Let's talk about using humor in your speaking because a lot of people ask me about that. Now there's a saying amongst those of us who are professional speakers, you don't have to be funny when you speak. But it helps if you want to get paid. Humor is very important. If you want to be a professional speaker. It's something that will be expected of you from clients, you need to be both educational and entertaining.

But what about if you're not looking to get paid? You're just giving presentations at work, perhaps giving people monthly updates on the financial status of the company? Do you need to have humor then? Oh, I think humor has to be appropriate to the context. But don't let that hold you back. Just because you're doing a serious subject doesn't mean that you can't be a little bit funny here and there.

So how might you do this easily? Well, one way is to stop putting pressure on yourself about being funny, and instead just concentrate on being fun. find things fun, and find the funny in things in real life. If you have a thought on stage, that's funny, just play it as long as it's clean, I guess. But just go for it in terms of enjoying life and showing people a certain level of delight That in itself will be fun and funny for the audience. Secondly, if you want to go for something funny to say, always start with yourself.

In this country, particularly, we really like self deprecating humor. We want to know more about you. But we also want to see you being a little bit vulnerable. So if you're going to tell a story or make a remark, then make yourself the idiot of that story. Don't start by being mean to anyone in the audience or any groups of people or somebody else that's not here. You can do that later.

When you gain that trust. And especially if you develop your skills and humor, then you can take more and more risk around that. But at first just make it about you think of something funny to say about yourself. I've worked with a few different people on this things that they can say when they first come on. There was a girl I worked with. He's a speaker, who's really quite posh and quite sort of country tidy.

And we decided that she was going to say when she came on, I know I'm really posh, but I've only got one horse. And she said that to audiences now, and they really love it because they kind of get who she is. So if there's something about you that you could mention something silly or funny that you don't mind talking about that you could just have a bit of a laugh about. You might use a funny slide. I've seen people put a picture of themselves up for the baby and say something about that, or anything at all. But whatever you do, just lighten up and you're speaking and people will find that really engaging.