7 Reasons Improv Helps Coaches

I've been coaching since 2013. I've been performing Improv since 2018. Nothing has improved my coaching practice more than Improv.

Here are some of the ways that happened. We'll start with the obvious and move toward the not so obvious.

How Improv Helps Coaches

1) Listening and Presence

Performing Improv, or just doing Improv games, requires full presence and listening. The game has rules, it moves fast, your improv partners can take things in any direction. The only way you can tune in and make something good happen is if you are fully engaged and listening to everything in the moment.

Improv works that part of my brain so hard that I physically feel my head different after an Improv practice. This is unbelievable training for becoming a listening and presence superstar in coaching sessions.

Most coaches are good listeners and are pretty present. But have you ever listened with your whole body? Were you ever so present that the person you are coaching FEELS you connected to them, even online? This transforms coaching sessions, the client, and the coach as well. If you experienced things like this already, awesome, maybe you've been doing Improv.

I would encourage you to stretch how far you can go in your listening and presence. It goes much deeper than most of us realize. I'm not sure any of us have reached the depth of what is possible.

2) Creativity

Second obvious benefit: more ideas. Improv requires you to be creative on the spot, in a split second. (Or to creatively hold the silence while you think of something).

Generating ideas has always been one of my strengths, but after Improv my idea generation experienced a step change.

Are they all good ideas? Well no. And that's the point. With Improv your inner idea critic starts to be quiet. There's no room for it in Improv. This spills over into the rest of your life so you are much less critical of yourself. Which allows your brain freedom you didn't even know you were squashing. Sounds good doesn't it?

This is incredibly helpful for any idea generating you are doing with a client. The more open you are the more open they will be. This is helpful for growing your own business as well. #Improvismoney

3) Playfulness and Lightness

Improv is play. It's not trying to get anywhere or accomplish anything. You do it for it's own sake. Because it feels great and is fun and has natural benefits.

Even in comedy Improv we are not working hard to be funny, we are simply being present and curious and playful and expressive and the hilarity comes naturally in boatloads.

What else in your life is true play? Not trying to achieve some goal, or make you better, or get you somewhere, or fix something. Many adults have lost their sense of play and spend almost no time doing it.

The benefit of play is lightness and skill improvement. It just comes naturally from doing it. This is why all children and all mammals instinctively play. ALL OF THEM. It's build into our genes from long long ago as the best way to socialize, explore, and learn. Because when something is joyful it's so much easier and it motivates you effortlessly.

Imagine becoming an even better coach so easily, through play. You can. With Improv.

How else does this help you with your clients? The more playful and lighter you are the more your very serious client can start to match that. Not only will they feel better, but they will be more open to the rest of what happens in a session.

Play allows for the rest of the benefits on this list to come much more easily. It's a loosener. It's a lightener. And it's a people bonder.

4) Confidence

Improv trains bravery. You need to go into a game or scene without any idea of what will happen. You can't predict it. You can't control it. You just dive in and perform and hope it works out. Usually in front of an audience. Yikes.

Why would you subject yourself to this? Well first of all, you are already doing it all the time. Re-read that above paragraph but imagine I'm talking about life or work. Or coaching. You 're already improvising all the time.

When you intentionally practice it and trained it specifically you see over and over again that you can dive in and not only handle it, you will come out shining. This makes you a braver coach. To broach hard subjects. Challenge your clients. Or offer perspectives and exercises you wouldn't have offered before. Badass coaching.

5) Expressing and Handling Emotion

Improv games and scenes are at their best and most compelling when there is the energy of emotion. Same thing with relationships. Same thing with goals. Same thing with motivation. Same thing with coaching.

If you're not asking for and extracting and examining the emotions your clients are having or want to have, you're leaving a lot of power and potential off the table.

Improv makes you more familiar and fluent with your own emotional landscape and responding to the emotions of others.

In fact, you can get to a point where you start to feel someone else's emotion before they can articulate it. If you go fully embodied, you can learn to feel in your own body what the person in front of you is feeling in theirs. This helps you help clients with what's really going on with them in ways they wouldn't be aware of without you.

Improv trains this level of emotional resonance and intelligence.

6) Embracing Tension and Uncertainty

Same deal with tension and uncertainty. The unpredictability of Improv means there can be surprise silences, miscommunications, or even conflicts. It can lead to sticky situations. Just like coaching.

But instead of sweating, stammering, or breaking the silence too quickly, Improv can help you sit in it, letting what needs to emerge naturally emerge between you and your scene partners. Or you and your client.

Tension, uncertainty, and silence is such fertile ground for something new and ground breaking to pop in. If, that is, you are adept at letting it happen and holding it. Improv trains that.

7) Trusting Yourself

Adding all this together, with Improv in your corner you start to trust yourself A LOT. Every time you jump into an Improv game or performance you essentially are backing yourself to make something good happen. And every time it works out you gain a little bit more belief in your own unique awesomeness.

This is going to help you be better as a coach and also as a grower of a coaching business. You'll put more trust in your instincts, your ideas, your skills, your ability to perform, your ability to face the unknown, your ability to figure it out, and your actions.

That's a form of creative power, no?

You Can Do Improv For Coaches With Us

We have an amazing event coming up: Improv For Coaches: Get Better At Handling Tension, Uncertainty, and Surprises In Your Coaching Sessions .

Check out the description. Maybe you'll come play with us. And start naturally getting all these benefits.

What benefits did I miss? Come to the event and tell us.

Love, David

PS - When you're ready to feel more peace, power, and expansion in your career and business, you might be interested in these:

1) EmpowHer Journey -

This is for career-driven women who want to stop behaving like the world is telling them and start behaving like their true powerful selves. Break the rules. We need more women leaders modeling the new way of loving success. Read more here.

2) Men on a Mission -

It's a men's group for us to own our mission and loving masculine power. Become the leader of your life, your relationships, and your work. Open to your higher power and play to create. Open to a deep relationship with Life in service and strength. Read more here.

3) Culture Audit -

If your leadership team or organization isn't humming how'd you'd like, if you're experiencing quiet quitting, high turnover, or just lower performance than you want. Or if you just are not clear what your best culture is. It's time for a culture audit. We have a robust method based on the needs and values of your people that can show you exactly where your culture is breaking down and how to fix it. Grab 15 mins with David for more details.