By Gary Hirsch

I have been performing improvised theater for over 20 years. It’s instant theater – no plan, no script, just creating with fellow performers and the audience in the moment.

As a student of the craft, I have been told during countless trainings and workshops:

“Come out on stage without any preconceptions.”

“Let go of your agenda.”

“Be fearless.”

“Be obvious.”

For most of my improvising years I have understood these ideas on an intellectual level, they absolutely make sense to me. Just walk on stage and see what happens. I understand this in here *see me tapping my forehead*. They exist as an idea, as a strategy. I contemplate them. But they stay in my head, even with all the understanding in the world, and actually doing these things is a constant battle. I still plan, worry, try to come up with streams of narrative before I even walk on stage. I do the opposite of the thing that I know will help me. This disconnect of knowing something and then doing the opposite is a bit miserable, so much so that recently I started avoiding getting up on stage at all- avoiding doing one of things I most love.

But sometimes words are said in just a certain manner and the stars align so that you can hear them in a different way, receiving it not only with your head, but with something else…. your heart maybe?

Last weekend this happened for me. I was attending a conference as a presenter, but found myself longing to be a student too, so I walked into a 90- minute beginner’s improv workshop. Excluding the few of us seasoned folks sprinkled in, the participants were mostly college students. At the beginning of the session one of the students raised their hands and asked a timeless question:

“How do I come out on stage with a blank mind, without an agenda? How do I walk on fearlessly?”

Edi (one of the facilitators) asked for the student’s name and then said, “When I say 7-11, what is the first thing that comes to your mind?”

“Slurpee” he said, looking a little embarrassed.

And then Edi says, “That’s enough (pause), you don’t need anything else”

Subtext: You don’t need more. You don’t need a clever/wonderful/brilliant idea. You don’t need to evaluate/invent/create/conjure anything else. Your Slurpee is unique and different because it’s your Slurpee. Only you can imagine, envision, create this specific Slurpee. Your first, most obvious idea is enough. There are endless possibilities, depths, world’s that you and your scene partner could explore with this Slurpee. This immediate, initial, obvious and effortless idea is enough. Your idea is enough. You are enough.

This was a simple, three-line exchange “7-11”, “Slurpee”, “That’s enough”. Good chance no one else in the room was as floored by this as I was. Likely no one had this cascade of thought that went from a Slurpee-to- (maybe for the first time) feeling, not just understanding that whatever I do is enough.

Reading this now you might be like, “Huh? What is he going on about?” It was an idea that I had heard many times, in different ways, but not this way at this time and at this place. And it shifted something for me at a core level. What if on and off stage, my ideas, words, actions are enough. What if I don’t have to try so hard to be _______________ (fill in your own blank here)? What if I am enough?

Again, these are not new ideas. You have probably heard or thought about these things before and reading it here might just feel like noise. But who knows?

Exposure to different teachers, thinkers, and doers is important to me. They all are probably saying the same ideas in slightly different ways, but when there is an alignment of the right idea + right messenger + right moment + right place, and the stars align – you can get a Slurpee moment like this.

Special thanks to improv facilitators Edi Patterson and Lauren Burns, and the Global Improv Initiative.

Gary Hirsch is the co-founder of On Your Feet a consultancy that uses improv to help organizations create, communicate, and collaborate. He is also the founder of Botjoy, a visual experiment in co-creation. Gary paints thousands of small & sometimes large hand painted robots that roam the world looking for joy, bravery, love, & coffee! Read more from Gary on the On Your Feet blog. You can reach him at gary@oyf.com