You're listening to the Paranormal UK Radio Network, the best in paranormal talk radio
in the UK and around the world. Welcome. When I first met Ron
Kulberson at a social event, I told him that my expertise was in near
death and shared death experiences. He explained his mission in life as bringing humor
to hospice. Well, that got my attention. Welcome to the Afterlife Files,
where we investigate near death experiences, shared death experiences, in all things
afterlife, and how they affect you. Unlike podcasts that are just stories,
we will give you a heads up on what to look for in our conversation,
and then after the interviews stick around. We help you make sense of
those accounts so you can incorporate the insights into your life. I think you'll
find that once having your most profound questions answered, living life in the physical
is filled with more peace and joy. We spent an awful lot of time
at the Afterlife Files talking about what happens after death occurs. Rarely have we
had the opportunity to talk about the process of dying and how to do it
well. The concept of care, that is the hospice experience, is part
of that having humor as part of that experience helps us look at the experience
of dying with a new lighter lens. It gives us a new perspective.
With a master's degree in social work, Ron Culberson spent the first part of
his career working in a large hospice organization as a clinical social worker, middle
manager and Seeing Your Leader. As a speaker, humorist, and author of
four books, including Do It Well, Make It Fun, The Key to
Success in Life, Death, and Almost Everything in Between. Ron's mission is
to change the workplace culture so that organizations are more productive and staff are more
content. He was the past president of the National Speakers Association and is a
recognized expert on the benefit of humor and laughter. I hope you have fun
watching our interview. Hey, Ron, we are really glad to have you
with us here at the Afterlife Files. Welcome. Thanks a lot. I'm
so glad to be here. I'm glad you're here too. So tell us
about hospice. What does that mean? Are their misconceptions about what it is
that happens in hospice. I think that's probably one of the most challenging parts
of hospice is the understanding of what it's all about. So it came to
this country in the late seventies and and basically it came about because in England
a woman named Sicily Saunders found that when people got into a situation with a
terminal illness or an illness that was not curable and may have some time limit,
that really the mainstream healthcare system didn't have anything for them, and there
was a lot of attempts at cure and putting people through unnecessary tests and just
kind of an environment that really wasn't conducive to healing. So she created a
concept of hospice. Down England, hospice was a place typically that you would
go, but in the United States it's primarily home care. It's a concept
of care. It's a holistic type of approach to care. So the vast
majority of it's done in people's homes because that's where most people want to be.
And it involves a team of professionals that include a social work or a
nurse, a doctor, a chaplain, volunteers, occupational therapists and physical therapist
is needed, but the idea is to treat the whole person with comfort measures
and what's called palliative care. Not towards cure, but as a way to
make the quality of their life better. And typically it's for people who have
some sort of life limiting illness. And it used to be in the early
days people use the term six months as the as the guideline, but nowadays
they're starting palliative care much sooner, so people can get involved in programs and
it evolves into hospice care at some point later down the line. But it's
also covered by Medicave's a really good Medicare benefit that covers hospice care. And
that's that's one of the better aspects of of the of the type of care
that it is because it does have good support through Medicare. Yeah. Nice.
And so when somebody enters into or why would people want to enter into
the hospitale here, Well, I think it goes back to that concept that
you know, when you're in a hospital or you're in a typical home care
setting, those folks are not necessarily specifically trained to care for people at that
point of an illness towards the end of life. There's a lot of pain
management specialty that goes along with it. There's a lot of psychological and emotional
support that needs to go along with it, and typically hospice folks are better
at that because that's what they're trained to do and they have a lot of
experience in it. So I think it's a point where people need a different
kind of care and these comfort measures can actually be healing. I've seen people
come into a hospice program and get better, not necessarily permanently, but for
a period of time because the type of care is some it's better nice.
So that begs the question of how did you get into it? Why you
know, how does that happen? I don't think of that as a typical
career path. Yeah, so I was the youngest person in my hospice Back
in the day, in the mid eighties, most people didn't go into hospice
right out of school. It was usually people doing a second career, like
a nurse who might have been an oncology nurse or a family practice nurse going
into into that as a second second part of her career or his career.
