Do A Theatrical Improvisation Course to Build Confidence

Hey guys, it’s Graham here again, and today I want to tell you why you should do a theatrical improvisation course. Now, you may have heard of theatrical improvisation or improve or theater sports or theater games, and they all refer to the underlying concept of improvising.

Now, improvisation is an incredibly valuable skill to have, and so I want to tell you why it’s so great to be able to improvise as far as self-confidence goes. Of course, the first reason why you should do theatrical improvisation is it’s simply a lot of fun. You’ll get out there, you’re mixing with some really cool people, you’re doing stuff that’s just coming into your head spontaneously and it’s a really great space to be in.

The next big reason why theatrical improvisation is so powerful is that you learn to fail. Failure is the key to success. A lot of us have been programmed through our upbringing, our childhood, schooling, not to fail, that failure is a bad thing, that you get punished for failure. Well, failure is a good thing. You want to embrace failure because once you’ve learnt how to fail gracefully, you have the key to success in your hand.

And I notice that a lot of people who struggle with self-confidence, particularly a lot of guys, have programmed themselves to totally avoid all failure in their life, and I totally used to be like this. So you want to reverse that trend, and theatrical improvisation is a great place to do that because as the teacher in my class told me yesterday you want to fail big. The bigger you can fail, the bigger you will succeed.

Learning to embrace failure is a huge concept that you’ll learn by learning how to improvise. Another thing that you’ll learn at theatrical improvisation is the art of conversation skills. A lot of guys I find worry about what they’re going to say in conversation, and once you’ve learnt to improvise the problem completely goes away.

The key to conversation skills is to learn how to pick up things that are happening in the environment. If you’re talking to a girl for instance, you might talk about something that she’s wearing or something that’s happening around you, to be totally present in that environment and learn how to pick up on things that are going on around you.

And in theatrical improvisation, this is exactly what they teach because they’ll teach you totally to be connected with the current moment, to be working with the other actors and to relate to what’s going on around you.

Theatrical improvisation is a fantastic way to build your self-confidence. You’ll also improve your communication skills with people, you’ll improve your ability to act with people and to really be present in the situation, which is really what it means to be self-confident, you know, to be comfortable in yourself and to be comfortable in any kind of situation that you find yourself.

The other reason why theatrical improvisation is great is that you get to be silly. You don’t have to worry about being serious all the time and getting things right all the time and being perfect all the time. You get to completely let go of those ideas because, really, they hold you back, not only when you’re trying to improvise, but they hold you back any time that you’re doing anything where you really just want to relax and be yourself.

I can’t highly recommend this enough. It’s great fun, you’ll learn a whole heap of stuff and you’ll meet some cool new people. So have a look around at your local community college or your local arts center or actors’ studio in your city, and have a look for any kind of theatrical improvisation or introduction to acting improvisation courses. Get out there and start having fun, and learn how to fail.