Improv: the secret ingredient

'You'll enter a room where a person is sitting on a chair. You don't know who they are and they'll speak first...' This is the beginning of a typical improvisation game where your identity depends on the first words of an unknown person. You can't prepare your text or your feelings because you're in their hands.

I work a lot with improvisation techniques to develop communication skills. They help participants open up and create community connection, but mainly they help them learn to concentrate on the other person.

Improvisation helps us discover our responsibility to our listeners. It directly shows us that communication isn't about telling somebody something. It's about catching the attention of the other person and relating to them. You need to take your partner or listener into serious consideration or you can't improvise - and you can't communicate either.

It's also easy to see that in the moment we're brave enough to go beyond our limits and if we give the lead to our partner, we turn out to be surprisingly creative. We change our attitudes about communication and unique, personal voices emerge.