Tim Gard

When They Need to Learn and Need to Laugh

Nancy’s Note
“Tim can just stand there and I literally crack up! Delivering one comical story after another to make valuable points, his presentations remind us that life is meant to be enjoyed. . . and fun. His interactive programs have audiences in absolute stitches, an experience they will remember for a long time.”

Tim Gard

When They Need to Learn and Need to Laugh

Nancy’s Note
“Tim can just stand there and I literally crack up! Delivering one comical story after another to make valuable points, his presentations remind us that life is meant to be enjoyed. . . and fun. His interactive programs have audiences in absolute stitches, an experience they will remember for a long time.”

Expertise

Motivation, Stress Management, Morale, Conflict Resolution, Culture, Safety, Humor, Change, Kindness, Resilience, Emcee

Travels From

Portland, Oregon

Speaking Style

Hilarious, Memorable, Motivational

About Tim...

Delivering tears-in-your-eyes, laugh-out-loud keynotes, Tim shows how humor can negate stress, counter negativity, increase productivity and renew one’s sense of being.

Watch Tim in Action

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Presentation Topics

Is employee motivation important to you? The “Laughter Becomes You” keynote is as funny as it is inspiring and content rich. Tim teaches audience members to develop and apply their own Comic Vision® to be more resourceful and resilient—both at work and in their personal lives.

His rejuvenating and immediately applicable message teaches audiences how to increase morale while enhancing productivity and everyday enthusiasm in three short and easy-to-adopt steps.

The unique yet practical ideas also help people diffuse routine or extreme stress by insulating themselves against negativity. They’re able to “refresh and renew” themselves by using and sharing his Comic Vision® techniques. More than that, his funny, morale-building stories and extraordinary visual props make this keynote speech a hilarious way to start or close your meeting.

This program can also be tailored for short breakouts (45 mins) or half-day working sessions.

Life is a game; business is a game; travel is a game. Well, literally everything is a game that usually involves winners, losers, and spectators. This “Change the Game” keynote helps you discover how to change any game to your advantage when encountering situational stressors, toxic people, and various challenges inherent to life.

The pressure to accomplish more with less, meet tight deliverable expectations, and respond with professional promptness can create stress, cause team dysfunction, and even decrease morale. The attitude that “everything seems so serious, heavy, and intense” is more than unproductive; it’s a truly unhealthy way to work and live!

Participants learn how one person can “change the game” for all players by applying easy-to-understand and hard-to-forget concepts—ones that champions have been using for centuries in sports, business, and life in general. Providing a shift in perspective and approach can influence the playing experience for everyone in a multitude of tangible and valuable ways. Learn how to reduce stress in this hilarious keynote! Using the game of marbles as a metaphor, Tim proves that overly complicated tasks can become surprisingly uncomplicated—FAST!

Tim personally consults with event coordinators both before and after each event. He wants to ensure that every participant receives a bag of marbles to aid in implementing “Change the Game” tools, tactics, and strategies. This keepsake ingrains the newly developed philosophy for overcoming what initially seemed to be impossible or unrealistic challenges.

Typical safety presentations are usually full of gruesome pictures and reminders of the rules. When the team leaves the room… they go right back to doing things the way they always have.

That’s because most safety training presentations aren’t designed to do more than rehash the importance of safety. They don’t have any neurological basis to help your team remember the safety rules. All your team is left with is a feeling of skepticism and “I would never do THAT.”

The key to this challenge is to make safety stick in the minds of your team—and that’s where Tim Gard comes in. Tim improves your safety training effectiveness with proven neuroscience and humor.

Tim uses neurolinguistic programming, emotional context, and stories to give your team easy-to-remember phrases that improve their compliance. While researching safety and applying his experience in safety training, he discovered that the most successful safety training combined information with emotional context. A presentation can provide statistics, pictures, and videos of safety violations, but without emotional context the information often doesn’t stick with the participant.

