Humor and Your Higher Self

Humor and Your Higher Self: The Gift You Keep Forgetting to Open

By Steve Rizzo, The Mindset Adjuster | Humor and Your Higher Self

I’ve spent more than three decades on stages in front of business leaders, sales teams, and packed convention halls, and I’ve noticed something interesting. The people who laugh the easiest are almost always the people who lead the best. That’s not a coincidence. In fact, it’s the whole premise behind humor and your higher self — the idea that laughter isn’t just a coping mechanism, it’s a doorway to the wisest, calmest, most capable version of you.

Let me explain what I mean before we go further.

What Is Your “Higher Self,” Anyway?

Your higher self is the part of you that isn’t rattled by traffic, difficult clients, or a bad quarter. It’s the version of you that responds instead of reacts. Meanwhile, your lower self — the reactive one — is the part that snaps at your assistant, catastrophizes over a missed deadline, or spirals after one negative review. Every one of us has both. The question is which one you feed most often.

As a result, the daily choice isn’t really between “good day” and “bad day.” It’s between which self you’re going to operate from. And this is precisely where humor earns its seat at the table.

Humor and Your Higher Self: Does God Have a Sense of Humor?

I get asked this question more than you’d think, usually right after a keynote when someone corners me by the coffee station. My answer is always the same: look at the platypus. Look at the fact that toddlers fall down laughing at their own feet. Consider that we were built with a diaphragm that spasms with joy for no productive reason whatsoever. If that’s not evidence of a Creator with a sense of humor, I don’t know what is.

Here’s the deeper point, though. Whether you believe humor was placed in us by God, by evolution, or by pure cosmic accident, the effect is the same: it was given to you. It’s built into your nervous system, your physiology, and your capacity for joy. Consequently, treating humor as a “nice extra” instead of a built-in tool is like using a smartphone exclusively to tell time.

The Gift Nobody Unwraps

Think about the last gift you received that you never took out of the box. Maybe it’s still sitting in a closet somewhere. It cost someone money, thought, and love — and it’s doing you absolutely no good sitting there wrapped up.

That’s exactly what happens when we let humor collect dust. Life handed you a gift so powerful it can lower cortisol, boost creativity, repair relationships, and shift an entire room’s energy in ten seconds flat. Yet so many hardworking, well-intentioned professionals leave it in the box because they’ve convinced themselves that seriousness equals competence.

Nothing could be further from the truth. In my experience working with everyone from Fortune 500 executives to million-dollar sales teams, the highest performers aren’t the grimmest people in the room. They’re the ones who can laugh at Monday’s fire drill and still hit Friday’s numbers. Therefore, if you want to access your higher self more consistently, the fastest on-ramp is learning to actually use the humor life handed you instead of admiring it from a distance.3

Why Business Owners Especially Need This

If you’re running a company, leading a team, or building a personal brand, you are under a unique kind of pressure. You’re the one everyone else looks to for the emotional temperature of the room. If you’re anxious, your team feels it within the hour. If you’re stressed, it leaks into every email you send.

On the other hand, when you lead from your higher self — humor intact — you become the calm in other people’s storms. You become the leader people want to work for, not just work with. Your team stops walking on eggshells and starts bringing you their best ideas, because a leader who can laugh is a leader people trust with bad news, wild ideas, and honest feedback.

Moreover, humor is a phenomenal diagnostic tool. Notice what makes you laugh under pressure versus what makes you snap. That gap is often exactly where your growth work lives.

Humor and Your Higher Self: Meet Your HUMOR BEING

I like to describe this part of you as your HUMOR BEING — the internal presence whose entire job is to notice the absurd, the ironic, and the light in any situation, even a difficult one. Your HUMOR BEING doesn’t ignore reality. It doesn’t pretend the layoff, the lawsuit, or the lost account didn’t happen. Instead, it looks for the crack of light in the situation and hands it to you like a flashlight.

Here’s the key: your HUMOR BEING is always on duty. The problem isn’t that it goes silent during hard times — it’s that we stop listening to it. We get so focused on the crisis that we mute the one internal voice capable of helping us handle that crisis with grace instead of panic.

So how do you start listening again? That brings us to the practical part of this conversation.