Doctors same way. So I had had an experience in graduate school where I
had a seven year old nephew that died of a brain tumor, and it
occurred to me at that point that I'm twenty five years old and never really
thought about this, thought about the process, thought about grief, thought about
loss. I grew up in a small town, so I went to a
lot of funerals growing up, but it just didn't process it and just start
exploring it. Did a paper in grad school on it. When I came
out of school as a social worker, applied to a number of different jobs
and that was the one I got. And I'll tell you, as a
twenty five year old, I don't think there's a better job to start your
career off than working with people at the end of their lives and sort of
learning from them about what they they learned and processed in their own lives.
Okay, give us a hint on what some of those high moments where well,
I think I think the biggest ehah for me was is nobody knows when,
where, or how they're going to die. We all know we will,
I mean, that's pretty much a guarantee, but but we don't know.
We don't know when or when that will happen, how that will happen.
And so this I used to have a button in my office at hospice
that said, live each day as if it were your last, because one
day'll be right. And I think that's hilarious. It's both, it's both
hilarious and so profound. Now it doesn't mean you throw caution in the way
and do anything you want. But what it what it taught me was you
live. You have to live in order to have that full experience of life.
And and and sometimes we worked too much, or we put off those
things that are important too long. And and just very briefly, I met
a number of people who, you know, said they worked their whole life
to retire and then six months after they retired, they were dead or they
had a terminal illness, and and I just thought, well, that's that's
not the way to do this, that's not the route to go. So
that had a huge impact changed everything in the way that I saw life and
death. That's nice. I imagine you met some extraordinary people at the end
of their life. Oh yeah, it really I told I tell people I
speak a lot in healthcare, So I tell people in these jobs where they're
working in healthcare environments, if you're not learning from your patients, really are
not paying attention, because they teach us they've already lived, so they you
can learn so much from that process. So I met extraordinary people as patients,
but also the people that worked beside me. Just the people that are
drawn to that type of work are I think, are really kind of cool
people. Yeah, I really huge, heart rounded, yep, smart,
you know, I really admire the people who have chosen that field. So
what kind of memories do you have of of people and incidents that stick out
for you. Well, I this is a story I often tell, and
I'll try to abbreviate it, but one of the things that I talk about
is the balance between seeking excellence and enjoying the process in life, So doing
a good job at whatever you do, but making the journey fun. And
I remember meeting this woman who who just was this extraordinary person. And when
I met her and her family, I realized that this family was just so
tight and great relationships, and it all went back to her. It was
just who she was. She had created this environment where she had a great
relationship with her husband and kids, and she was terminally ill and she had
a change in her health. They didn't think it was related to her illness.
They thought it might be something like an infection or medication reaction. So
they brought her into our inpatient facility. We had a twelve bed infacient facility
that was very comfortable setting like a home and just you know, flowered sheets,
wallpaper, hardwood floors, just a beautiful setting. And I went to
see her one day when she got in there, a couple of days after
she got in there, and I could tell that she was definitely different than
when i'd seen her before. She she didn't her color was different. She
was having trouble breathing. She looked very weak, and I asked her how
she was doing, and she said not good. And I said, are
you getting everything she need? You need? And she just she just went,
oh, they're spoiling me. They anticipate my needs. I didn't expect
the answer. Yeah, they bring me things before I know I need them.
And then she just leaned up on the bed and she was trembling because
she was so weak, and just took this long gaze around the room and
she said, you know this place, this place, it's so beautiful.
She said, you know, I'd heard so much about it. I was
dying to see it. Oh, and then she fell fell back on her
pillow and just started laughing and uh, you know, I'm sitting there thinking
as a social worker, what am I supposed to do now? And uh
and so we just had this moment of laughter, just rich moment of laughter,
and six hours later she died. And I will tell you it was
just it was just extraordinary. It had a profound impact on me because she
lived her life the way that I tried to encourage people think about living,
which is that she did it well. Clearly her family was evidence of that.
