One of the powerful under-the-radar skill-building abilities of improv is the development of resilience.
What Is Resilience?
A skill that affects everything from overall happiness to performance at school and work, resilience is the speed and ease at which an individual is able to meet adverse instances and qualities of life and deal with them in order to continue forward. Resilience is that quality which allows a clear head and focus when problem solving, or a more immediate rebound from a negative hurdle, Resilience is all about adaptability, about “bouncing back” after experiencing trauma, falling into a negative routine, or experiencing one of many other forms of hardship.
Resilience while inherent in all of us, is developed from early childhood and is more accessible the more it is practiced. Rob Gent, Chief Clinical Officer of Embark Behavioral Health, explains that “Experiences of positive affect begin in the early developmental period of life where the interactive dyadic relationship creates neurobiological circuitry informing the individual that experiences of negative affect are temporary and returning to positive affect is predictable and reliable (forming resiliency).”
With enough practice, resilience can become instinctive when coping with a stressful event or situation. The question is how do we practice resiliency in a culture that does everything possible to avoid a sense of failure from early childhood and beyond?
Why Improv Builds Resilience?
As Gent explains, when we understand the developmental process of building resiliency we can better attune and “prioritize the creating of experiences of secure relationships to generate emotional regulation.” With improv’s foundational rule of “Yes, and” framing each and every social interaction, a sense of security is provided for all.
In every moment, players unconditionally accept another player’s offer, “Yes!” They then show that they value that off by adding their own to it, “and…” This simple act of “Yes, and…” provides a relationship for trust, respect, confidence, attunement and more to develop simultaneously. The security created with these two words provides enough structure for players to joyfully navigate the uncertainty that each new offer brings while continuing to move the game forward.
Improv: A Safe and Joyful Practice of Resilience
Improv takes practice. It’s a mental work-out. It can sometimes be painful: When a game doesn’t work; when you freeze; when you just can’t think fast enough. That’s okay. People are practicing. Skills are developing. It is okay to fail. Failure is going to happen but, as the writer, comedian, improviser, and actress Tina Fey says, “You’ve got to experience failure to understand you can survive it” (Goodwin, 2008).
Resiliency is one of the great lessons learned from playing improv. In fact, in improv you don’t fail alone and in secret. You fail with your peers and in front of an audience. It sounds horrifying, but in improv you find that people will just jump up and try again.
That is because improv naturally addresses the five needs for intrinsic motivation: fun, survival, belonging, autonomy and competence (DeMichele, 2019). So, even when a player’s experience may not have felt fun because they feel that they “failed,” they often jump-up to participate at the next opportunity. They repeatedly practice and demonstrate resilience.
Can Improv Build Resilience Throughout Communities?
Improv provides repeated practice in innovative problem solving within a secure and supportive relationships framed by “Yes, and…”. This develops resiliency to overcome everyday set-backs at work, school and in life. It creates space for members of a community to attune, co-regulate and collaborate, using the “Yes, and..” as they move forward with ideas and solutions together.
In classrooms and families, students with and without exposure to trauma build resilience within the security and trusting relationships that the practice of improv nurtures.
It can also influence supportive teamwork in a workplace setting, as improv games help employees feel heard and valued, influencing a change in how team members tackle new problems. When resilience is developed, a team is able to work together with more strength, and the individuals who make up the team are able to approach new problems with more confidence.
Improv provides a: safe, supportive and joyful way to:
- practice moving forward amidst uncertainty
- to practice solving problems within the boundaries of a structure or set of rules
- to fail and have the intrinsic motivation to immediately jump up and try again
Improv develops resiliency.
If you would like to try improv at your next conference or event, take a look at my Keynote or Workshop and Online offerings, or purchase One Rule Improv, so you can introduce the resilience-building power of improv to your team, classroom, community or family.
