Improv Thinking with Vivek Venugopal

Derek Orth: One, two, Well, listeners, welcome back to Creatively Well. I am your host, Derek. This is a show about creative well-being and essentially how creativity can help us in our personal and professional lives. And I'm stoked. Today we have a very special guest, Vivek Vanugapal. Vivek, welcome to the show. I think I'm in the wrong class. I'm supposed to be an intro to Psych. Is it the wrong mic? Creatively Well. I'm doing well, man. Thank you. Thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here. Awesome. Well, for the folks who don't know who you are, which is a vanishingly small population because of your fame, tell us a little bit about like, what would you say about what you do for people? know, like how you would describe it to someone at a dinner party, for example. It's a great question because I've had a few different careers, which I can talk about, and some of them are a lot easier to explain than others. Depending on how deeply I want to get into a conversation with said person. at a party, I might say something as banal as I do corporate training work. I train professionals on communication, public speaking and storytelling. Or I might say, I teach people to be more human. And sometimes I'll say, I teach improv for a living. Completely depends. on how I'm feeling and the level of conversation I'd like to get into. Okay. Well, great. Well, hopefully you feel like this is a safe place, psychologically speaking, and that you can, you can talk to me about improv or anything you want to. We can cry, we can laugh, whatever you want to do. Great. Amazing. Amazing. I will say that that, is only the case because you and I have known each other for as long as we have. So we'll get into it without having to do the work of building that psychological safety right now. in the moment. I love it. Yeah. Don't do any trust falls. Cause I'm not actually there. We're doing this. ⁓ yeah. Exactly. Right. So yes, we're to talk about improv today, which I'm super excited about. Obviously a topic we're both really passionate about just to kind of get us started. I mean, what's the origin story for you with improv? Like how did you first really, I mean, you may have seen it at an earlier time, but when did it first kind of touch your life? When did you become involved with it? And what was that like? So, so my first interaction with improv, was my college's improv team. I had a friend who was in the college improv team and he said to me, I think you'd be really great at improv. You should come to one of our practices. Come to one of our shows, come to one of our practices. And so I went to one of their practices. And this was a self, like student led college improv team. So there wasn't really a coach, there was just someone who had. maybe taken, done some improv in high school. And so they were like, you know, bringing some of those improv lessons into the college. So there wasn't really like a teacher, there wasn't a coach, whatever it is. And they just kind of threw me in there and it was not a great experience. Like I just didn't know what was going on. I didn't have any kind of basis on, you know, what I should be doing or anything. So I kind of was like, yeah, not for me, you know? And then I think that's a lot of people's experience, right? Is like, they're just scared to death of it. then, well, also, Also, my theory on improv and musicals is that most people's first interaction with both of those art forms tend to be at best a mediocre version of those art forms, right? Typically, people's first exposure to a musical is like a middle school musical, right? And their first exposure to improv, at least trying to do improv or watching improv is a bad high school improv team, a bad college team. Some show you've been dragged to by a friend. Exactly. In like an obscure black box theater somewhere and you're like, what's happening? And so most people's immediate thing is like, ⁓ I don't like that. I don't enjoy that art form. But if you were to, if your first exposure to a musical was a Broadway musical, if your first exposure to musical was Hamilton, you're like, ⁓ that is. I get it. Right. If your first exposure to. improv is whose line is it anyway? You're like, okay, I see it. I see it operating at the highest level. And so my first experience was that, and then I kind of was like, yeah, I guess not for me, not a big deal, whatever. And then as a young adult, I lived in Chicago and I was friends with a lot of standup comedians. And standup comedians tended to, at least in those days, and I think still today, tended to think about improvisers as like an opposing force. And they were like. Right, it's like never the twain shall meet, right? No, like improvisers are way too happy, they're way too on, they're always riffing, it's too much, right? And stand-up comedians like to have this like, you know, this idea that they are artists and they are, you know, very like in their thoughts and in their feelings and they're very quiet and they're introverted. A lot of them are depressed. Like that's the kind of veneer around stand-up comedy. And so I just hung out with all these stand-up comics and they were like, man, improvisers, like lame, whatever. And I lived in Chicago for 10 years and I did not take a single improv class. I went and I watched improv shows and I did all the stuff, but I did not ever take a class even though I lived two blocks away from I.O. Improv Olympic. Improv Olympic at Chicago. I used to go to shows at Second City and all these things, but I just never took classes because I was just like, for me. And I was a very serious professional, Derek. I needed to do the work, right? I was working. was like, this is not, performance is not for me. And over the years had a few different careers and then ended up in San Francisco and was working in sales, in tech sales. And I was out with a couple of standup comedians