Every human interaction involves some degree of
emotional risk. Buyer and seller, employee and employer, teacher and student,
therapist and client and every other combination of roles are most likely to
succeed when the risk - e.g., of
rejection, being misunderstood, failing to communicate – is managed with a
combination of competence and good will. Competence in relationships is a skill
set we can spend our entire lives improving. Through practice we can unlearn some of the defensive
patterning we developed out of hurt and fear or simply absorbed from the people
who around us who had no better tools for navigating emotional uncertainty as well as discover
what works better and moves us toward what we really want with other people.
Improvisation master and Stanford University professor Patricia Ryan Madson describes improv as a training ground for acting with generosity, awareness of the needs of others, and willingness to jump in and share the struggle with others on the stage of life. Her
book Improv Wisdom: Don't Prepare, Just Show Up outlines 12 maxims that
form the philosophy behind improvisation and are genuinely useful guidelines
for creating our lives, culminating in the foundational principle of all successful families, partnerships, groups and teams: “take care
of each other.”
“Learning
how to work together moment by moment without a known formula is the essence of
improvisation,” she writes. “We recognize this ability when we watch jazz
musicians, giving and taking stage, harmonizing, creating a piece of music
before us and finding an ending just when it is needed. This wordless
synchronicity can be found in ordinary life as well.” Self-and-other-awareness,
interpersonal connection, self-responsibility and emotional regulation – the capacity
to recognize our emotional triggers without reacting from the stress response
or, conversely, to reign in emotions that are inappropriate to the boundaries
of a situation – are skills associated with emotional intelligence that can be
learned through the structure and process of improvisation. Improvisation master and Stanford University professor Patricia Ryan Madson describes improv as a training ground for acting with generosity, awareness of the needs of others, and willingness to jump in and share the struggle with others on the stage of life. Her
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| by Jude Treder-Wolff, LCSW, RMT, CGP |
The
greater our fluency in the language of feelings, the more successful we will be
in negotiating the barriers between ourselves and others. And we never know
when a barrier will present itself, making improvisation - with its emphasis on here-and-now creative responsiveness - an ideal training
ground for essential relationship skills. Studies show that our perception of the choices
available to us in a given situation – and therefore our power to act – is directly
related to our sense of competence, which grows through practice. In research recently published in The Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, participants “were asked about their
preferences for choice in a variety of hypothetical situations. The researchers
found that participants were more likely to prefer choices in situations in
which they had previously received positive performance feedback or felt
competent because of prior experience. The results provided evidence of a
relationship between competence and choice.”
Improv is the result of agreements made between players that form the structure of the game or scene, in the same way that romantic and business partners operate within a set of agreements. The agreements between teacher and student, therapist and client, or trainer and trainee take into account the difference in status - a teacher can assign a value to students' work and students accept the teacher's authority and knowledge, a client accepts the therapist's expertise and agrees to a specific fee, meeting time and what is acceptable contact outside the sessions - and if everyone involved honors those agreements a great deal of creative energy can be generated through the interaction. What works is what moves the story forward, both in an improv situation and in a real-life relationship. We gain competence through jumping in with the skills we have, seeing what develops,and experimenting with new, previously untried approaches. Because of the risk inherent in human interaction, there is some degree of fear. One of the other relationship-building dimensions of improv is "following the fear." Follow the fear of rejection, failure, humiliation, or whatever other emotional nightmares that are always possible in an improv situation. Take it right to the edge of the abyss. In improv, we may follow the fear right into the abyss but we will not go there alone. And in going there we gain a kind of psychological "muscle" to engage creativity when we need it most, which is when we are at the end of what we know. When old habits fail to meet the demands of an urgent, evolving need. When all else fails.
Emotional competence grows when we push past our preconceptions about what is possible for us and endure that discomfort in service of a higher goal. The higher goal can be that the conversation we are having right now goes in a positive direction, no matter how much we may disagree with the other person. It may be that we support another person just because the relationship is that important. The higher goal can be the communication of an idea. In improv we may sacrifice getting a big laugh to help another player out of a "brain freeze." What we get out of this is a kind of indescribable magic that can transform even an ordinary encounter with another person into something transcendant.
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