Drew Coolidge
Most of the credit for this post goes to Drew Coolidge, an exquisitely gifted improviser I’ve had the fun of watching many times in action with his group Cartel, and before that in a group called Spank Drew (draw your own conclusions about what that team thought of him). On USSRocknRoll.com he writes about his three favorite improv teachers, and the gifts each of them gave him.
Here’s a summary of Drew’s post and my take on its applications to business:
From Eric Hunnicutt, he learned how to deal with fear. “Just be present. It’s not about getting rid of fear, if you’re present, fear has no room to exist.” Hunnicutt taught him.
When it comes to business, or life in general for that matter, who among us doesn’t have fears? A speech. A parent. A spider. A client. Hunnicutt’s advice to Drew about performing onstage is just as legit in any other context: don’t work at being fearless. That’s like treating fear as some kind of virus and yourself a victim in need of medication. Don’t go there with your energy. Instead, practice being present. If you’re completely absent, begin by focusing on your breathing. Your senses, all of them, and the space around you, all of it. Go from there. By giving 100% of your attention to everyone and everything around you, fear ceases to become a factor in your performance.
(The basketball legend, Larry Bird, once said about playing in an NBA championship game against the Houston Rockets that, while running a fast break, was he aware not only of where all ten players were on the court, he was aware of every fan in the first 20 rows of the arena. If someone was sitting down with a box of popcorn, or leaving their seat, Bird saw it while sprinting down the floor. We normally think of players confining their awareness to the court, but when our senses are 100% engaged, a line painted on a floor is just one more thing we notice. It does not define the limits of our awareness.)
From Dave Hill, Coolidge got insight into what improvisers call the group mind. The group mind is when all the players on a team tap into and share the flow of a performance. They are all on the same page, they are one organism, evolving in realtime right before our eyes. “It’s the product of individuals making strong choices and completely supporting the moves of the other players,” is how Drew boils down Hill’s gift. It naturally follows Hunnicut’s note. If you’re present, you can do this.
In business, everyone talks about teamwork, but dishearteningly few understand what Dave Hill taught Drew: Every player on a team can make the strongest, boldest, ballsiest individual move she or he is capable of making, and support those moves by their fellow players, and have all of it be consistent with good teamwork. (Oh, and group mind is not the same thing as groupthink. The two concepts are completely at odds with one another.) Agree on the game your team is playing and you’re on the way toward discovering the group mind.
From David Pasquesi, Drew received this gem: “The scene is already occurring, it’s our job to allow the scene to reveal itself to us. The tools for doing that are: 1. Listening (or Paying Attention) 2. There is no two.”
We call Lstening (or Paying Attention) ‘Heeding.’ In business, we can get so focused on the desired resolution to our ‘scene,’ that we forget to heed what’s happening in the moment, which is the only chance we have to improve our odds of success. Heeding results in opportunity recognition. Forget to heed, fail to recognize opportunity.
I’ve evolved the headline from Drew’s post a bit. He made it go, I heeded, and that’s how we up along. Spanks, Drew!
One night when my son, Alex (who’s leaving tomorrow for a job in NYC) was five years old, we watched the movie E.T. together at home. When E.T. left Elliot to return to his home planet, Alex cried. He was still sad when I tucked him into bed a little later. “Why did E.T. leave?” he asked.
