I love to improvise. I really do believe it keeps my brain young, it asks me to pay attention in ways that nothing else does. I use it with clients to warm them up to me and to each other, to create metaphorical (and real) connections to how they are communicating (or not), listening (or not) and interacting. I also use it to clear out the cobwebs in their brains, and get them to focus.
So I love to hear others talk about what improv does for you. I’m particularly taken at the moment with Kelly Leonard of Second City’s podcast, where he’s talking to authors of business books, and putting improv squarely into that context. This podcast episode with Dr Leah Weiss, author of How We Work: Live Your Purpose, Reclaim Your Sanity, and Embrace the Daily Grind has these gems:
Kelly Leonard says:
Improvisation is noisy group mindfulness
Leah says it’s:
interpersonal mindfulness
Then in this podcast Kelly interviews Leonard Mlodinow, who is a Theoretical Physicist on his concept of Elastic Thinking, outlined in his book Elastic: Flexible Thinking in a Constantly Changing World (here’s a Guardian review of the book). Worth a listen.
