Glossary
Making fun of yourself. It’s charming when it’s about quirks or effort, but can backfire when it’s about whether you can do the job.
The line the course draws: jokes about effort or quirks (“I can’t park to save my life”) make you more human and cost nothing. Jokes about competence (“I’m hopeless at this job”) are taken at face value by at least some of the room, because people cannot always tell a joke from a confession. Keep the first kind and drop the second.
The guardrail: self-deprecation about effort or quirks is charming; self-deprecation about competence (“I’m hopeless at this”) undercuts you. And playfulness only works from a settled body. It is the reward for the stillness and breath you have already built.
Examples from the course that use it.
At the team lunch you tell the story of locking yourself out of the office in your socks. Everyone laughs. You look more human and more in charge. The week before, a colleague said “I’m honestly hopeless with budgets” in the same tone, and lost the budget conversation before it started.