With the rise of social media, we forget how edited everything that we see often is. It appears that creators are doing one take, and they’re done, right? My husband is a social media content creator. He often gets a lot of criticism that his job is easy and he should be putting out more content. What they don’t realize is that it usually takes hours of multiple takes and then lots of editing to create the final product.
TEDx and standup specials are also great examples of media that we are exposed to subconsciously erodes our confidence. TEDx and standup specials are highly scripted, rehearsed, and edited but appear off the cuff or improvisational. These polished final projects that we are bombarded with constantly eat away at our Resilience. They send our brain the message that you should present to peers or clients flawlessly every time. The truth is that you will make mistakes when giving, and it is your resiliency skills that will help determine how well or how poorly you bounce back and recover. Improv, in my mind, is an essential skill to build to improve your or your team’s Resilience.
The American Psychological Association identified five key traits to resilience: building connections, seeking help, embracing healthy thoughts, and finding purpose. Improv can help with all of these things, and that is one reason I am such a proponent of integrating this into training and leadership development plans.
In Kat Koppett’s article, “Improv Is the Gym for Building Resilience,” she shares how an unexpected medical condition left her paralyzed. She realized through this experience how powerful improv could be at building resilience. As an actor, improv was a regular part of Kat’s practice. While the loss of her mobility might usually take another person down, she was able to use the banked resiliency skills that she had to make it through a recovery process. After making a full recovery, she started her own business that focuses on helping companies use improv to improve their residency. Here are some of the ways that Kat believes improv can build these resilience muscles:
1. Accept the Offer
Improv teaches you to accept the offer. If your partner has handed you a cardboard box and told you that there is an elephant in it, you don’t reject it by asking, “How could an elephant ever fit in a box so small?” Instead, you say thank you and ask them, “You got that shrink ray you have been making to work?!” Similarly, we are more resilient when we can accept what we are offered and make the most of it in life.
2. Build positivity with the reality you have.
Your scene partner may not be great. They might hand you an offer that could make the scene go cold, but it is your challenge as their partner to take the offer and make it positive. Finding the positive in your reality will make you so much more resilient than only seeing the negatives in life.
3. Find the objective in the scene; keep the focus on the here and now.
A scene is about the people in the scene. The change, the struggle, the win or loss will happen to the characters on the stage. Your goal as an actor is to find the objective in the scene and build on that. When you focus on the objective and let the other non-essential parts slide, you become more resilient.
4. Find the gift in any mistake or failure.
Improv is about character change. The characters in a scene must experience some type of change for the scene to be interesting. As an actor doing improv, you can use mistakes or failure to drive change in a scene. Similarly, how can you see your mistakes or failures as gifts in your own life?
5. Find what the scene needs.
Actors doing improv must constantly be asking themselves, “What does this scene need?” They strive to be the best scene partner they can be by providing the needed bits of information to allow for a scene to thrive and develop. Taking this on as a mantra in your life will allow you to respond well in challenging environments.
Each work environment has its own unique challenge. Still, you can customize these principles of improv to strengthen individuals and a team’s resilience to help create better buy-in when doing these exercises with your team. Facilitators need to clearly articulate the benefits of improv because, just like the gym, if you don’t know what you are working toward, these painful exercises will strongly deter anyone from continuing the hard work. I would love to help you and your team improve your resilience through improv. Email me or schedule a free consultation to see how I could support you.
Want to know more about Empowered Development Consulting? Reach out to me, Meghan Scheidel, and find out how Empowered Development Consulting can help you.