Adam Grenier: belief

Transcript context

…And played all these fun things. And I'm curious what you've taken away from improv that has helped you become better at your work? So, I think generally the whole suite of skills that you develop in improv are pretty applicable, right? Because you are getting comfortable on your feet with change, with teamwork, building off of each other, experimenting, trying new things, a little bit of everything. I think a couple of the key rules or themes of improv that I really try to hammer home with people are obviously the "Yes, and..." side of improv, which everyone's probably heard, which is in a scene the worst thing you could do is deny somebody, because you're actually just stopping progress and you're not building off of anything. So, the appropriate approach is to say, "Yes, that is true, and..." and add to it. So, if someone's like, "Hey, you have a chicken on your head," not saying, "No, I don't." Just kind of ruins that scene. Versus saying, "Yes, I do, and it's name is Sally. What's your chicken's name? " Builds on that and gives it more opportunity. And so I think that in growth in business is super important to be able to say, "Yes, I do see your idea," or "Yes, we did accomplish this and this is what we want to do next and this is how it's going to build on it," I think is super important. The other one that I think is less known or talked about is the gift of details. So, in a scene, if you give somebody really specific details about something, it gives so much more meat to be able to work off of in terms of what's coming next. So, if someone's starting a scene and they're clearly watching television and clicking through the channels and I walk up and just say like, "Oh, you're watching TV, cool." That's a yes statement. I'm not denying what they did. But if I come up and say like, "Oh cool, you're watching TV. Is that an Alf episode? I haven't seen Alf since I was a kid. It reminds me this one time I actually ate my own cat." Just giving those specific details of Alf and me as a kid and I had a cat, which if people don't know Alf, he ate cats. I don't remember that. I remember Alf, but I don't remember he ate cats.…

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