Stand Up For Your Success (Cutting Edge Personal Development Information in Stand Up Comedy Format)

By Burt Teplitzky

This book is the companion book for Sell It With Humor, the brain child of Burt Teplitzky, the former managing partner for the World Famous IMPROV Comedy Club's Humor Training Division and Florida license for the IMPROV Comedy Traffic Schools.

On a special Saturday, the World Famous IMPROV Comedy Club in Hollywood, California teamed up with Burt to produce the funniest motivational and inspirational comedy festival. These are the transcripts for this life changing event-and it's funny!

You'll learn how to communicate more effectively without using a bull horn. You'll also become a sparkling conversationalist even if you have nothing to say, as well as increasing your self confidence...and six additional titles.

Also, Burt will be your on paper MC throughout commenting on what you're read and what you will read. And, as a special bonus, Burt has thrown in 52 special newsletters, one for each week of the year that are designed to give you humorous insights into life and business.

Join us while we create that special day for you. laugh while you become a better person. You can see more at www.sellitwithhumor.com. Burt is available for keynote speaking and for company wide training events.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Burt Teplitzky
• Release date: Jun 15, 2011
• ISBN: 9780982723159

Burt Teplitzky

Burt is an author of two books, stand up comedian, keynote speaker, sales trainer and former managing partner of the World Famous IMPROV Comedy Club's Corporate Training Division as well as former Florida licensee for the IMPROV Comedy Traffic Schools. He is divorced and lives in Los Angeles area. Okay girls, not all at once...

Book preview

Stand Up For Your Success

Cutting Edge Personal Development Information

Delivered In Stand-Up Comedy Format

By Burt Teplitzky

From the Creator of the World-Famous IMPROV Comedy Club’s Corporate Humor Training Division, the licensee of Florida’s Famous IMPROV Comedy Traffic Schools, and the book,

Sell It With Humor

Published by Burt Teplitzky at Smashwords

Copyright (C) 2009 Burt Teplitzky

All rights reserved

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

This book is available in print at most online retailers.

Published in the United States by Burtwithau Publishing

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-publication data

Teplitzky, Burt

Stand Up For Your Success/Burt Teplitzky. First Ed.

Burtwithau Publishing website address:

www.BurtwithauPublishing.com

Los Angeles

FIRST EDITION

Book Design by Burt Teplitzky

DEDICATIONS

For my daughter, Talia,

Again, you are my inspiration for this book. I can only hope that the knowledge in this book will help you to live a happier life, long after I’m gone (well, and while I’m here, too.) Also, this is my second book, so I’m catching up to you.

For my nieces and nephew, Hannah, Emma and Jacob,

I hope that you all find something to learn from in this book and if you do, please pass along the information—and the laughs.

For my family, Dad, Mom, Iris and Caryl.

I know that we don’t always appreciate information unless it seems to come to us in an amazing way. And, because this information is coming from me, it may not have the same impact had you discovered it in a bottle floating in the ocean. But I think you will be surprised at what you find here. I’m sure there is a gift for each of you in this book.

To all of you, please remember to laugh every day. Start with the funny and important messages in this book. Let’s start laughing, learning… and living!

Contents

INTRODUCTION

SECTION I

Who Should Read This Book?

SECTION II

Stand Up For Your Success Show

SECTION III

Infomercial Topic Segments

1. How To Communicate Without Using A Bullhorn

2. How To Be A Sparkling Conversationalist Even If You Have Nothing To Say

3. How To Be Assertive Without Carrying A Gun

4. How To Speak In Public Without Wetting Your Shorts

5. Get The Stress Monkey Off Your Back And Into Its Cage

6. Secrets Of Success From The Little Engine That Could

7. Increase Your Self-Confidence—Superman Is My Role Model

8. How To Humorize Your Presentation

SECTION IV

Burt’s Weekly Special Report

Special Reports (Listed From Weeks 1 - 52)

Conclusion

About The Author

Acknowledgements

Send me Your Stories

INTRODUCTION

This book is designed to help you learn how to become a better and more successful person--as well as make you laugh while you read it. I’ll even show you how to add humor and laughter to your own presentations and to life. How can I describe this book?

Imagine if much of the important life-changing information you need to improve your life were delivered from top motivational leaders and writers, and hearing it in stand-up comedy format, so you are laughing while you are learning. It might go something like this:

"Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for attending the Comedy District (a comedy club I was part owner of). Please keep your talking to a minimum and your laughter to a maximum. We have a great comedy show for you tonight. Our first comedian is a billionaire, one of the largest real estate developers in the world and a famous television personality, ladies and gentlemen, please give a big hand to Donald Trump!

