If laughter is good medicine, hundreds of health-care professionals were treated at Utah Health Care Association's annual convention and exposition Wednesday.
Jim Pelley, the convention's keynote speaker and former stand-up comedian, spoke on humor in the workplace and warned of being "terminally serious.""When you're laughing you see options; when you're crying you see nothing," said Pelley, president of Laughter Works, Sacramento, Calif.
Pelley said humor can decrease one's level of stress and build one's creative-solving capacity by increasing blood circulation, feeding oxygen to the brain, pumping out hormones that aid alertness and releasing pain-killing endorphins, Pelley said.
A sense of humor also "gives you the ability to take what bothers you and turn it to your advantage," Pelley said.
He sited the example of Mom and Pop's pizza place in the Denver area whose business was drastically hurt by a full-page Domino's Pizza advertisement in the phone book. Not able to afford a similar ad, the owners of the small restaurant made their "problems help them to a solution" by offering half off Mom and Pop's pizza with a Domino's Pizza phone book ad. During Mom and Pop's ad campaign, "you couldn't find a Domino's Pizza ad in the phone book," Pelley said.
"A little humor in marketing can be very powerful," Pelley said.
Pelley, who has worked with Saturday Night Live comedians and gives humorous seminars across the country, offered several ways to invite humor into health care. These included learning to laugh at yourself before others beat you to it; hanging around others who make you laugh; singing your complaints to a boss or co-worker; creating an attitude of "inverse paranoia" by hiding positive notes to your co-worker.
Pelley's speech kicked off the three-day conference for health-care professionals at Little America Hotel.