From Higher Self to Daily Habit: Making Humor Usable

Insight is great, but application is where transformation actually happens. Below are strategies I share with audiences around the world, refined over years of working with business owners who thought they simply “weren’t funny people.” Spoiler alert: you don’t have to be funny to use humor. You just have to be willing.

1. Start your morning with a Mindset Adjuster. Before you check email, before the day’s chaos gets its hooks into you, take ninety seconds to do something that reliably makes you smile — a video, a memory, a song, a photo of your kid’s ridiculous face. This is your Mindset Adjuster, and it works exactly like it sounds: it recalibrates your operating system before the world gets a vote.

2. Keep a “Delight File.” Whenever something makes you genuinely laugh — an email typo, a client’s odd turn of phrase, a meme your team sends — save it. On rough days, open the file. This isn’t avoidance; it’s evidence. It reminds your nervous system that joy is still available even when a specific situation is hard.

More Humor Strategies

3. Ask your HUMOR BEING for a second opinion. Next time you’re mid-meltdown over a problem, pause and ask: “What would my HUMOR BEING notice here?” Nine times out of ten, there’s an absurd detail hiding in plain sight, and naming it out loud instantly lowers the emotional temperature of the room.

4. Laugh at yourself first. Leaders who can self-deprecate appropriately signal enormous security to their teams. It says, “I don’t need to be perfect to be in charge.” That, in turn, gives everyone else permission to stop performing perfection too.

5. Protect your recovery time. Comedians don’t perform back-to-back-to-back without a break, and neither should you. Build small pockets of levity into your calendar the same way you’d schedule a strategy meeting. Treat it as non-negotiable, not optional.

Why This Matters More Now Than Ever

Business today moves faster, changes more unpredictably, and demands more emotional bandwidth than it did even five years ago. Given that reality, the old model of “grind now, laugh later” simply doesn’t hold up. Later never comes, and burnout arrives instead.

Consequently, humor isn’t a luxury reserved for vacation or happy hour. It’s a leadership skill, a resilience strategy, and — I’d argue — a spiritual practice. When you access it consistently, you’re not distracting yourself from your problems. You’re accessing the version of yourself equipped to actually solve them.

That’s the real bridge between humor and your higher self: joy isn’t the reward you get after you’ve handled everything. Joy is frequently the tool that helps you handle it in the first place.

Unwrap the Gift

So here’s my challenge to you, one business owner or professional to another. Stop treating humor like a party favor you’ll get to eventually. Start treating it like the operating system upgrade it actually is. Your higher self is already in there, waiting. Your HUMOR BEING has been on duty this entire time. All that’s left is for you to actually open the gift you were given and use it — today, in your next meeting, in your next hard conversation, in your next ordinary Tuesday.

Because at the end of the day, a life well-lived isn’t measured only by the deals closed or the titles earned. It’s measured by how much lightness you were willing to let in along the way. And that, more than any strategy I’ve ever taught from a stage, is Mindset Adjuster work worth doing.

Humor and Your Higher Self: A Few Questions I Hear Often

Isn’t it unprofessional to joke around at work? Not at all — as long as the humor punches up at situations, not down at people. There’s a clear difference between mocking a colleague and simply naming the absurdity of a printer that jams every single Monday. One divides a team; the other bonds it.

What if I’m just not a naturally funny person? You don’t need to deliver punchlines to benefit from humor and your higher self. You simply need to notice what’s already funny and let yourself react to it honestly. Noticing is 90 percent of the work.

How do I use humor during a genuine crisis? Timing matters. Humor isn’t meant to minimize real pain; it’s meant to give you enough oxygen to keep functioning while you deal with that pain. Even in the toughest boardroom conversations, a well-placed moment of levity can lower everyone’s shoulders half an inch and make the next hard decision easier to reach.

If this resonated with you, I’d love to help your team access their own humor and higher self connection. Reach out and let’s talk about bringing this message — and a whole lot of laughter — to your next event.

Steve Rizzo is a Hall of Fame motivational keynote speaker, former national headline comedian, and author of the bestselling books “Get Your Shift Together” and “Motivate This!” He helps business professionals and organizations shift their mindset from failure to success through the power of humor, practical strategies, and unstoppable attitude. Learn more at steverizzo.com.