Yesterday evening, after wrapping up my last call, I strolled down the road to spend my Tuesday evening at…an improv class.
2 hours later: my face hurt from how much I’d been laughing.
Upon a recommendation from one of my friends, I felt the itch to do something different. Push myself outside of my comfort zone. Immerse myself in the deep (yet somewhat self-conscious) joy of being a complete beginner. Introduce more play into my life.
Even though I’ve only been to two classes so far, my first foray into improv has been utterly transformative. Today, I’d like to share some of my biggest lessons with you:
Our teacher taught us a famous improv phrase in our first class:
“You bring a brick. I’ll bring a brick. Together, we’ll build a cathedral.”
It’s meant to signify that you’re not supposed to weave the whole narrative and make the audience guffaw with uncontrollable laughter yourself. Your job as an improviser is to make your fellow improvisers look great. It’s not about saying the most outlandish, ridiculous thing you can think of. Just contribute a brick and let your partners build on it, bit by bit.
It makes me remember how no great innovation or breakthrough is created by one individual. We love the myth of the lone genius, but the reality is that most breakthroughs come as a result of multiple people gathering their bricks together and constructing them into a cathedral that none of them could have crafted alone.
We only listen to about 20% of someone’s sentence. Our ego steals the remaining 80%. In other words, we spend most of the time someone is talking to us thinking about how we’re going to respond. In the first class, we were all putting crazy pressure on ourselves to make sure that whatever on earth was going to come out of our mouths next was gut-wrenchingly hilarious, witty or smart. Of course, you want to make your audience laugh. Or do you? It became obvious pretty quickly that we didn’t actually want to make our audience laugh (because there wasn’t one), but that we wanted our partner to see us as hilarious/witty/smart. In short: we wanted to keep up appearances.
But that pressure meant that we weren’t actually listening to the brick our partner was bringing, which only made it harder to weave a decent story together. Releasing the pressure on ourselves and listening actively to each other made for a way better story.
I speak and write a lot about how we are all multi-curious, multi-faceted human beings. Whether at work, personally, or in our relationships, there is so much that makes us us, that distilling ourselves down to one easily comprehensible label has become the only way to make ourselves understood in a complex world. Or at least that’s the story we tell ourselves. I call bullsh*t.
Improv is a space to welcome all your faces into the room, however unfamiliar they’ve become to you, however shy you might be about them, however curious and weird they seem to you. And you’ll discover so many new faces too! The thing about doing improv with a group of strangers is that you never know who might resonate with and embrace your faces.
You’ve probably heard of the infamous “Yes, and” game, which is now heard in as many corporate off-sites as it is in improv classes. “Yes, and”, “Thatttt’s right, Bob” and “Yeah, totally” are just a few of the different ways we’ve been learning to build upon what our partner has sad and strengthen their idea. You notice how psychologically powerful this technique is when you play “Yes, and” immediately after “No, but” (everything you partner says, you have to say “no” to). Gosh, that does hurt.
Remember this in your next big negotiation or when you need to persuade someone of something. Even saying “yes, but” is psychologically more pleasing then saying an outright “no”.
Signing up to an improv class is a self-selecting mechanism. When I walked into the studio for the first class, there were chairs dotted around the edge of the room, with about 6 people already sitting down. You could hear a pin drop. People were staring intently at the ceiling. Absent-mindedly playing with their hair. Becoming suddenly absorbed in their phone. We were all terrified.
Yet by the end of that first class, we had all signed a silent contract that this was a no-judgement zone. This little studio was an oasis that existed far away from the big, bad world where so many of us are ruled by the fear of “But what will people think?”. In improv, there is no “wrong”. There’s no “right” either. There just is. That’s the beauty of the ego-less zone.
You can’t be stuck in the future or the past when you’re doing improv. You have to listen so actively to what your partner is saying that you don’t have the mental bandwidth to worry about what you’re going to have for dinner, let alone how you’re going to resolve that argument with your partner. In improv, you have to exist in the most present moment possible. The magic really happens when you retain that mindset outside of the studio.
To kick off yesterday’s class, we played a (supposedly) simple number game. We stood in a circle and had to count to 20. The catch? If one of us said the same number at the same time, we had to go back to the start. The first ten times we tried, the highest we got was about six. Then suddenly someone said “oooneeee” realllyyyy sloooowwwly. That gave us all the hint we needed. We slowed down. We looked properly at each other. We moved our mouths deliberately so others could anticipate if we were going to say a number. That time, we got to 14.
The lesson? Our society prizes speed as a measure of performance. Graduate by 20. Have a baby by 30. Get the promotion by 40. Ugh, please leave. These arbitrary milestones rule our lives, govern our decisions and often fracture our relationships. When our teacher introduced this game, every single one of us assumed that we had to count to 20 as fast as humanly possible. We’re so conditioned to believe that speed = success, that it even trickles into the way we count to 20. This one, short game showed me that if you just slow down, take in the view, and work collaboratively with the people around you, you’ll get a much better outcome (and probably have a way better time doing it).
Picasso once said:
“It takes a very long time to become young.”
I’ve never understood that quote better than I do now. My improv classes literally consist of us playing playground games for two hours every Tuesday evening. The joyous buzz every single one of us feels as we leave the studio is palpable. We’ve all accessed deeply buried crevices of creativity we thought had been consigned decades ago to the detention room at school. We were punished, so we locked the door, threw away the key and never looked back. If there’s one thing you take from this essay, I hope it’s this:
Look back. Take the time you need to become young again. I guarantee it will transform your future.