at one time. And I said something to the effect of, I think my superpower is that I can... Present anything to any group of people, you know, if you just give me a few minutes to go over a deck I can stand in front of a group of astrophysicists and I can deliver talk with slides and tell the story I probably won't be able to answer questions but I can deliver a deck that's already been created and The the comedian I was talking to is a comedian named Caitlin Gill and she said, know There's a show in San Francisco that does exactly that It is called Speechless and you should go check it out. so Speechless, you know, Derek, is a show that was a monthly show in San Francisco where comedians and improvisers got up on stage and gave ⁓ fully improvised talks using slides they had never seen before in a style that was randomly selected about a topic that was suggested by an audience member. That was the premise of the show. Most people's waking nightmare. Most people's making nightmare, but hilarious to watch from the audience, right? So I attended, I showed up to one of the shows and we Speeches used to have an open mic called Crowdsourced that happened before the main show. So four comedians were booked to be on the show. And then the person who won the open mic got onto the main stage that night. And it was a competition show. So we had judges who would judge the talks, score you. And if you won. you came back the next month to defend your crown. And so I showed up to one of these shows and I participated in the open mic and I won the open mic. And when I won the open mic. The scrappy upstart. Yeah. And then I was on the main stage that night and then I won the main stage. That night. That night. And so then I came back. So I had to come back the next month. So I came back the next month and I didn't win the second month. But Scott Lifton, who was one of the producers of the show, was like, hey. you're pretty good at this. Do you want to just be on our like rotation, our roster? And I was like, yeah, this sounds great. And it was this moment for me that was that like, feel like a lot of people, mostly boys have this like fantasy that this completely useless skill they have is going to become the most important skill in the room. You know, it's like the old, what was that 80s movie War Games? where it's like, hey, I'm really good at video games and now I'm actually going to defend the United States because they need someone who can play video games, right? It's like something like that. Is that with Val Kilmer? Is that what Yeah, I think so. I have a big recollection of Val Kilmer there, I just, I felt that in that moment I was like, oh my God, this thing that I'm like weirdly good at suddenly is generating applause and laughter. was like the greatest feeling. what I really- I just want to ask you about that. So- Like, so was it the fact that you already had this skill set that was kind of honed through the work that you'd been doing that does that would made that a different, more comfortable experience for you than what you did in your college experience? Yeah. So I've thought about it a bunch because so I think it's a combination of things. One is that I had been working in jobs. The jobs that I'd loved the most were jobs where I had the opportunity to not just present in front of a group of people or to a group of people. but also incorporate the things that they had been telling me when I did that presentation. So I was a nonprofit fundraiser for a long time that involved meeting with donors, understanding what they truly cared about, and then expressing the work that we were doing in a way that resonated with them, right? I then moved into tech sales. When I was in tech sales, it was the exact same thing. I had to listen to what the clients actually needed and then incorporate that into the sales pitch that I was giving. And make sure that the ⁓ product that we were selling to them actually was solving their problems. Right. But in order to do that, you needed to deeply listen. You needed to be able to tell a compelling story. You needed to be able to use their language, build on their ideas. These are all kind of the building blocks of improv, although I didn't know it. Right. I was just doing it. I learned on the streets, right. The other thing is, I think I, my background, my, my life background. has been one that has forced me to have an adaptability built into my mindset. So I was born in Africa, I was born in Zambia, I lived there till I was 11. I moved to India, I finished high school in India. And then from there, I made the national transition to Iowa for college. What's that trail called? There's a name for it. Oh my God, it's an old story. It's an old, old story. And so it was... In those formative years, I had to find ways to adapt in the moment, understand different perspectives. And so I have just been wired in that way. And I think that there's something in my brain that allows me to do that faster than some other people, right? In terms of getting into that flow state. And we can talk about the neuroscience of it. Cause again, something I've become, I became deeply interested in. because I was like, why is it that I feel so comfortable doing this and other people don't? And how can I help other people get to where they need to be in order to do this when they need to do it? Right? And so I, I started to do speechless regularly and, I recognize, my, this is improv. I think I want to like learn improv properly. And I ended up taking classes at an improv school in San Francisco called end games. And I went through the end games system. The way that improv schools generally work is you take the intro class and then second level, third level, fourth level. did all those things and I continued to just perform improv. Right. So as part of a lot of times when you are doing these classes at these schools, you have to then perform, right? You create a team, you