The serious part
Why I started
I’ll be honest about this, because I think leaders are flawed people and pretending otherwise is wrong.
Over the last few years I went through a hard stretch: marriage and family struggles, and eventually a divorce. I call it my existential midlife crisis. I made a lot of changes. I stopped drinking. I got more introspective. Instead of only trying to get better at my job, analytically and intellectually, I set out to get better as a person and to actually learn about myself.
For most of my life I believed emotions were nice when they were powerful and good, but otherwise they were distractions that made people inefficient, so you should suppress them. I came to see that ignoring them meant poor relationships, not understanding yourself, and not being happy.
“What’s the point of living life if you’re just going to be unhappy?”
So I dove into emotional intelligence: how feelings work, how they play out in relationships, building a vocabulary for them, expressing myself, understanding other people, talking with my kids about how they feel, and trying to help everyone around me become better people.
Somewhere in there, comedy came to mind. Then I came across improv, and my honest reaction was: ugh. I’ve always loved stand-up, but I never liked improv. Watching it made me feel awkward. Looking back, I think I was feeling what the performers were feeling, and it made me uncomfortable because I wasn’t comfortable with myself, with my emotions, or with connecting with other people. It was an art form I didn’t understand, so it was hard to watch.
Then I saw an ad for an improv class, and I made a decision:
“I’m going to get out of my skin. I’m going to do this. I’m probably going to hate it, but I’m going to do it.”
Because I’d already been reading and opening up to change, I didn’t hate it. I loved it. It gave a physical, practised form to everything I’d been learning about. It’s almost like therapy to me.
There’s a bigger story behind all of this (relationships, kids, getting sober) and maybe someday I’ll write it up properly. For now, this is where improv fits in.
