“Improvise!” by Max Dickins (personal notes)

Those are my personal notes on Max Dickins’s book “Improvise!” (insert Amazon affiliate link here)

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What improvisation is

• Improvisation is a higher-level mindset for navigating life.
  • Life also is, improvisation. In that sense it makes sense to learn to be better at improvising. (e.g. with what you currently have etc.; nurturing improvisation skills.)
    • Life is made of small-scale improv moments every day; by being more creative in each one of these moments, you generate more joy.
  • Improv is a future-proof skill, as it teaches you to adapt however things will turn out.
• Improvisation principles are a set of beliefs, mindsets, worldview and assumptions that offer an alternative way of interpreting and responding to your surroundings.
  • For example, the “Trust” principle: trusting that everyone has a good intention.
• Improvisation is about creating something out of everything; not out of nothing.
  • Improvisation is about doing the best you can with what is at hand.
    • This requires you noticing what you actually have, and what you might ignore you have; or what is already here in the environment (“Listening”.) Be aware of your resources.
      • You improvise on something; not on nothing.
• Improvisation is a skill that you can train. You can practice improvisation.
• Improvisation is closely connected to creativity, imagination, play and presence, the present moment.
• Improvisation lets you “lose yourself in …”
  • Improvisation is a flow state, where the rest of the world disappears and everything else is suspended.
  • Improvisation is an opportunity to step into a different self or character
    • Playing a role knowing you’re playing a role. Temporarily suppose that you’re a character and act the way that character would act. Instead, for me to convincingly play a milkman, I just need to temporarily suppose that I am one. I simply act as if it were true that I am indeed a milkman. So, I ask myself: What would I do, think and feel in this situation if I were, in fact, a milkman?
• Improvisation is a mode of encounter; you can meet the “play” part of another person with your own “play” part.
• Improvisation has its own community.
  • The culture of improv is very inclusive and celebrates the individuality of each person.

How improvisation happens

• Improvisation happens within a structure, a frame, a set of rules. Improvisation requires the right balance between freedom and structure. The rules set us free. They provide a structure within which we can play.
• Improvisation does not preclude planning; rather, it supports its execution.
• Improvisation can be encouraged by creating a culture fostering, cheering, celebrating and rewarding creativity, and providing positive feedback.