But in that moment when most of us could think of nothing else than
our illness, she wasn't going to miss a chance to laugh and enjoy the
moment. So there's just so much packed into that experience that I'll never forget
it. Oh that's a that's a lovely thing. And we spoiled it with
flowered cheets and yeah. Yeah. So sometimes people that are in hospice are
afraid of their transition and you know, what did you do to, you
know, help them get over that? Well, you know, if you
look at the research, and you know, I have been out of it
for a number of years, so this may have been updated, but I
remember back then that much of the research said that the vast majority of people
were more concerned about the process than the actual death. That it was being
in pain or either psychologically or physically. It was the process of dying that
scared people, and I think in particular of people who might be dying of
some sort of respiratory disease. How how how scary that is to not be
able to breathe or to feel that you can't get your breath. So so
in a hospice environment, we had chaplains and social workers to help with the
spiritual and the psychological challenges that people would have, to help them wrestle with
some of that and what the fear was about or what, you know,
how their spirituality was affected. And then we had amazing physicians and nurses who
were really really good at managing symptoms. So whether it be a breathing issue
or a pain issue, they were able to manage it where they didn't have
to knock somebody out with a lot of medication. They could they could you
help them to relieve the symptoms, but allow them to still be alert and
enjoy some quality time. So I think it was the combination of looking at
it holistically that really helped support people. Now. Of course people still had
challenges, but I think that approach was just a great way to do it
because you hit all areas of what someone might experience. I know my grandfather
was really concerned that they were going to drug him up and that he would
spend his last moments in days and not be able to participate with the people
who are coming to visit them to say goodbye. I remember I remember a
physician saying that the body is a really amazing, amazing work of art,
and that the body knows how to protect us and oftentimes the body does what
it needs to do as we near that process, and maybe we don't need
as much of the external help. And I was really struck by that.
But you when when when someone is at a point where the pain is so
great, or they're already slipping in and out of awareness or getting very close,
um, you know, the medications can can truly help ease that process.
Yeah, I have this this, I got it. It was Woody
Allen who said, I'm not afraid of death. I just don't want to
be there when it happened, right exactly. I think that's that's very true
of a lot of people. Um, So, you know, a lot
of my folks who come and watch this are really into the what happens after
we die, because you know, near death experiences it's all about, you
know, what happens when we leave our physical bodies and enter into the non
physical. Um. So, did you see people, did they have premonitions
about you know, did they see their dead relatives waiting for them? You
know what kind of tell us a couple of cool stories here. Yeah,
you know, it's interesting. So I worked in hospice care for ten years
now. I only worked in a clinical capacity for about five of those.
And you know, during all of that time, I never was with someone
when they actually died. I was with both of my parents when they died,
and that was really a profound experience to be witness to that. But
I never was really in a hospice setting with someone. I was certainly there
shortly before and shortly after, but not at the time. But it was
not uncommon at all for patients to say that they had dreamed of taking a
trip shortly before they died. It could have been they had a dream about
being a train or catching an airplane. It was not uncommon for people to
say that they had had a dream. That's usually the terms they would use.
I had a dream about seeing a loved one who had died, and
it was consistent enough and frequent enough that it wasn't just random, And so
we did believe there was something too that. While we didn't have the ability
to to say what that was or how that works, it certainly did happen.
And two of two of my friends who worked in hospice with me,
Maggie Collan and Pat Kelly, wrote the book Final Gifts, where they just
give one after another, right, one after another. Example advertisement right there.
Yeah, yeah, And they just had so many examples that they had
seen where people did somehow convey that they were nearing death and that we who
weren't tuned into that might have missed it. But they saw consistent patterns.
And I can't really say that I had anything extraordinary other than the idea that
someone saw someone they loved when they knew where that they've dreamed they were going
on a trip. But um, but they certainly had a number of those
experiences. Yeah. I had a friend of mine who wound up with a
terminal disease and his dream was, um, he was on deck waiting at
the first tee, waiting to tee off. You know, he just loved
the golf and and you know that was that was his his metaphor for where
I'm I'm getting ready to step up and really enjoy this last round. Yeah,
that's great. So you mentioned that um humor is was was a great
thing where you were introduced to it by this lovely woman, and that has
been kind of a focus of yours. Yeah, so how did that happen?
