Hello improv friends!

I'm excited to release six improv exercises in a single episode and PDF that you can use to help learn through challenging scenarios - how to set them up as reps you can drill to help you learn about your improv brain.

You might be able to figure out what your brain does in the process... which is a great way to move towards trusting it, and your gut, when you run into these kinds of challenges.

So... here it is!

Six Exercises to Ruin You!

In a recent episode, 7 Scene Hacks to Help When You Make a Mistake, I talked about the idea that the path to getting good at improv to rack up ten thousand "failures" instead of trying to avoid these "mistakes". I provided 7 hacks to help in these scenarios in that episode.

But this episode might lead to a very practical question: how do you actually practice something like that? It is one thing to accept a mistake when it happens by accident or use something to "get out of it", but it is another to intentionally put yourself in a position to fail. To practice it, repeatedly. Yikes.

But this place, making mistakes, is where the real growth happens. You learn about your brain, and you can start to trust your instincts, too. This is the concept of deliberate practice, where we create real challenges for ourselves in a safe environment so we can work on error correction. This is how we build a tolerance for chaos and the confidence that we can handle anything that happens on stage.

To help with this, I have put together a kind of workout plan with exercises designed to do just that. These six exercises simulate the most common and difficult situations we find ourselves in. For example, some exercises are about being thrown into a scene that is designed to be difficult from the very beginning. Others are about forcing you to act before you have time to think, making a bold move first and figuring out how to justify it later. This helps build the muscle for spontaneous decision making and trusting your gut. I also have exercises in there that tackle challenging scene partners (which means some of you get to practice being THAT!).

By identifying the situations that challenge us most and running directly at them in practice, we get our reps in. We learn to see these threats as gifts. The stakes in improv are almost always low, which makes it the perfect laboratory for building this kind of creative resilience.

You can also get these exercises in a new booklet I just wrote. This PDF includes additional modifications and a bunch of examples that are not in the video and podcast episode below. You can get the PDF here, and your support will help me with the out-of-pocket expenses and labour to create these resources!

$5.00 Exercises to Ruin You Six exercises (for scene partners or solo practice) to practice your biggest challenges. These include examples,... Read more Get it now!

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An Improv Workout: 6 Exercis... Aug 11 · Your Improv Brain 21:48   ​

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Get Out of Your Head by... forgetting?

You've probably done an improv exercise that trains you to remember details in a scene. For example, redo a scene you did and try to recall every sentence. Or associate words in a list and everyone tries to regenerate the word association list around a circle.

And we all want to win, right? That makes us good at improv.

But eventually this approach - holding on to specific details - might start to get in our way. And this idea is supported by how our brains are actually built. The skill we might need to practice is actually... forgetting. This might sound weird, because forgetting feels like a failure (what we talked about last week!)

Cognitive neuroscience suggests forgetting can be a deliberate, adaptive process that our brains use to work more efficiently. When we intentionally let go of details, we reduce our cognitive load. This frees up mental space. That helps us listen better, and remember... more! Learn the difference between intentional and unintentional forgetting and how you can use it in a scene.

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How Forgetting Can Help to G... Aug 4 · Your Improv Brain 19:42   ​