Also, our second comedian is a famous motivational speaker. He can walk on fire and can help everyone improve their life, please welcome, Tony Robbins. And, for your headliner; he was the managing partner of the World-Famous IMPROV Corporate Humor Training Division, the top licensee of the IMPROV Comedy traffic Schools and is the author of the wildly popular book, Sell It With Humor, let’s give it up for Burt Teplitzky." (The crowd goes wild and women throw themselves at him. Okay, I went too far.)

Well, I doubt this line-up will ever actually occur, but it’s not unlike what occurred at the World-Famous IMPROV Comedy Club one Saturday in Hollywood, California. This was a day that top motivational and humorous speakers spent months in advance preparing important content and practicing their humor for and then presenting their topics at the Hollywood IMPROV before a standing-room crowd of over 300 people.

The topic: Stand Up for Your Success. Of course, a double entendre meaning that life-changing information will be delivered in a stand-up comedy format. The timeless information contained here is and will continue to be life-changing. In this book, we define funny as anything that gets a laugh, as long as it’s clean, relevant and reinforces a point or a message the presenter is making. We define success as achieving whatever it is in your life that will make you happy. On this day, top funny motivational speakers gathered and delivered life-changing information to help people from all walks of life succeed, and we delivered it in a stand-up comedy format. To my knowledge, this had never been done before.

The day consisted of eight, 20-minute segments on various topics such as how to speak in public, how to increase your self-confidence, how to reach your goals, and more. These were originally taped to sell as an infomercial product. Instead, we decided to sell these segments after scheduled seminars and as a potential television series. Later, I had the presentations transcribed and made them available as this book for you to read, learn and enjoy. Oh, and laugh over, too.

Some of what you will read here are the eight segments of personal development, the original infomercial program discussing the importance of the use of humor in the learning process and 52 weekly special reports designed to entertain and to motivate you into your desired action. Some of these special reports were taken from important points I made in my book, Sell It With Humor, and many are bonus reports never before available.

Of course these reports are sprinkled with humor (some are sprinkled more heavily than others) to make the reading quick, fun, impactful, and easy-to-absorb. My only regret is that you couldn’t be at the Hollywood IMPROV that day to watch the audience reaction as they laughed and learned. The taping lasted over eight hours and I don’t remember even a single person walking out.

My previous book, Sell it With Humor, was aimed at helping sales professionals sell more, executives and CEOs deliver important information, as well as trainers, speakers and teachers all use humor to get their important messages across.

There are three sections in this book. Section I teaches you the importance of humor and how you can incorporate it into your work, presentation and life. Section II consists of the eight personal development segments where you will receive life-changing information. Some of the information in this section you may have heard before in books and seminars, or may have read and forgotten it. Section III contains the 52 weekly special reports.

This book is for anyone who wants to be inspired, motivated, reminded of the seeds for success in life, and who wants to laugh while reading and learning. You will definitely finish this book with some lofty goals and some great humor gems (formerly known as jokes) under your belt that you can use to improve your success.

Here we go!

SECTION I

WHO SHOULD READ THIS BOOK?

Again, my previous book, Sell It With Humor, caters more to those wanting to become more effective in their presentations and selling techniques. Actually, we all present something but we don’t always present with the intention of solely making money. That makes Sell It With Humor really a business book. Those reading it are primarily sales professionals, executives, CEOs, professional speakers, trainees, managers, and teachers wanting to increase sales, close more deals, or just get important messages across to influence others. (Who doesn’t, right?)

In tense selling situations, humor helps reduce buying objections by facing them head on and assists in making the buying objection seem more unrealistic than it might actually be. In that book, I also encourage presenters to migrate from giving one-on-one presentations to performing (that’s what it is) group-selling presentations. That way, you give the same presentation to many people at one time and make more sales. If you are in sales, you will see many samples of these tools for overcoming objections in the presentation topic Humor as a Cutting Edge Tool. Although many of these concepts may be applied in the working world, they can also be applied in your home and personal life.

This book is more general in nature. The topics are tailored to the mainstream public. Reading this book is like combining many of the popular self-improvement and personal development and training books, extracting all of the major messages, injecting them with humor, and reading it. The audio book contains the actual live presentations taped at the Hollywood IMPROV.