And you know, tell us a little bit about how you shifted into
helping people. Um see the humor and hospice. I love a literation.
Yeah. Well, um, I was the guy that wanted to be class
clown in high school and and I surprised me. Yeah, I got teachers
pet which just really irritated me. But I grew up in a small town
and I knew everybody, so that that certainly made sense. But so I
was I was never the kind of guy that was drawn to doing stand up
comedy. A number of my friends have done that, and I just didn't
like the environment. I thought, you know, to be in a club
with a lot of drunk people. And of course, back when I was
younger, people would be smoking, I just thought, and then everybody's expectations
were so high that just sounded miserable to me. But I had always been
a fan of humor. I'd always been funny. I always liked humor.
I just studied comedians when I was young. So I got to grad school
and one of my professors, the guy that was my professor for my research
project, my thesis, he allowed me to study a relationship between humor and
depression. So I did a research study at the University of Virginia in their
Department of Behavioral Medicine because that's where I was working part time, and we
studied how people saw, of all things far side cartoons, which we now
know is deeply flawed because if some of them are so bizarre, how they
saw humor at different points during stages of depression. And it didn't come up
with anything profound or different. It just replicated previous studies that showed that when
people are seriously depressed, they didn't see anything funny, but as they started
to heal or would sometimes speed up the process or help the process. So
I'm asked this just boxes and boxes of research on humor and literally became an
expert in the benefits of humor, and I thought, well, you know,
I'm kind of a ham I like being in front of people, so
maybe I can start teaching this. And let's started going to a few conferences
and teaching about the therapeutic benefits of humor, why it helps us, why
it's beneficial to us. And that's how I ultimately got into the professional speaking
career that I've been doing for the past twenty six years. Was that I
did that in my role in hospice by speaking in hospice conferences but about humor,
why humor is helpful to us. And you know, as I've said
before, if you're talking about humor at a hospice conference, you stand out
like a sore thumb. Nobody else is doing, you know, So to
my great benefit, I did stand out and started getting a lot of requests
to speak. But but also in my clinical work in hospice, I always
asked that in my initial interview patients what role humor played in their life or
if they valued humor. And my purpose for that was it would give you
a window into their psychological way of looking at the world. If if I
asked somebody how they use humor and they said, well, what's funny about
this? You clearly could see defensiveness and maybe a lack of being able to
use or see humor. But if somebody said, oh, you know,
we we do joke telling sessions every night after dinner, then you know they
were open to the idea and perhaps it could be used as a tool to
help them balance out the stress of the illness. So I did use it
in that way in my clinical work, but primarily I used it in teaching.
And so when you were doing this, this hospice work and you were
talking about humor, is this for the initiations? Was it for the management
staff, for everybody? I mean, how did that work? My primary
role, or my primary way of teaching about humor was to always use it
as a psychological advantage or a social advantage. And so to get into sort
of the mechanics of it. There are two things specifically in the humor research
that I think allows us to cope with stress. One is that if you
can laugh in the midst of something stressful, you create a moment of reprieve
from the stress, which gives you a little bit of distance from the stress
and the stress. Research will show that if you can get a break from
it, it helps you rejuvenate even just a second or two, and allows
you to continue coping. So that was one way, So just being able
to laugh in the midst of stress can be helpful. But the second and
a more powerful way that I think humor benefits is that, by its very
nature, changes our way of seeing things. So let's just say that a
lot of stress is based on how we see something, not so much what's
happening, but how we're seeing it. If we could change the way we're
seeing it, perhaps it wouldn't be stressful in the first place, and we
can get into a whole other area of mindfulness when it comes to this kind
of thing about what we're actually processing in our minds. But the very nature
of a joke is that it takes you down one path and then changes directions,
forcing you to see the original premise differently. Well, that's just changing
your perspective. So my theory is is that the more humor we enjoy,
the more we allow ourselves to train the neural pathways in our brain to see
the humor in life, then perhaps that allows us to also manage the way
we see stress. A little bit differently, and so I was always teaching
people just to try to incorporate it more in their lives, whether it be
in management leadership. I definitely think there's a communication benefit. If somebody is
funny in the way that communicate something, it sticks, People remember it,
People remember the person. And I mean I used to say, I'm no
dummy. I know that if I say something funny, people will remember me.
