A joke can break the tension. Just don’t use it every time things get real, or it turns into a hiding spot.
CREATIVITY
WHAT THIS MEANS
Humour is genuinely useful for lowering the temperature, and it becomes a problem only when it arrives every single time the conversation gets real. Used that way it is not lightening the moment, it is ending it, and the other person learns there is no version of you that stays. Nobody tells you this, they just stop bringing things to you.
Notice the next time a laugh is your first reflex in a serious conversation. Let one of those moments pass without the joke and see what fills it. Staying there for a minute is usually all that is being asked.
A QUESTION TO SIT WITH
What do you use jokes to avoid saying out loud?
MORE IN CREATIVITY & ORIGINALITY
- Your notes app has a hundred ideas nobody’s seen. Pick one and let it meet the world.
- Your voice cracking at open mic is still braver than the perfect singing you do in the shower for nobody.
- Show the weird idea in the brainstorm. Half the great projects started as the idea someone almost didn’t say.
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