The topics and messages in this book may serve as your mental vitamins and will save you numerous hours of reading self-improvement books to get important information since I have attempted to consolidate the essential points for you. All of this is in this book. We have carefully researched top content, reviewed it with experienced business consultants (mostly, each other) and are sharing this information with you. Then, the presenters use humorous stories they were given, or recalled from their own personal lives to drive home important points.

To make the feel even more like that of a comedy show, we also researched relevant, appropriate humor designed to make a point and presented the information at a real comedy club. Our goal was to create a laugh every three to six minutes. This is not a small feat as some of this material can be pretty dry. Powerful, isn’t it?

However, creating humor to reinforce messages was really not the hard part. I was a licensee for the IMPROV’s Comedy Traffic schools. If you’re not familiar with these schools then you are either a good driver or have never been caught. Which is it? In some states, when a driver receives a ticket for a moving violation, that violator must attend a traffic school or his or her insurance rates may increase.

Our schools taught these classes and used humor to make the subject matter more bearable and painless. It works! The point is that if we can add humor to dry material such as driving regulation and statistics, we had no problem humorizing most dry topics. There is some traffic school humor in Sell It With Humor. In this book, the topics are broad and help all of us to improve in many aspects of our lives. I will describe the topics in the book very soon. So, who is this book for? You and me and everyone.

What Are The Topics And How

And Why Were They Selected?

When I was originally searching for topics to record and use for the infomercial and the products, I was looking for the useful topics that most people would like to learn or brush up on. In some cases, this would be information many people would hear or read about for the very first time. Some of the research for topic selection included identifying top-selling seminars, books and magazines--and using those topics. For example, our topic on how to speak in public was created because the general public’s worst fear is speaking in public, even above dying.

Can you believe that? People would rather die than speak in public. Crazy, right? Other topics I selected from talking to many people and asking them what they thought would be the most beneficial to him or her. We didn’t include topics on how to get rich quickly or how to meet the person of your dreams (although, I think these would have been popular, too.)

For this project, I gathered professional speakers who were already actual experts in the field they were discussing. As a requirement, they had to have a sense of humor. So, why didn’t I use actual comedians? Well, I was afraid someone might ask them important questions. Do you really want to change your life based on information you received from a real comedian? Exactly! We know comics don’t have a real life.

Actually, everyone I chose was able, with a little coaching, to present their material and reach a laugh or two every three to six minutes, as required by my Punch/Point/Benefit™ formula (more on this later).

Before I tell you the topics, please let me share an embarrassing story. When I was selecting presenters for the infomercial, I had many speakers submit their tapes to me for review and approval. Then, I ran them by the co-owners of the IMPROV at that time, Budd Friedman and Mark Lonow. Because we were representing the World-Famous IMPROV Comedy Club’s new Humor Division, we couldn’t have anyone using dirty material, and we couldn’t use anyone who only got laughs by making facial gestures.

From hundreds of submission I received, I selected only a handful of presenters. From what I remember, Marc Victor Hansen and Jack Canfield, authors of the Chicken Soup for the Soul book series, submitted their tapes. I rejected them. As I said in Sell It With Humor, I’m an idiot. You think there’s a day that goes by where I don’t kick myself? You’re right.

In addition to the information in Section I on humor and the 52 special reports in Section III, here are the topics that were transcribed almost word for word from the live presentations. They are recorded in Section II. Here are the topics:

- How to speak in public without fainting

- How to communicate more effectively without using a bullhorn

- How to be a sparkling conversationalist even if you have nothing to say

- Secrets of success from the little engine that could

- How to increase your self-confidence: Superman is my role model

- On your mark, get ready, goal!

- How to be more assertive without using a gun

- How to humorize your presentation

Don’t you think that you can learn something from any or all of these topics? So, now you have it. The top eight topics people want to learn about. All packaged with important points, information and reinforcement humor (so you can laugh and remember what you’ve read or heard) and delivered to you in monologue form as if you were actually watching a stand-up comedy routine. Try to beat that lethal combination.

These Topics Will Help You In Many Ways

These topics will help you improve your life in many different ways. First of all, in many cases, when we hear or learn something new, we forget almost 80% of the information within seven days. Amazing, isn’t it? Well, if we can’t remember it, we can’t apply it. That means that if you learned 10 important life-changing concepts by reading a book, or by attending a seminar, you might remember only two concepts after a week. Why can’t we remember?

One of the reasons is that we can listen to a presenter for an hour and there is a lot of information. How does your brain know what to remember? We can’t program that part. Logic dictates that if you don’t remember to perform a function, then there can be no results. Common sense, right? What if the 20% you retain after a week is the useless part of the information? Then nothing you remember is usable. Then the information is not too helpful, is it? There must be a method of presenting that has the goal of having the listener(s) remember and utilize what they’ve learned.