Principles of improvisation

• Trust
  • Assume that your fellow players have good intentions. Feel safe.
  • Create a culture of safety.
    • Encourage people to take risks and respond positively to it. (“Permission slip.”)
    • Before shows, improvisers go around every player on the team, look them in the eyes, pat them on the back and say: “I’ve got your back.”
      • In improvisation, you take risks knowing that you’ll be supported by your fellow players. “If you do something weird, I’ll do something weirder.”
• Authenticity
  • Do not plan. Do not have a script.
• Listening
  • Pay attention, tweak your behaviour accordingly.
  • Alternate between giving and taking focus.
  • Pause before answering.
  • Meet people where they are, understand them, talk to them from their point of view.
• Yes, and.
  • Acknowledge, then build upon. Create a world.
• Adding value
  • Contribute information, make statements, build the world further, add offers.
    • e.g. “—I came to the hospital as early as I could. —We had a boy! He’s beautiful, Derek.”
  • Move the action forward.
  • “What does the scene need here?”
• Spontaneity.
  • Don’t censor or second-guess yourself. Trust your instincts. Act before you are ready, don’t think about it. Start your sentence before you know how you will finish them.
  • There is no perfect moment. “Improvisers are biased to action over preparation.” If you stop to consider whether this would be the perfect moment, the moment is gone.
  • When being spontaneous and fully in the now, you shut down a part of your brain (the controlling part) and activate another. Creativity/Spontaneity <→ Self-censoring (parts of brain)
  • Our inner critic is the voice of others, that others actually don’t have.
  • Focus on a game to trick your mind out of its habits. Free yourself from the mind and its habits.
  • Exploration is a happy consequence of play.
    • Use play to come up with creative solutions.
• Assertiveness and commitment
  • Own your decisions, don’t back-track, be clear and assertive with your choices, execute them clearly. Be direct and clear. Have a clear behaviour, don’t second-guess yourself. “Express clearly. Too often we communicate in subtext and are disappointed or irritated when we aren’t understood.”
  • Make bold choices before you are ready. Get ready after. When I look back at my life so far, all the things that have given me the most meaning have arisen from making bold choices before I was ready. […] I could easily have said “Yes, but I’ve just come out of a long-term relationship.”
  • Make choices, or the scene dies. The only bad choice is no choice.
  • You have to risk making bad choices in order to get the good ones
    * The more you make clear choices, the more experience you gain.
  • Principles of assertiveness
    • LEADERSHIP. INITIATE THINGS. (Leader (having the vision, initiating) vs Manager (executing, making the plan work))
    • STEP IN. Don’t ask for permission to speak. Step in clearly.
    • OWN YOUR VOICE. Be loud, clear, articulate. Take up space.
    • DON’T BACKTRACK, DON’T SECOND-GUESS.
    • MAKE DECISIONS AND STATEMENTS, NOT QUESTIONS OR INVITES. Have opinions. Add information and provide value.
    • BE CLEAR AND DIRECT. Don’t beat around the bush.
    • TAKE UP SPACE. BE AT THE FRONT. “Play forward” (at the front of the stage), be engaged. Don’t be afraid to dominate the conversation.
  • In certain situations, the commitment to the performance is more important than the performance itself. Owning it.
    • For example, singing activities during improv warm-up: they are meta-games testing your commitment — also a challenge to keep your inner critic and self-doubt in check; comfort zone challenges.
  • Fear responses are from ancient times (served the purpose of not getting ostracized) and are irrelevant now. YOU ARE FREE.
    • Struggling with commitment is a classic fear response. A lot of beginner improvisers struggle with this.
  • Know when to end a scene.
    • If something is not working, end it. People tend to be more afraid of change than of unhappiness, of stagnation.
      • × “When we play, we we simply live in a reality until it stops being useful or fun.”
    • By ending a scene, you are able to create a new one.
    • Have a ritual to end a scene. Improvisers do “the sweep”, where they jog across the front of the stage to mark the end of a scene.
    • You’re in constant control of the reality you’re creating. By sweeping, you don’t get stuck in any one of the realities you’ve created.
      • You are the one to create and end the scenes.
• Celebrate mistakes
  • Acknowledge and transform them
• Play

Practical tools

• Listen with your body to the other improviser’s body, and improvise with this. Body and body-language-based improv.
• Call out the emotions in the scene. Make them explicit by talking about them.
• Respond with STRONG EMOTIONS.
• Actively celebrate mistakes. “Yes, and” them.
• Take notes of the laughs and what triggered them; double down on what provoked them.
• Alternate between giving and taking focus. At times supporting the other improviser, at times taking the focus.
• Use the “heads, hearts, pirates” model to balance a scene: level-headedness & coherent storyline ; emotions, feelings and heat ; chaos, randomness and shaking things up.
• It’s not about you, it’s about the scene. Focus on the scene.
  • We get nervous when we give a presentation because we think it’s about us, but actually it’s not. It’s about what you’re presenting.
  • Focus on making the other player look good (rather than focussing on yourself).

Creativity

• *Innovation is most likely to occur when people from diverse backgrounds, thinking styles and perspectives collide.
• Team up with people on projects to bring in more creativity.
• To be creative, be curious. Be exposed to a lot of things, and be curious about them. Think a thought you never thought before. Learn about how things work.
  • Creativity is connecting ideas. To connect ideas, you have to collect them first.
  • Change your ACTION habits and your THOUGHT habits. Do things you would normally never do. (Hobby, book). Act yourself into a new way of thinking. To think differently, do different things.

Brainstorming

• Question-storming: brainstorm questions around a problem; to help think about it differently. Then, pick five that you’ll focus on answering.
• Brainstorming big: “How can I 10x…?”. Brainstorm for exponential results rather than an incremental one.
• First come up with many options, then pick the best one. Focus first on coming up with many solutions rather than the “best” solutions.
• Set a time limit to come up with ideas with urgency.
• Try out prototypes fast. Share ideas early, even before they are fully formed, let them bounce off each other (ideas are only the beginning), and try them out fast.
  • “Foam pits”: safe spaces to try ideas out, e.g. at a smaller scale
• Encourage wild ideas.
• Shift your environment to inspire you and give you ideas.