start doing performances, start to go to more performances. I started to do a two person musical improv show called American Immigrants with Anthony Veneziale, who was one of the co-founders of Speechless. And the two of us created a two person improv format that incorporated music as well. And we just started to do that pretty often. And so I started to like, I had this like jump into the deep end moment with improv where I was just like, all right, we just got to go high stakes. Anthony, I just want to ⁓ yeah, yeah. That's the point I wanted to get to. Yeah. Please like say who Anthony Veneziali is and how you went from just like, throwing yourself into doing a show to suddenly performing with, yeah, tell us about Anthony. With Anthony, yeah. Anthony was one of the co-founders of Speechless. And so I became friends with him through that. And we started to do, you know, we just started to do those shows together. And then I found out that not only is he an amazing improviser and performer, but he had been doing it for, you know, a lot longer than I had. and in fact had created a show, which was a fully improvised musical show called Freestyle Love Supreme with Lin-Manuel Miranda. you've heard the name. Yeah. And so he'd been doing improv at the highest level for a long time. And since then took the show on Broadway, brought improv back to Broadway after Nichols and May, like decades ago. ⁓ my gosh. And then won a Tony Award. And, you know, they, they won a Tony award for improv on Broadway. mean, next level stuff. And then there's me who's just like ⁓ learning the tenets of improv and Anthony performing together. So that was a jump into the deep end for sure for me. But what that resulted in is me falling in love with this art form and just deeply diving into the history of improv, the neuroscience of it, understanding what's going on in your brain when you're improvising those kinds of things. again, so. You asked me how I got into improv and I've already talked about more than that, but that was my intro. That's great. Well, that's perfect. And yeah, I think that's a natural kind of like segue. So what I'm hearing, you you kind of had this kind of not so great experience, which a lot of people can, you know, relate to. And then suddenly a really great experience that kind of tied into your life history and then into your work history and what you were doing and what you were practicing. so, you know, it seemed like you kind of got into it through that. And then, you know, it was just. pure fun, right? know, doing it for like the love of the game, but that kind of led more into this interest into like, what's actually happening? Like, what have I, what have I unconsciously been trained to do? And like, how can I help other people? Like, I don't know. What was the moment where you realized, ⁓ I could, I could do this as like a job. Like when it started to switch into, I can teach this to people, not just so people can laugh, but that it actually benefits them in all these other areas of their lives. Yeah. The moment. that it resonated for me the most. I was working my corporate job and someone had heard that I had been starting to take improv classes. And she said, would you mind coming to my teams offsite, you know, like five person teams offsite and just doing a couple of exercises. I really need people to kind of like loosen up, get out of their shell. And I was like, yeah, sure. I mean, like most people who've taken one improv course, you're like, yeah, I could teach this, right? Full of hubris. It turned out that that I said yes to it and then a few weeks later the day came when I had to do it. It turned out it was the day after the 2016 election. Fun. Which was a difficult time for a lot of people. And so I got into work that day and I was just like I didn't know which way was up and I just looked at my calendar and I was like ⁓ my god I have to teach this like improv. workshop and I don't even feel like talking, let alone like teaching. And, and I called Anthony and I was like, Hey, so I promised to do this. Can you help me figure out what I should do? And he was like, yeah, why don't you do this is this? like, you know, and then he actually came over and we figured it out together. And then we ran this session and it was just like 45 minutes. But for those five people on that team and for me, for that hour that we were together, that's all we were thinking about. And we stopped thinking about all the other stuff in the world. And I walked away from that being like, ⁓ my gosh, this is what I want to do. I want to give people this escape when they need it, but really the skills to be able to manage all the craziness that's happening around us. The resiliency, the adaptability. the being present of it all, all of those things, right? We weren't, for that hour, nobody was on their phones, nobody was checking their emails, everyone was deeply in this and everyone was playing together and laughing and crying and all the different things, all in one hour. And so that to me was the moment. I'll also say one thing, which is that I don't know that I can categorize my first experience with improv as a negative one. It was more just a, eh, one. Okay, yeah, right and I to this day I'm in touch with my friend who invited me to that Fred Bukumar and Fred I was like man you saw something and you like you saw something in me. Yeah. Yeah, right I also was still at a stage in my life where I cared a lot about what people thought of me that the judgment the judgmental part of my brain was in overdrive right like I'm a I'd only been in the United States for a couple of years at that point. I was still trying to figure out like my, my place in the world, right. Which is what college really is. But I had this, this thing, I was like a real fish out of water. I'd come from India. I was in the middle of Iowa. So was just like, I don't know if this is for me. And I think that if I had taken