clients.

Kerry explained that neurotransmitters, or chemical messengers, such as Dopamine, Oxytocine, Serotonin and Endorphins, help people feel good, and if we can tap into people’s neurotransmitters, we can encourage positive thoughts and actions.

Kerry also spoke about FLIP, which was developed by the company, Laughology.  By focusing on the elements of FLIP, anyone can turn their own, or other people’s, bad humour into good humour.  The FLIP elements are:

• Focus – focus on the things that you can change
• Language – including facial expressions, body language, voice tone and pitch, as well as the words themselves
• Imagination – imagine a positive outcome: far too often when we imagine “what if…..”, we imagine negative outcomes
• Pattern Breaking – it can take a while to change a pattern of behaviour, so don’t give up and allow yourself and others to make mistakes.

To demonstrate how hard it can be to break a pattern of behaviour, Kerry used an exercise which started with people reciting “1 – 2 – 3”; followed by them saying “woof – 2 – 3”; and eventually finished five minutes later in a room filled with laughter, with them saying “woof – raspberry-blowing – baaaa”!

It was an interesting and fun evening, enjoyed all the more over a glass of wine.

If you would like to learn more about the content of the evening and the relevance to business, please contact Jackie or Andrew and they will put you in touch with Kerry.

Castletons Accountants