So it was the way I used to always go into new situations was
that's how people would remember me. And so I used it as an advantage
in a lot of different ways. Yeah. Well, similarly, I wear
a kilt, so people often remember you know who I am because I show
up and I you know, there's a guy in a skirt who don't call
it that, you know I Yeah, yeah, Well it's because of you
know, this academic area that I'm in, because you know, in order
for me to be get really smart and about near death experiences, you have
to talk to a whole bunch of people who have been guilt and brought back
to life again. Yeah, you're right, right, all right, dad,
joke there. Okay, Well, you know, give you an example,
because I think there's so much truth to that. And first time I
met you, you were wearing killed, so I definitely remember that. And
ironically, one of my best friends, his last name is mckeyon and and
he his daughter got married recently and he were killed to the wedding, so
you know, it was it was just a few weeks after before I saw
you. But let me give you an example. So we talked about offline.
We talked a little bit about rotary. And I was involved in a
chamber of commerce for a little while and we would have these networking meetings where
you would go and you'd need other businesses and either would always have be that
time during the meeting, say, you know, fifteen twenty people there and
you go around the room, tell us who you are and what you do.
There's always that and I just think everybody does the same thing. You
know. I work with organizations who do this, and it's just standard.
So I'm like, I just don't. I never operate that way. So
one time I was at a meeting and the person on one side of me
was a massage therapist and the person on the other side of me coincidentally was
a physical therapist, and I just thought that was interesting and so when it
got to me, I said, ironically, I'm sitting in between a massage
therapist and a physical therapist. I am so relaxed, and I literally slid
out of my chair into the floor, just like that. And it's the
silliest sort of visual thing. And all of a sudden, everybody's just like,
what is this guy doing? And I had probably six or eight people
standing in line to talk to me after the meeting, and so you know,
to me, that's my little research project. It works. It worked.
Yeah, it was silly, but I got people's attention, and you
know that led to potential. Say, if I'm in a business, potential
business for me, it's true. And if you ever get a chance to
go to a near death conference, I have to tell you, these are
folks that are just filled with joy and they just they have learned how to
be present, and you know they already know what's going to happen on the
other side because they've been there and they come back and you know it's a
really good plan. Then we leave our physical body, so you know,
let's enjoy this time we have right now, which speaks to your mindfulness thing
you were just talking about. So talk a little bit about maybe your practice
or how you help people do that kind of mindful work. Mindfulness work.
Yeah, so this is a relatively new thing for me. And when I
say relatively new, it's probably only been about fifteen years that I've really become
more. We're aware of mindfulness in and of itself. And I told somebody,
I said, I wish this was something I was taught when I was
in first grade, Oh, because it just it would serve our lives so
much better. Now that being said, When I went through social work school,
one of the things we are taught is awareness. We are taught how
to be aware of process, like if you're in a group therapy setting,
the process of not only what the conversation is, but what's going on under
the surface there. Awareness of where someone is coming from, what their background
might be, what their personality might be. And so I would call that
paying attention. And as somebody who you know calls themselves a humorist, I
have always been paying attention my whole life. That's where humor is. It's
out there in the world, it's everywhere, and I've always been paying attention.
So I think there was part of me that was already doing this,
and the mindfulness literature and study that I've done just reinforced it. But the
way that I make the link between humor is I show people how being mindful
and aware will lead you to more humor. You will see more humor in
the world. But I think as an awareness, my practice, if you
want to call it, that, is just that I am constantly aware.
I'm like, this morning, I was on a walk and I'm just aware
of every aspect of the walk. And so I'm trying to practice it in
every in every part of my daily existence. I'm not as good at the
meditation and some of the things to reinforce that, but I think I'm pretty
good at it from just a daily practice of awareness perspective. Yeah, I'm
thinking of about twenty years ago, I made a a shift in my life
that it was about being well. Techer Totle aids, be here now,
right, you know, being present is all you can and then when you
catch yourself flipping off into the future or flipping into the past, just go
cancel that. Yeah, yeah, be here now. What's going on now?
