Practice Improvisation and Improve Your Speaking Skills
What is improvisation? Improvisation is a set of exercises, principles and a mindset that has you think spontaneously and creatively (note this is my own definition that I’ve come up with after having spent 4 days doing it - feel free to add your own definition in the comments). By practicing the exercises you train your brain to come up with ideas spontaneously and to use story structure, physicality, humor and emotion. The principles encourage and channel your creativity and this mindset has you give it a go and be willing to fail.
Here’s an example of a basic improvisation exercise. It’s called Ding! You start making up a story and every so often another person rings a bell. When they do, you have to come up with something different. So let’s say you’ve just said:
“The man walked into the laundromat” “Ding!”
“He walked into a hotel” “Ding!”
“He walked into a nightclub” “Ding!”
“He walked into a black hole” …no ding so you continue with the story.
This is just one exercise. During the course, we probably did at least 30 different exercises.
How can improvisation improve you as a speaker? I thought that improvisation would help me think on my feet and come up with quick responses. Doing some of the exercises many times over will probably help me with this over time. But what I realize is that improvisation helps me generate ideas and improves my material during the preparation phase of working on a speech or presentation. In particular, I’ve learned how I can make the stories I tell much more engaging. Sometimes I worked on stories that I tell on our courses, sometimes on stories that I’d never told before. This was invaluable for me (as well as reminding me what it’s like being a course participant on one of our courses!) Here are some of the principles I’ve learned:
1. Advance and expand. Everything you say should either advance the action or expand on a specific event or emotion in the story. If you’re expanding on a point, it should either be funny or add to the audience’s understanding or feelings for the story. If it doesn’t, chuck it out. Keeping the action of a story moving forward is critical.
Avish coached me by shouting out either expand or advance as I told my story. Sometimes this led me to expand on the story in a way that I’d never done before and led to some really funny lines that I’ll incorporate in the future. Other times, Avish had me move on (advance) so that the story reached its climax faster and with more impact.
You can also do this with a partner, shouting out “expand” or “advance”. Although there'll be certain times when it makes sense to shout expand or advance, it’s not that critical. The point of the exercise is to play with your story in unpredictable ways and see what you generate as a result. If you’re a more advanced improvisation practitioner, do add your views on this in the comments.
2. Demonstrate rather than describe emotion. Emotion is a great way of increasing audience engagement in a story. I had a habit of describing my emotions rather than demonstrating them. I tended to smile during most of my story even when it wasn’t appropriate (apparently, it wasn’t as bad as the John McCain grimace – phew!) As I told my story, I learned to identify the moments where I could demonstrate emotion and be encouraged to go over the top in acting them out.
This was another thing I learned – when I’m practicing I can experiment with going over the top – and then pull back to what is appropriate for a particular situation. It’s a bit like driving a car which can go 300 miles an hour but most of the time staying within the speed limit.
If you know that you’re a bit buttoned-up when you’re speaking to a group, experiment with emotion in the privacy of your own bathroom. Then you’ll have more choice as to how you demonstrate emotion in front of the room.
3. Develop the characters in your story. So I knew that having characters and acting them out was a useful thing to do when telling a story, but I was doing it wrong. I have a story that contrasts the way my daughter Jessica spoke as an excited, naive 5 year old and then as a knowing 15 year old. But when I was being Jessica, I kept talking to the audience, rather than to her imaginary mother.
I also played with using more than just my voice to imitate Jessica – but I think that needs some more work! I understood that when experimenting with developing characters, it’s useful to do it in front of a mirror rather than video yourself. You can play with different facial expressions and body movement and see immediately whether they work.
Here’s an example of a basic improvisation exercise. It’s called Ding! You start making up a story and every so often another person rings a bell. When they do, you have to come up with something different. So let’s say you’ve just said:
“The man walked into the laundromat” “Ding!”
“He walked into a hotel” “Ding!”
“He walked into a nightclub” “Ding!”
“He walked into a black hole” …no ding so you continue with the story.
This is just one exercise. During the course, we probably did at least 30 different exercises.
How can improvisation improve you as a speaker? I thought that improvisation would help me think on my feet and come up with quick responses. Doing some of the exercises many times over will probably help me with this over time. But what I realize is that improvisation helps me generate ideas and improves my material during the preparation phase of working on a speech or presentation. In particular, I’ve learned how I can make the stories I tell much more engaging. Sometimes I worked on stories that I tell on our courses, sometimes on stories that I’d never told before. This was invaluable for me (as well as reminding me what it’s like being a course participant on one of our courses!) Here are some of the principles I’ve learned:
1. Advance and expand. Everything you say should either advance the action or expand on a specific event or emotion in the story. If you’re expanding on a point, it should either be funny or add to the audience’s understanding or feelings for the story. If it doesn’t, chuck it out. Keeping the action of a story moving forward is critical.
Avish coached me by shouting out either expand or advance as I told my story. Sometimes this led me to expand on the story in a way that I’d never done before and led to some really funny lines that I’ll incorporate in the future. Other times, Avish had me move on (advance) so that the story reached its climax faster and with more impact.
You can also do this with a partner, shouting out “expand” or “advance”. Although there'll be certain times when it makes sense to shout expand or advance, it’s not that critical. The point of the exercise is to play with your story in unpredictable ways and see what you generate as a result. If you’re a more advanced improvisation practitioner, do add your views on this in the comments.
2. Demonstrate rather than describe emotion. Emotion is a great way of increasing audience engagement in a story. I had a habit of describing my emotions rather than demonstrating them. I tended to smile during most of my story even when it wasn’t appropriate (apparently, it wasn’t as bad as the John McCain grimace – phew!) As I told my story, I learned to identify the moments where I could demonstrate emotion and be encouraged to go over the top in acting them out.
This was another thing I learned – when I’m practicing I can experiment with going over the top – and then pull back to what is appropriate for a particular situation. It’s a bit like driving a car which can go 300 miles an hour but most of the time staying within the speed limit.
If you know that you’re a bit buttoned-up when you’re speaking to a group, experiment with emotion in the privacy of your own bathroom. Then you’ll have more choice as to how you demonstrate emotion in front of the room.
3. Develop the characters in your story. So I knew that having characters and acting them out was a useful thing to do when telling a story, but I was doing it wrong. I have a story that contrasts the way my daughter Jessica spoke as an excited, naive 5 year old and then as a knowing 15 year old. But when I was being Jessica, I kept talking to the audience, rather than to her imaginary mother.
I also played with using more than just my voice to imitate Jessica – but I think that needs some more work! I understood that when experimenting with developing characters, it’s useful to do it in front of a mirror rather than video yourself. You can play with different facial expressions and body movement and see immediately whether they work.
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Source: hypnotherapyservices.com
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