Japan's All Nippon Airways (ANA) and Hong Kong's First Eastern Investment group will launch a new low-cost airline to begin domestic and international operations in Q2 2011 out of Osaka's Kansai airport.
Yeoh Siew Hoon attends a workshop at ITB Berlin where the mandatory prescription is laughter.
Speakers Lenny Ravich and Avi Livran geting delegates on their feet
I have moderated many sessions in my career – some are more fun than others. But I have to say that I’ve never laughed as much as I did during a recent session at ITB Berlin.
The session was called “Happy Hour of Humour, Laughter and Optimism”. At first, I thought they would be serving some of their famous German beer at the late afternoon workshop but no, in walked two men whose business it is to make people laugh.
It’s not a bad job, I reckon, if you can get it. What could be more rewarding than making people laugh and feel good at the end of a long day at a trade show like ITB Berlin.
Putting a new spin to the old wisdom “laughter is the best medicine”, Lenny Ravich, author of the book “A funny thing happened on the way to enlightenment”, and partner Ari Livran, who calls himself “an innovator and optimism philosopher”, took turns to get the audience cracking up with laughter.
Ravich, who lives in Tel Aviv, is clearly the funny man who tells the jokes with a straight face. He preaches “humour and optimism as a way of life”.
In his book, he shares his life’s lessons. In the chapter, “Dealing with Embarassments”, he writes, “Learning to laugh at our embarrassments has got to be the scariest thing in the world; especially when our bloopers are performed in front of other people. Humour and self-righteousness are mutually exclusive. True humour is laughter at oneself.”
He quotes an article from USA Today which, in a survey, found out that the greatest fear of mankind was not that of death – that came second to fear of public speaking. “That means that the person giving the eulogy at a funeral would rather trade places with the person in the coffin.”
Liran, whose website is Ha-p.com, brings the philosopher’s touch to the session and says all of us are born with happy genes and that accounts for 50% of positive psychology. Forty percent comes from “self-hedonistic adoption” – in other words, it’s up to us – and 10% is due to events.
And sharing the E+R=O formula, he says it is important for us to control our Response to Events because while we can’t control the events, we can influence their Outcome with our response.
During the workshop, they got the audience to make funny faces, dance, laugh, guffaw, chuckle and speak gibberish.
There was also a testimonial presentation from Erik Waggener, general manager of Ramada Encore Geneva, who is obviously a believer in their preachings. The two have conducted team-building exercises for his hotel and Waggener spoke of his hotel’s management style that’s based on the four Hs – humanity, humility, honesty and happiness.
He said the humour training session run by Ravich and Liran had created a happier work environment and “happy staff make happy customers”.
Ari, who is based in Singapore, also runs Laughter Yoga sessions in addition to Happy Hour workshops at conferences.
Well, by the end of this Happy Hour, we were certainly a happy lot. I think I got the audience to speak gibberish at the end as a way of thanking the two speakers.