Right? And man, that's a that's a tough practice. It's just
I mean it becomes easier as you put yourself as a habit. But wow,
you know, we're kind of we're kind of wired to to flip into
the future. Right, what's next? It's what's going to happen next?
What do I have to prepare for? What I have to worry about?
I mean, my wife and I talk about this all the time because she
kind of genetically is a warrior, and I think her mother was kind of
like that or is still like that, and I was always one of those
people. It'll work out fine unless something tells me otherwise. It doesn't mean
I don't worry about things, but I'm not just naturally worrying about everything.
Um, they're very specific areas that I worry about. UM, But I
don't like if my kids drive home, I don't worry that they got home
safely, because I figure if they did, now find out about it.
And that's not to say I don't care about them, or that I would.
I would be concerned about them, but but I don't assume that something's
going to happen. And there's also not much you can do about it,
right exactly exactly? Yeah, So how does that, um tell me a
story about you know, somebody who is trying to put some humor into their
management life or for instance, or you know how to run an organization,
just like we're way too serious around here. Yeah, I think. I
think from a leadership and management perspective, one of the greatest forms of humor
that can be used in that specific in that instance or that style is self
deprecating. Is someone who's so comfortable in their abilities that they can make fun
of themselves. This ties into mindfulness too, because you're talking about the idea
that someone's not worried about how they appear. They're comfortable in their skin.
And if you're comfortable in your skin, you can make fun of yourself.
And when you do that, I think what happens is it makes you more
approachable, It makes you more endearing to the people. I used to say
a leader needs to be worth following to be a leader, and if you're
so closed off or so guarded or not connected to people, they're not gonna
want to follow you. And one specific example, I remember working with the
CEO one time who wanted some help on his presentation skills, and he was
in a hospice environment and he was a business guy. He came into that
role with a business background, even though it was a nonprofit healthcare environment.
He used to actually say, he used to say, we're a nonprofit organization.
We didn't start out that way, just ended up that way. So
it's always thought that was funny. But but he would always do a lot
of numbers in his presentation. Would he would here's how many patients we have,
here's the demographics, Here's where they live, here's the you know,
here's the kind of coverage we have Medicare and all the And I said to
him, I said, think about who your audience is. You're talking to
new employees, and you're talking to employees, and they're caregivers. They don't
care about the numbers. Now, granted, if you need them to know
this information, we can provide it in some other format, but you don't
need to do it during the presentation. He was doing an orientation program every
month for new employees. I said, why don't you tell a story about
the first time he went to see a hospice patient. And the next time
he did his presentation, he told the story about going to visit his first
hospice patient and just the impact the experience had on him and so all of
a sudden, this guy almost stepped down, if you will, from his
CEO role and became a human being. And you could see people sitting there
and they leaned up and they connected with him, and he used a little
bit of humor in the story, so it made it even better. And
then afterwards, all these people wanted to come up and shake his hand and
talk to him. After I told him, I said, if you could
just see the difference in that experience and previously when you wanted to talk about
graphs and charts, you just you know, it made him more human.
And that's what I think humor does. It makes us more human, and
people appreciate that. Now we still have to be good at what we do.
Oh yeah, it's always that. That just reminds me exactly. I
used to run a chain of department and specialty stores and one day I when
I took over the job, I went to a new employee orientation. Yeah,
and it was, you know, here's how you use the cash register,
and here's how you do a return, and here's how you check in
merchandise. And it was like, hey, the poor employees are asleep.
