What Happens When You Say Yes?

In the previous post I started sharing about some of the powerful life skills and lessons I’ve been gleaning from impro story-telling. Impro is a form of theatre where the story is made up by the team of actors as they act it out. Nobody knows where the story will go, because they’re creating it together on the spot, often in collaboration with the audience. The context of uncertainty that’s created within the impro games and story-telling sessions is in many ways similar to the fast-paced, high-change, unpredictable environments that many of us are living and working in these days, so I’ve found a lot of the impro perspectives and skills are highly relevant to thriving in this era.

How to Design a Lifestyle to Suit Your Preferred Change Cycle

Working with people who are living or working in high-change environments, I’ve noticed that a lot of them seem to be in those high-change environments because they enjoy change and they’re better than most people at dealing with change. The Renaissance Souls among them feel alive when they’re learning something new, so they seek out new experiences and change their work on a regular basis (or feel frustrated when they don’t). The aspiring traveling location independent professionals I work with are drawn to the stimulation of changing their environment regularly and living in different parts of the world. And the software and business consultants I work with have often chosen to consult because they enjoy being involved in leading change in an organization. But while they’re all attracted to the idea of change, there are a variety of different change styles amongst them, and so they prefer different timeframes for their changes, and different degrees of change.

Why Resisting Change is Boring

In recent posts (here and here), I’ve been sharing about some of the powerful life skills and lessons I’ve been gleaning from impro story-telling. Impro is a form of theatre where the story is made up by the team of actors as they act it out. Nobody knows where the story will go, because they’re creating it together on the spot, often in collaboration with the audience. The context of uncertainty that’s created within the impro games and story-telling sessions is in many ways similar to the fast-paced, high-change, unpredictable environments that many of us are living and working in these days, so I’ve found a lot of the impro perspectives and skills are highly relevant to thriving in this era – particularly the perspectives on embracing, rather than resisting, uncertainty and change.

Beliefs for Thriving in Uncertain Times

A few weeks ago, I participated in a weekend introduction to impro workshop with the Sponteneity Shop in London. Impro is a form of theatre where the story is made up by the team of actors as they act it out. Nobody knows where the story will go, because they’re creating it together on the spot, often in collaboration with the audience. Andy had done a workshop with them and it gave him some serious shifts in his thinking and he came home energized and alive after each session. So I was inspired to check it out. I was not prepared for the mind-and-personality-altering experience that it turned out to be (which was appropriate, I guess, since it was impro!) I’d encourage anyone wanting to learn more about their own habitual patterns and stucknesses, learn how to think on their feet, get better at working in a team, develop confidence and become more flexible and resilient to sign up for an impro class – especially Tom Salinsky’s impro class, since he’s an excellent facilitator.

How to Make Mistakes, Part 2

On Thursday I wrote Part 1 of “How to Make Mistakes Well, where I emphasized how you can change the way you THINK about mistakes and failures, in order to get better results (and not feel so crap). Part 2 is about how you can respond to mistakes and failure, with the emphasis on action. If you didn’t read part 1 yet, then go back and start there, because these actions will be hard to follow through on if you haven’t changed the way you think about failure and success.