When used mindfully, humour can create energy, deepen relationships, and bring fun into the learning process. It supports trust, strengthens presence, and helps coaches and clients connect on a very human level.
In a world increasingly shaped by AI, this matters even more. Machines may mimic humour, but genuine human humour is relational, contextual, and deeply human. It emerges through trust, timing, vulnerability, and shared experience.
This prompted me last year to do some deeper research into this topic together with Professor Jonathan Passmore.
Our latest article, Humor in Coaching, explores how humour can:
• deepen the coach-client relationship
• unlock stuck thinking
• create psychological safety
• support learning and insight
• and act as the “WD-40 of coaching”
Of course, humour also carries risks if poorly timed or lacking empathy — which makes authenticity and awareness essential. https://choice-online.com/passmore-and-hayward/
In the end, perhaps humour is one of the distinctly human qualities that coaching needs now more than ever.