Yeah, and it isn't at all in mission with who we are, right,
So I made it a rule that for the first two weeks they couldn't
touch a piece of paper, they couldn't touch a cash register. All they
had to do was go out there and figure out what our customers wanted and
just make friends with our customers, right right, What a difference? Yeah,
yeah, yeah, it's well, it's it's you know, it's also
you're getting at what's the big picture here? The details are important to learn,
but if you don't understand the big picture. When I was a manager,
I used to have all my employees go to every department in the organization
to learn what every other department did. And my reasoning for that was whoever,
who knows. One day you get a phone message that was like routed
to the wrong place, and you have to direct it back to where it
needs to go. Hey, you know where it should go. But be
you understand where you fit in this bigger, bigger organization and how it all
makes sense. Oh and how many times has that happened to you? You
get off on some extension and somebody, oh, they sent you to the
wrong place. But it's really you know, Sandra, that you need to
talk to let me hook you up with Sandra because she's awesome at solving your
problem. Right. Oh, okay, that puts me in a good frame
of mind, you knowing that there's a Sandra in my life exactly. Oh,
I'm thinking of I'm back to the the folks who you have met at
hospice conferences and and and you know, the kinds of people that show up
for this kind of work. You know, and clearly you stayed in that
arena. You do presentations and speeches for other people too, but you know
you're kind of known for this this humor and hospice thing. What keeps bringing
you back? Well, I think if you ask any person that worked in
hospice, the first thing they would say was that it was a great privilege
to be able to do that work. The people that don't do that work,
I think it's depressing and think it's really heavy. Thinks think it would
burn you out very quickly. But this sounds odd, But it was the
most fun job I ever had because the people that did it were they understood
the importance of the balance, and I believe they saw every single day the
more tragic side of life, so they really embraced and understood the need for
the other side of life, the joy and the richness of life. So
I think they pursued it, and I think we all got that on some
level. So to be immersed with those people and around those people, to
me is like nothing else. I mean, I just when I'm speaking at
a hospice conference or at an individual hospice organization, I just I feel like
I'm home with family because I get it. I know that I know what
goes on in their mind, I know how they see the world. I
understand the challenges of the work. But I think most of those folks would
tell you that we really benefited way more than our patients did just by being
in that environment. How interesting. So I was looking at the list of
books that you have written, and one of them had a title that I
just can't figure out. It is my kneecap seemed too loose. I knew
that would be it. I just started to chuckle right away. So what
is that all about? Yeah? So, so checking them right now?
You know, I know I seem to be so Yeah. So if you
straighten your knee leg out, your kneecap is loose, and which always seemed
odd to me, that it stays there the whole your whole life and doesn't
really go anywhere. But so my first book was on seeing the Humor in
life. And then I felt like I needed to do something else for my
second book, and I just I didn't have like a book in me,
you know, I just didn't. I couldn't think of what it would be.
So I wrote that I started. It was right around the time that
Facebook was getting very, very popular, and I was trying to write something
funny on Facebook every day, just some random thought, just weird thought.
And one day I was sitting there and I'm moves my kneecap back and forth,
and I thought, well, that's weird. So I just wrote,
my kneecap seems too loose. And then the next day, you know,
I wrote something like, um, you know, if if your belly button
continues to get if you wore the same sweater for your whole life, would
your belly button eventually eat the sweater? The whole sweater, you know,
like you know, these random things like what like like uh anyway, like
like um, why do we call it a watch rather than an arm clock?
Just so, so then I got this idea. I'm gonna write one
every day for a year. Now. Obviously I would sit down sometimes and
write three or four at a time. But um, so that was the
book. It was just it was called three hundred and sixty five Random Thoughts
to inspire deeply shallow thinking, and it was just goofing. Now here's the
best part of this whole thing. Um. I got a call one day
from the Mayo Clinic and they ordered twenty copies of that book because they thought
it was a medical book. Well it is. We know the benefits of
humor, we covered that are reading. Unfortunately, a month later they called
back and said, can we return this? This isn't what we thought.
But yeah, so yeah, that was just that was just a goofy book.
But I enjoyed writing it and I still will post things on Twitter or
Facebook that are from that book just because I think they make me laugh.
So I love it. And we are bumping up against our time. So
what haven't I asked you that you would like to kind of wrap this conversation
up with Gosh, that's a really good question, I guess since were just
talking about books, you know, we can talk about the book. Do
it well? Make it fun that's really my primary book. But you know
when we talked about humor when we hit the the two thousands, like two
thousand and eight seven, when the economy tanked, what I found in my
speaking business was people really wanted humor, but they didn't have the funds to
pay for it because everybody was hurting financially. And I started thinking about what
I had been doing for years and just turned my topic into that. I
had been talking to people years about how humor in the workplace is valuable,
but you can't use humor if you're not good at your job. We've all
had those people in the work environments who are not good at what they do,
and then when they try to be funny, everybody just rolls their eyes.
