| 7 Habits of
Highly Cheerful People
1. Collect cartoons and jokes that you enjoy and share these with friends, colleagues, and family.
2. Be more playful. Be playful, silly, and improvisational because others pick up your spirit.
3. Carry some humor with you in your wallet or purse and share it.
4. Hang out with people who laugh and find joy in life.
5. Give silly and ridiculous gifts and cards.
6. Look for humor and humor will find you.
7. Most important, step back and laugh at yourself.
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"Coach builds her practice on medicinal mirth"
If anyone can laugh all the way to the bank, it is Hedda Matza-Haughton. her Manhattan-based business, "For the Health of It" Consultation Services, offers workshops and individual coaching sessions that show people how to use their funny bone to benefit the rest of the body.
In the workshops, she helps participants use laughter and play to reduce stress and, along with traditional medicine, to improve health--a connection that has been proved by medical studies. "I get people interacting and laughing to experience the benefits themselves," says Ms. Matza-Haughton.
In a typical hour-long session, she hands out such props as colorful scarfs and red rubber noses. Sometimes, she starts out by just laughing for several minutes, which soon proves contagious. She finishes with exercises that aid participants in discovering how to apply play and laughter techniques to their everyday lives.
A social worker by training, Ms. Matza-Haughton was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1989. It was then that she read the book that inspired her business, Norman Cousin's The Anatomy of an Illness, in which he recounts how funny movies aided his recovery.
Ms. Matza-Haughton launched her firm two and a half years ago, starting out by doing workshops at nonprofit organizations. Increasingly, she has secured engagements with corporations to help reduce employees' stress, boosting their energy and creativity and improving communications.
Now booking at least one or two workshops a week, Ms. Matza-Haughton projects revenues of about $200,000 this year.
Recently, she began marketing a $20 "Princess Juicy Joy" laughter kit featuring such items as a clown nose, an audiotape that describes her technique's benefits and includes a section of pure laughter and an affirmation card of 12 positive-thinking statements to start the day.
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