Picture yourself standing on stage with two other actors and an audience full of unfamiliar faces. You are about to perform an improvised scene. You ask the audience for a location where the scene could take place. Someone shouts out, “The Oval Office!” You have no script, no time to plan, no safety net, and you don’t know what the other actors are thinking. You have two seconds to launch in and perform a never rehearsed four-minute scene. It needs to have a beginning, which establishes the location and the characters, a middle with a conflict, and an end that resolves the conflict. You need to be captivating, funny, and creative throughout. And the three of you actors on that stage need to work together if you want it to succeed.

TIME TO PULL OUT THE TUMS?
This may sound like an exciting challenge to some of you, and to others like a recurring nightmare. This is comedy improv.

The skills that we study and practice in improv apply to life and relationships and work. The skills an improv actor uses on stage are the same skills required for collaboration and successful partnership in any job or relationship. We are all “Co-Creators.” We co-create with management teams, clients, family members, friends, PTA groups… even deciding with others what restaurant to pick for dinner is a collaboration. We create organizations from scratch, and we help others to grow. Raising children is a challenging form of co-creation. We can renew our energy for relating with others by seeing our lives as a co-creative process.

What all creativity requires is the courage to do what I call the Ready, Fire, Aim Principle. You create something, fire it out there publicly and then re-aim it later. Often we have to re-aim again and again.

Failing, mistakes, re-aiming: all of these are important parts of leading a creative life. You might wonder, is it possible to get to the point where you are so good that you never fail again? I have to say, I don’t think it’s possible. Sorry. There’s no way to be assured of perfection. And it’s not like one day you wake up and say, “Oh! Now I get it!” and then you are appointed the Perfect Idea Queen until death, a member of a Creative Supreme Court.

The beauty is, as a creative person, you are off the hook. If it’s not possible to be failure-free then you can relax, knowing that it’s all part of the game. Taking risks means there’s a chance of failure. And if you want to play the game, you have to chalk it up and not berate yourself about it.
Life is not fail-proof. And a creative life is filled with ups and downs. If your desire is to lead a creative and spontaneous life, then you must open up to, allow for, and even welcome the possibility of failure. Living courageously and taking creative risks is a rich way in to discovering a more vivacious life.

Katie Goodman will be offering her Improvisation For the Spirit retreat at Namaste in Asheville NC Aug 28-29. She is an actress and teacher currently touring nationally with her retreats and her women’s comedy show “Broad Comedy.” For more information visit www.improvforthespirit.com and www.broadcomedy.com

Try This:
You are in an improv scene and your partner says, “Hey, Officer! There’s a man with a gun in here!” This situation triggers your imagination, and you come up with different responses, some normal and some a little
unusual: “Hey Officer! There’s a man with a gun in here!”

Possible Responses:
1. “I see him! Let’s go get him!”
2. “Oh crap, I grabbed my son’s toy gun by accident this morning. Sorry, can’t help ya.”
3. “This is a job for Opera Cop!” (You continue the scene singing the robber his rights.)
4. “Oh, man… not again. Come on, Ma! Put the gun down! We’ve talked about this before…”

Here’s some new opening lines and now you fill in whatever responses come into your head. You can start with simple or obvious ones if you like. But after three or four responses, try to give a few that we might not expect--the unexpected can be funnier sometimes. Repeat the opening line each time and then quickly respond out loud before you write it down—don’t think long and hard. Just respond immediately.

Here are some starters:
1. “Hand it over. I know you’re hiding it.”
2. “Don’t play with your food, Joey.”
3. “Sir, will you be having tea this afternoon?” 4.
”Do you come here often?” (Creative responses to this last one might even prove useful…)

Journal your observations by answering these questions:
1. What did you discover?
2. Were you quicker than you thought? Slower?
3. Did you have more ideas than you’d expected? Less? How many did you think you SHOULD have?
4. What was your first reaction when you read the first line?
5. Did you change your first reaction by the fourth exercise?
6. What are your beliefs about yourself regarding your creativity? Are you creative? Do you believe you are less creative than others?
7.Is this belief true? If you don’t like these beliefs, write down a new belief that you’d like to have.
8.How can you really deeply internalize this new belief? In other words, what would have to change? Would you need to have a new experience where you actually succeeded beyond your expectations of yourself? Take a comedy course? A writing course? Something else? What do you need in order to reconnect with your belief in your abilities? Write down the first step you can take to gain more confidence.

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