They're not taken seriously, they're not respected. So I used to tell
people, I said, first and foremost, you've got to be good at
your job, then you can be fun and people will like that. If
you're good at what you do, people respect you, and if you're fun,
people want to be around you. So that gave birth to the concept
of do it well, make it fun, and it took my material and
morphed it into this under this umbrella of be good at what you do first
and then make there an even fun and it was a concept that really resonated
with people and it totally changed my career, changed my life in the sense
that for the first time, I felt like I stumbled on something that people
got and it worked for them and they appreciated it. And I'm not kidding
anybody, I don't have it. Nobody's ever said I've had too much deep
content. I don't. You know. There's a lot of what I do
is entertainment, but the message is buried in there, so metaphorically, hopefully
I'm sinking this stuff in to people's brains in a different way, but it's
intended to be entertaining. But that concept, I think is I just want
to explain that because I think it's It really came from my hospice experience,
was that I realized that we have a journey in front of us, and
we have to orchestrate how we manage that journey. Nobody's going to do it
for us, and if we can do it in a way that we're proud
of what we did and we succeed at what we do because we try to
be good at it. But it was fun too. I mean, I
don't think you can ask for anything more. I'll go to that church.
Jamn brother. Yeah yeah. So how do people get a hold of you,
Ron, Well, it's very simple. Ron Culberson dot COM's the website
and there's a lot of information on there. I will say, there's a
lot of free stuff where you know, the books are on there, but
there's articles, there's blog there are videos, and then I have a bibliography
with a lot of the books that had an impact on me. And so
make it easy on people. They can just click it and it goes right
to Amazon. I don't get I don't get a cut for that, but
it just makes it easy. So if people want to read more about some
of the topics that have influenced men, they're there. Awesome, thank you.
What a wonderful way to spend an afternoon having humor and hospice and chatting
with you. This has been great, Ryan, Thanks well, thank you,
Scott. I really appreciate being included and stick around everybody because I've got
a couple of ideas that I'd like to explore a review. So with that
note, Ron, see you later, by thy care well. This interview
should lighten your spirits. I found it to be filled with nuggets of wisdom.
Just to be clear, these are my viewpoints, but that's why you
watch the Afterlife files to gain perspective by using more than one lens which to
view this rich information. Ron started this interview with honesty. He was a
twenty five year old young man that, as a result of a tragic death
of his nephew, was forced to deal with the reality of death and afterwards
what it meant to live life fully. It was that way for me too,
when I was twenty seven. It took the act of losing two people
that I loved in a car accident to really look at what it meant to
be alive. Second, I also appreciate his honesty about what people fear the
process of dying rather than death itself. I think that insight can be really
helpful when talking about death with a friend or a loved one. Third,
a key insight for me was how humor works by taking you down one path
and an arc abruptly changing direction, forcing you to see the original premise differently.
Ron called that changing perspective near death experiences are like that. We think
we have a handle on how the world works. Then in an instant we
discover our truths just don't hold up. We learn through experiencing the non physical
world that the reality of a universe based on unity changes everything. The concept
that consciousness is foundational and comes before matter rocks the world of many of an
endy ear fourth, when we know that we all win, meaning that we
are all unconditionally love, no matter what mistakes we've made in our physical life,
gives us the grace to not take ourselves too seriously. It's just the
kind of attitude that is best in a leadership position, and that explains how
self deprecating humor can be so effective. Lastly, I love how he emphasizes
how paying attention being here now is the way to appreciate life and find humor
in it. Many a near death experiencer has come back from their experience with
a commitment to paying attention to every precious moment in physical life that it has
to give us not only for the experience, but also as a vehicle for
listening to Spirit as it contacts us through those coincidences that come our way.
I do hope that videos such as this give you some insight on what near
death and shared death experiencers discover about the afterlife, the nature of consciousness,
and how to live your life more fully. If you've not already hit that
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joining us at the Afterlife Files