The presentations in the book are different, they are designed to do just that. Actually, in this book, you should remember 80% and forget only 20%. How do we do it? What technique or method helps us to retain or remember what we’ve heard or read, so we can apply it? Glad you asked.

First, we select a topic that most people want to know more about. This is the first step because if we select a useless topic or even if you remember everything, it doesn’t serve you well. Then, we research important topic points or messages to include under the topic. Usually, we select 10 major points in a one-hour presentation, in this case, the reading material. The reason we select 10 is because we want to get a laugh at least every six minutes. The laugh helps the listener remember the material as you will see. So, in a 60- minute presentation, given that there are 10 points, with at least one laugh every six minutes, this helps us reinforce 10 points with humor in a one-hour presentation. Then, under each topic point or message, we include one to four minutes of information that the audience needs to hear.

After we write content, we write or select a humor gem to attach to the content, or message. A humor gem is a joke that has been modified to fit into a presentation to get a laugh and to reinforce a point and to share a benefit with the listener if he or she were to act on that point or message.

Can I get any duller in a humor explanation? The original joke must reinforce the point to be considered a humor gem. Then we update the joke to have the incident occur recently, to us and make it relevant to the listener. This way the audience is more interested in listening to you and they are more connected. This is when a joke becomes a gem: when it becomes a learning tool. Sell It With Humor goes into deep methodology behind constructing these humor gems from jokes. Sounds like fun, doesn’t it? Right.

There will be numerous examples of using this method in Section II. So, the humor gem gets the laugh and the punch line (the laugh line) is remembered. By remembering the punch line, the humor gem is remembered. When the humor gem is remembered, the content and message is recalled. We all remember a good joke or a funny story, don’t we? Actually, we remember jokes that aren’t funny as well, but we remember them; that’s the key.

So how does it work? The message is anchored by the laugh or humor gem. If you are confused, don’t worry. There will be many examples throughout this book. Don’t worry about how the cook prepares the meal, just enjoy it.

The Benefits For Those Learning

The Principles In This Book

The late Og Mandino is relatively unknown now, but his motivational books hold the record for the most number of books sold in this category. His books were short and easy to read. Somewhere in his books, the lead character would come across some a list of successful rules that would be life-changing. His stories were always interesting. Perhaps they would be in a bottle found hundreds of years later, or even handed down through generations. To this date, The Richest Man in Babylon is the highest-selling sales and motivational book ever. His stories probably will never be made into a Hollywood movie, but he did succeed in making learning success principles more palatable.

I believe this is what we have done as well. Through the humor connected to various success principles, you will clearly see the point the presenters are making and the benefit the listener(s) will have should they apply those ideas. There is no having to search for hidden meanings. The only requirement is that you sit back, read (or listen) and laugh and learn. Oh, and enjoy the process. The presenters present their messages clearly in easy-to-understand stories. Some of these stories are their own personal signature stories, meaning they really happened to him or her, and they always receive an excellent reaction.

How do we ensure constant laughing and learning? We strictly enforce the use and integration of the Punch/Point/Benefit™ system so there will be no missing of any points and their related benefits. This means that every story has a punchline, a point to the story, and a benefit for the listener when the reader applies the point. Does the material really motivate people into real action, you ask? Absolutely. There are numerous examples. Here are a few taken from a cross section of people having read some of the special reports in Section III.

In one of the newsletters, I took my own advice. In the IMPROV Comedy Traffic School’s call center, we were receiving almost 20,000 calls per month. Within 10 seconds, almost 50% of the callers were hanging up. The rest would wait until the Law and Order series expires -which will most likely be a long time, so we weren’t worried about those.

What did we do? We created a funny, informative on-hold message that encouraged people to stay on the phone or they would miss the funny scenario coming up. Would this material ever be on a sitcom? Most likely not. However, it worked just fine for on-hold scenarios. Are there Emmy awards for the funniest outgoing telephone messages? I guess not. The same holds true for the humor throughout this book. This humor is not meant to be used at a comedy club. It would hardly get a laugh from people paying $10 or more and buying two drinks expecting belly laughs after a tough day. That’s not what we are sharing. We painlessly wrap relevant, appropriate, clever (most of the time, anyway) humor around points we want you to remember.

You will laugh, chuckle, or at least smile. Okay, there might be the occasional groan, I’ll