Improv games

• Last word, first word (listening practice)
  • Have a conversation for 90 seconds, where the first word of your reply is the last word of what was just said.
  • Practices listening until the end, and practices thinking on the spot because you don’t know what the last word is going to be.

Life

• We can only use information we’ve heard.
  • Read books, talk to people, try stuff, go to workshops. Exchange with people, try stuff out with them. Take a leap.
• The world is fraught with offers. Pay attention. (× Improvisation out of everything: notice your environment.)
• Experience supplies us with intellectual baggage.
  • The more you know about something, the quicker you are to judge and be critical, instead of potentially exploring.
  • “How would I interact with the world if I were naive and not encumbered by past experiences?”
• Faced with a problem, ask yourself “What’s the wrong answer?” This then lets you see the right path more clearly.
  • “When we define what we don’t want, what we do want becomes clearer.”
• Use mediums other than words to access your subconscious mind. Draw, symbolize, visualize, use the space.
• Do things fast, try things fast, rather than think too much about it.
  • If you don’t know what to do, you should keep trying stuff until you find the answer.
• You are the master of your experience.
  • When we play, we we simply live in a reality until it stops being useful or fun.
    • Try different paradigms, see what they bring you.
• To approach a problem differently: in one column, list all assumptions and beliefs you have about it; in the other column, break them all.
  • What if I did differently this thing I’ve always done the same way?
  • What if…? : What if this were easy? What if this where simple?
• Meet your chimp: in one column, list your negative self-talk; in the other column, reframe it, find positive beliefs and certainties about yourself.
• Delineate a sacred space and create rituals into, out of, inside and around it.
• People (and yourself) are characters and can be described as such: what they do, what they want, what they’re afraid of, what their pain points are, their personality traits; what they love, what they hate
  • You can take a step back from yourself and describe yourself objectively.
• Adults are atrophied children, needing to relearn the art of play. Play!
• Reframe blocks as opportunities.
• On feeling things and going for it
  • “We rip out so much of ourselves to be cured of things faster than we go bankrupt by the age of 30 and have less to offer each time we start with someone new. But to make yourself feel nothing so as to not feel anything - what a waste. It is easy when we are foiled by disaster, broken by life, to stop desiring things, to narrow our horizons and flatten our emotional landscape. To do so might make us feel safe. After all, if we don’t try, we cannot fail, and if we don’t fail, we cannot hurt. Yet if we don’t feel sorrow and pain, we cannot feel joy either. And without joy, what’s left?”
• On aliveness
  • “I felt alive. Of course, I’d been alive before the improv class too, ­biologically speaking. But it turns out I wasn’t really, not in the sense that makes you want to dance, do shots and look up in awe at the bright full moon. […] I had a giddy optimism that was so unusual it was actually making me feel self-conscious. I couldn’t wait to go back the next week and do another class. That presence, that connection with others, that spontaneity: it was addictive. It’s like that feeling when you’re in a long-term relationship that hasn’t really worked for a while, but you think you still love them anyway, and then you accidentally happen to meet someone else and realise you don’t love your partner at all, because *this* is what love is and how did you ever forget?”

Fear

• Fear
  • Follow the fear. Admit that you are feeling it, and follow it.
    • Fear shows us our attachment, for example to safety. Following the fear can thus be transformative.
  • Team up with other people to do things you’re afraid of doing.
  • Your rational and emotional minds are at odds. Your emotional mind (your “chimp”) wants safety, while your rational mind wants growth. Deliberately take risks, break patterns. You are not your chimp: don’t identify with your chimp, see it for what it is. It gives you suggestions, but you still get to decide.
    • You can distract your “chimp” (emotional center, fear center) by focussing on a task (e.g. being engaged, playful)

