Change!

Did your gut wrench when you read my headline? Change. Change. Change. Change. Change. Change. Change. Change. Change. Are you sweating now?

Quick, tell me: WHAT frustrates you in your life? What isn't working?

Why don't you CHANGE it? When we get into a routine; a dull, painful pattern with no variation, it is easy to get stuck and frustrated. Yet, the funny thing is so MANY of us are CHOOSING pain.

In fact, we FIGHT to keep the pain and avoid the CHANGE! We get angry. We lash out at the people or situations that (we think) are trying to FORCE us into change. In other words, we do our best to BLOCK the change.

In an improv scene, a BLOCK is going to piss off your scene partner and bore the audience. In life, it causes other people to GIVE UP on you. 

To avoid change is to avoid CREATIVITY.

I get it, I really do. CHANGE is scary. Change is uncomfortable. We KNOW what we have. We DON'T know what change will bring.

Watch a kid. Kids are great at change. They are so tuned in to that creative part of their souls that will try just about anything (until an adult tells them it is scary, right?) A baby will try to walk and fall on her butt -and LAUGH about it! She'll keep CHANGING her tactics. She'll try new ways to walk. Walking for the baby is CHANGE. This baby UNDERSTANDS that CHANGE will bring her freedom and autonomy so she keeps at it until she finds success. And then, she moves on to the NEXT thing. The NEXT change!!

With complete confidence, I can tell you what change will bring:

CHANGE WILL BRING SOMETHING BETTER.

OR, SOMETHING WORSE.

The point is, you're going to be complaining about the SAME things tomorrow, next week, next year, -on your deathbed- if you don't make SOME kind of change. For better or worse. 

What is your great excuse for NOT stepping IN to your unique CREATIVITY and finding a way to CHANGE what you don't love about your life? What's your great excuse for NOT trying again if the first CHANGE didn't work out in a way you liked?

Pay Attention! 5 Tips for Improving Your Attention Span

LISTENING is one of the rules of improv. When you watch an improvised scene, it is immediately obvious when someone in the scene has missed something important. You'll see an actor call another character by the wrong name, or walk through that imaginary wall that was established earlier in the scene. It takes the audience out of the scene, because they ARE listening and it bothers them when another actor in the scene is NOT! It gives the audience the impression that the actor who wasn't paying attention is just too self-important to be bothered with listening to the other players.

The same goes for the "real world". When you aren't paying attention, people NOTICE! Don't fool yourself into thinking that they don't!

When we apply the rules of improv to the "real world" I always expand the improv rule of listening to include PAYING ATTENTION to everything: conversations, presentations, body language, emails -you name it. We need to pay attention to everything.

Seriously! Haven't we ALL been in that meeting with the annoying goober who doesn't have a CLUE about what's going on? You know who I'm talking about, the person who obviously ignored the email that was sent out, pre-meeting with the subject line: PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE OUR NEXT MEETING. That person inevitably asks long-winded questions that they THINK make them look important/involved but really, they are just revealing their ignorance on the topic! Oh, and they're usually late to the meeting, too!

To make matters worse, that goober is paying such LITTLE attention that they don't even notice the rolling of the eyes, the gnashing of the teeth and the overall FRUSTRATED body language from their peers. Am I right?

Paying attention can be taught, just like any other skill. At every improv class I teach, at least half the exercises we do are designed to increase focus and attention.

If you suspect that you aren't great at paying attention here are some tips to get BETTER at it:

1. Take an improv class -seriously, there are many options out there.
2. Block out a half hour before meetings to review any notes/emails that were sent prior to the meeting, in fact, as soon as you get a meeting invitation, block out your calendar so you can do this.
3. Take NOTES. Evernote is a great tool, I use it on ALL my devices so I can always review.
4. Focus on the speaker, not on your reply. Comment on what the speaker has just said INSTEAD of bringing up a new talking point or starting a new conversation.
5. Start being brutally honest; the pain of 'fessing up to not remembering a name, key point, meeting, etc is one of the the best ways to train yourself to pay more attention!