How can improv help with nervousness?

June 28, 2011

 

My Super Six Tips for Success

1. Simplicity Rules

There is a technique called “start in the middle” and another which says “speak to know what you want to say” and both of these are telling us essentially, to get on with it! Begin with what seems obvious. Just speak – start somewhere – stop procrastinating or worrying.

2. Question Yourself

When preparing to give a speech in public, don’t write down a script but do write down questions to yourself, so that during the speech you are essentially answering those questions in an improvised way. If you want to try improvising a whole speech, you can practice at home by picking a random topic and speaking for a couple of minutes on it.

3. What could possibly go wrong?

Shift your attention from yourself to others. Nerves come from anticipating what will go wrong so if you can switch that off and be in the moment, the nerves should disappear.

4. You, boring? No way!

People are often worried that they are boring. It’s important to remember that what is ordinary to you can often be a revelation to others – you are more interesting than you think…

5. Mistakes are offers

Nerves arise from fear of making mistakes. In improv, we love and embrace mistakes. We actually call them something else entirely – we call them offers. They are an offer to your scene partner to use or explore. In performance, they are often the way that audience relates to you. The audience are usually willing you to succeed and are very supportive when make a mistake or give an entirely unexpected offer.

6. Yes, Yes, Yes

In improv, we use a game called Yes And (see earlier blog posts for more on this) . Using the game of Yes And, we become more positive. Positivity is something associated with confident people, so saying yes equals confidence.

 

 

 

Who else is using improv in Business?

June 6, 2011

Are you wondering whether improv is really a useful tool in business?

Well, it’s being taught at MIT and Harvard, so that’s a pretty good endorsement.

In the news recently, I noticed this article called “Why using improvisation in business to teach business skills is no joke”.  Check it out here:

http://edition.cnn.com/2010/BUSINESS/02/18/improvisation.business.skills/index.html

or read it below:

In a business world that’s more uncertain than ever it pays to be able to think on your feet. That’s why some business schools are using improvisation classes to teach skills such as creativity and leadership.

While many people might think of improvisation as unscripted comedy, it can apply to any form of spontaneous theater — and practitioners say that using “improv” to teach business skills is no joke.

Robert Kulhan is an adjunct assistant professor at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business, in North Carolina, and CEO of Business Improvisations. He has been improvising on stage for years and now teaches improvisation to business students and executives.

“Improvisation isn’t about comedy, it’s about reacting — being focused and present in the moment at a very high level,” Kulhan told CNN.

As well as teaching people to react and adapt, he said improvisation can teach creativity, innovation, communication, teamwork and leadership.

Lakshmi Balachandra teaches Improvisational Leadership at MIT Sloan School of Management and is a guest lecturer for advanced negotiation students at Harvard Business School.

She was an improv comic before working in venture capital and finance. She went to study an MBA at MIT Sloan and said it was there she realized how much she was using her improvisation training in her business career.

“Improv teaches you how to think on your feet and how to react and adapt very quickly to unexpected events and things you may not have planned for,” Balachandra told CNN.

“It applies to leadership and it applies to negotiation, where you never have control over what happens,” she said. “Negotiation is a dynamic process — you have to be able to think on your feet and adapt.”

Kulhan and Balachandra both said that the key to improvisation is the “Yes, and” principle, and it’s an idea they believe is particularly relevant to business.

In performance improvisation it means listening to what someone else says, accepting what they say, and then building on that. In business terms it means accepting any idea that’s brought to the table and then taking that idea further.

Kulhan said this kind of “suspension of judgment” is essential for brainstorming and creative thinking, but unconditional acceptance doesn’t always come easily to high-flying execs. He said it’s not that critical thinking isn’t important — just that it can sometimes get in the way.

“There’s a misconception in business that you have to be 100 percent correct 100 percent of the time, whereas the truth is you have to be 100 percent correct about 10 percent of the time — the rest of the time you have to just make decisions,” said Kulhan.

“We get bogged down in analysis paralysis, or just the pressure of being right, and we feel like we have to be correct all the time. But if you just make a decision you’ll have room to adapt and react and get it to work within the parameters you need.”

Kulhan said principles of improvisation can help anyone hone their business skills, and if you can’t get to an improvisation class you can still apply the fundamentals of improv to your own life.

“One way is to self audit — see what you’re doing in real time and how you affect other people in real time,” he told CNN.

“You can take that ‘Yes, and’ phrase and test it out at home or in meetings, and try exercising suspension of judgment — try out the principles in real life.”