What attendees will learn and experience:

  • STORYTELLING: Discover the power of storytelling and how to apply context to statistics.
  • RESILIENCE: Resilience training can impact safety violations. The fact is, tired and stressed-out people are a higher risk. Resilience training can help reduce stress and insulate people from safety violations.
  • COIN FLIP: Safety violations can occur when people are in a hurry. Tim’s “flip of a coin” technique helps participants learn to pause and think of the consequences before acting.
  • STRESS: Discover how stress can be either a positive or a negative in safety.
  • HEAD AND HEART: Participants will identify their own reasons why safety matters to them. This “head and heart” section helps people understand how a moment of carelessness can impact their entire life.
  • AUTOPILOT: Why “I can do this in my sleep” is a very dangerous mindset. Participants will discover how to “be in the now” and practice consistent awareness, taking them off autopilot.

Almost everyone will agree that humor can have a positive impact at work. As a strategic skill, it can act as a positive factor in communication, morale, and stress reduction.

However, if misused, it can have an equally negative effect.

During this keynote we’ll explore how to steer clear of the negative or controversial humor that may become a source of problems and complaints by concentrating on humor that enhances (and never diminishes) workplace culture to improve morale and customer service.

In this laughter-filled leadership program, you’ll discover how humor can help you powerfully deal with the challenges of an ever-changing workplace.

By applying a few simple precautions, you will see how making the farce be with you improves the environment for everyone.

Today’s leaders are forced to do more with less; supervisors and managers are constantly tasked to inspire their troops to do more work with a fraction of the staffing and resources needed.

This program focuses on developing your own humor plan while defining what is permissible, and what is not, in your workplace. As a participant, you will take away:

  • Knowledge of how to be a positive humor leader
  • Key differences between leadership and authority
  • Reasons why funny does not always equal appropriate
  • Ways to encourage good humor and discourage bad humor
  • Benefits and potential pitfalls of using laughter and humor in business
  • Ways to steer clear of the negative humor that can cause problems and complaints

This program’s easy and practical guidelines prevent negative humor in the workplace while allowing positive Humor to strengthen communication and boost morale.

Burn Bright Today, Don’t Burnout Tomorrow

Human services professionals have a passion in helping others—they are patient, caring, empathic.  Because empathy and compassion are demanded of them daily, many can experience compassion fatigue when dealing with heavy workloads, excessive demands, and long work hours.

Drawing on his own extensive background in human services, Tim Gard has developed a specific workshop on dealing with compassion fatigue for those in the profession.  Tim is passionate about helping them to be able to burn bright and not burn out so they can keep doing “that voodoo they do so well!”

One of the best defenses to burnout, fatigue, or any stressor is early prevention. Stress is an inevitable part of all jobs. This has never been truer with service-oriented careers in today’s world.

Before Tim Gard became the funny guy on stage spreading the benefits of laughter, he worked in human services. He’s been an eligibility caseworker, an eligibility investigator, and then a management analyst with USDA Food and Nutrition Services, Mountain Plains Region. He determined eligibility for human services programs, investigated program abuse for those same programs, and then worked to oversee those same programs at a federal level.

It was while working with the Montana Department of Social and Rehabilitation Services that Tim began to develop training to help fellow eligibility workers deal with stress, team development, compassion fatigue, and burnout inherent to their jobs. He discovered in those early training sessions that sharing his own good humor and enabling the group to develop a Comic Vision™ of their own proved to be a very effective and fun way for people to deal with, and even avoid, the sometimes intense personal and professional stress most people encounter every day. He later was the sole source of research and development, author, and presenter of several workshops designed specifically for social services groups on such topics as “How to Deal with Welfare Fraud Personally and Professionally,” “Interviewing Techniques,” and “Field Interviews/Home Visits.”

Tim has spoken at over 2,000 conferences worldwide. More importantly, he has been a keynote speaker and has held workshops for several human services events, including:

  • The Food Stamp Directors Conference
  • The QC Directors Conference
  • State WIC events for New Mexico, Oklahoma, Maine, and Nevada
  • The National Eligibility Workers Association
  • The United Council on Welfare Fraud… and many others

He is one of the few professional speakers on the planet who has such an extensive background in human services, including WIC. When human services conferences need workshops, keynotes, and/or team development training, Tim Gard is their first choice.