The title is an attempt to demonstrate a view point that I have tried to adopt as a temporary coping mechanism for my self-confidence. The special name for it is self-enhancing humour. This refers to being able to view life events comically instead of being consumed by negative emotions which can often be hard to do like I talked about in Joy & Giraffeness because in negative situations, it can hard to see the positives in the situation and see the funny side. This tactic admittedly doesn’t always help me forget the stressful thing that actually happened, however it does help me to think of how the situation could have been worse.

The other type of humour that I wanted to talk about is called self-defeating humour. This is when we target humour at ourselves. An example of this is when someone has complimented me on a wise decision that I have made and I would sometimes laugh and say “well, I try to be!” I sometimes feel uncomfortable to admit that I have shown wisdom in particular perhaps because like I talked about in Why We Struggle to Proclaim our Giraffeness, we can feel uncomfortable to boast about ourselves too much and belittling those around us. Although it is important to build up those around us and I will talk about other ways of doing this in a later post, I feel that this way of thinking does not let us give ourselves credit where it is due and can lead you into believing that there isn’t much that you are good at which is a state that I have found myself in quite a lot.

Thank you for taking the time to read this and I hope that you find it helpful. As always, feel free to get in touch with any questions/feedback, I always love to hear it!

Until next time

Kathryn