Coaching, improvement, learning, feedback

• The antidote to shame is not sympathy or pity — “Poor you”; it is empathy — “Me too.”
• Improvement
  • You can simply focus on becoming better every day. This lets you improve without comparing yourself to others constantly.
    • Process goals (habits) vs outcome goals (vision). Your vision is supported by your habits.
    • What is an area in your life that you can upgrade? (Focussing on becoming better.)
  • Journalling: what went well, what could I have done better, the one big thing I’m focussing on tomorrow
  • Measure the important things and regularly check in with the results.
  • Reviewing: What should I start doing, what should I stop doing, what I should continue doing?
• Failure & success
  • Failure
    • Do a pre-mortem: how will the project / my life have failed?
    • Experience is the most essential when it comes to improvement. Iterate fast, keep on iterating regardless of success or failure. See everything as information, see failures as information, as data points; instead of taking it personally. Fail forward. We can only discover the rules of the game by playing it.
      • Learn from your failures. Use them as a tool to learn from, and not just as an unfortunate event. Analyze them, review them. Failure is only valuable if we learn from it.
    • To move from failure to success as quickly as possible, you have to fail faster.
    • You have to get it wrong first in order to get it right. But if you give up, you’ll never get it right. (!)
    • “Foam pits” (× Prototyping): you can practice in areas where it’s safer to fail, where the failures are less “hard”. (Safe spaces, experimental spaces, trial areas.)
      • You can set a “foam pit” goal equivalent of a goal you have (thereby also letting you prototype fast), for example starting a blog before writing a book, or going to Toastmasters meetings before doing public speaking, etc.
    • Be neither terrified nor ashamed of failure. See it as a learning experience (not as something about yourself). Fail more.
    • Differentiate between the process and the outcome. You can celebrate the process even if it resulted in a failure.
    • Rejections are a good sign, a sign that you’re taking risks (and are polarizing). If you are only collecting (relative) successes, it means you are not taking enough risks. Go fail!
      • “Where in your life would you benefit from getting more rejections?”
    • Acknowledge failures and mistakes and laugh about it. The “failure bow” is an ironic improvisation ritual whereby one vainly bows after doing a mistake. Rewire your response to failures.
      • (Semaphores; agreed-upon gestures conveying a specific meaning.)
    • See failures as milestones on the way to success. Celebrate them by writing a failure résumé.
    • Comedy and improvisation have a strong culture of celebrating failures. Not taking oneself too seriously.
    • Analyze your failures using the five Why’s.
  • Success
    • Notice your successes and double down on them; don’t keep on searching for other methods if you’ve found something that works. In your successes is the recipe for more success.
      • Superstrengths
        • List strengths that you have in abundance compared to other people (capabilities, skills, character traits).
        • Pick your top 3 superstrengths.
        • Find ways to double down on them.
          • “Does my current plan make the best use of my unique strengths?”
          • “How can I use my strengths more often?”
          • “In what other areas might I apply this strength?”
          • “How can I dedicate more of my time and other resources to developing this strength?”
• Feedback / Coaching
  • Feedback transforms our experience into knowledge and expertise; and lets you improve your intuition and spontaneous decisions.
  • Side coaching (moment-to-moment coaching) lets you notice your mistakes in context. In side-coaching, a coach is on the side and interrupts you when you make a mistake, points it out, and gives you an alternative “better choice”.
    • Real-time feedback lets you have all the context and circumstances fresh in your mind, as opposed to periodical check-ins.
    • Feedback lets you discover blind spots and problems you didn’t know you have, as well as solutions to them.
    • Feedback can be positive as well. You can give positive feedback, sharing appreciation for what the other person is doing well, thereby encouraging more of the things you like.
      • In general, focus on people’s strengths more than their weaknesses. Focus more on enjoying their strong suits, on prioritizing good times.
  • Feedback is information, and nothing more.
• Giving feedback
  • Ask someone to stop a behaviour by not just telling them to stop it, but also what to do instead.
• Receiving feedback
  • Feedback is difficult to get. Encourage getting feedback by:
    • Proactively seeking it out; asking for feedback.
    • Responding positively to feedback.
  • See feedback as a gift.