a class and not just showed up at a rehearsal, it would have been different. Right. But I just didn't have access to that at the time. So I think that's, that's what it is. And so when I. Now, what I noticed about that class that I did in 2016, that I led in 2016 is that I was teaching it. wasn't just making people do it. Right. And I was just, and I was teaching not improv comedy. I was teaching improv thinking. So it wasn't about like, how can you be funny? How can you be entertaining? It was how can you take the, the, the core tenants of improv and apply them to the work you're doing and to the life that you're leading right now. And that was the unlock for me. Wow. Yeah. That's so great. And I just want to speak. I want to get right into like some of the neuroscience, like you were kind of alluding to before. And then how that kind of, how you started to take these improv exercises, game scenes, and break them down into things that, you know, folks that don't necessarily identify themselves as improvisers can do. But I just had to say, you know, I have a, you know, to your point, we were talking about this, like caring a lot about what other people think. And I think. For me, similarly, I had this kind of perfectionism that I didn't, wasn't intentionally aware that improv was going to be this kind of therapeutic thing for me, but because of the nature of it not being something that's scripted, something that you can't perfect, and then just learning to kind of trust yourself to do things and then, know, course correct as necessary. That was hugely therapeutic for me and to this day. so, yeah, I think. Well, that quest for perfection comes from from kind of repeated feedback that we have received our entire lives, right? Which is that when you're in a classroom as a young child, if you raise your hand to answer a question and you answer it incorrectly, you are mocked and ridiculed by like the teacher saying, nope, that's wrong, by your peers thinking that you're not smart or your perception that they are thinking that. And so we are trained from a very young age to not... speak or do anything unless we know for sure that it's correct, right? Because you get a reward when it's correct and when it's incorrect, it is absolutely the worst moment of your life, right? So that creates a neural pathway that gets like really crystallized pretty early on. And then for the types of people who kind of feed into that, we just keep treading that same path. And we go like, okay, I'm not gonna show anyone this presentation until it's perfect until everything is lined up perfectly. And then we find ourselves going through what has historically been called analysis paralysis, right? Where we're just like, I can't do anything because I'm too focused on making sure that everything I do, I do it correctly. And so that's where that quest for perfectionism comes from. And what improv allows you to do is to celebrate the mistakes, right? As Bob Ross would say, those happy little accidents. You know, and he's from actually from my hometown. Is that right? Well, I even thought from I think he lived most of his life. Yeah, because you guys don't have the same hairstyle at all. far as I can tell. That is a joke for our visual listener. Yeah, It's a joke that I can make because both Derek and I share the same hairstyle, which is to say none at all. The choice. Yeah. So, know, so it's it's this. It's this constant quest to not make a mistake that tends to hold a lot of people back. And what improv allowed me to understand is that, ⁓ yeah, it's okay to mess up because if you mess up, actually it could reveal something even more interesting. It also exposed to me the idea that you need to be in a space where you can make mistakes, right? So. I'm very careful about the advice I give people around improv thinking and authenticity and being yourself because the truth is a lot of people a lot of times find themselves in an environment where they cannot be authentic. They cannot be themselves. They cannot afford to make mistakes because it's a high pressure, high stress environment. They're in the job that they cannot afford. to mess up on or lose. know, like I'm not telling a NASA scientist to just improvise on the space shuttle design, right? Yeah, right. But these skills can be super important in other aspects of the work that you're doing or other aspects of your life. And if you find yourself in a situation where you're like, ⁓ if I make a mistake, I'm going to get fired. Maybe it's time for you to question whether you should be in that place at all. Right. And so that's mostly what I what I talk about. Not to say that this is for all the time. You when we talk about flow state, I always say you want to be able to access your flow state when you need it. You don't want to live in your flow state all the time. Because we all know people who live in that flow state. It's like Salvador Dali, be like walking your anteater around and like, you walk around barefoot, you don't pay bills like, yeah, cool. But like some, you need to, you need to be able to do some of those things. So it's really about how do you unlock it? And that I think is what improv thinking can help you get to. That's great. I want to hear more about that, maybe about like the brain science around it and everything. know, I, know a little bit about being kind of like what John Cleese would talk about being like in the open mode or being in the closed mode. You know, so, so yeah, there's stuff that, you know, this is intriguing, I'm sure for a lot of people. And I love the way that you kind of like explain this, but yeah, like what's actually happening when we're doing certain exercises, what's changing in the brain and, it's, it's actually based on real science. Yeah. Yeah. And at speechless, we had the opportunity to work with a neuroscientist named Dr. Charles Lim, who has a lab at UCSF, the university of California and San Francisco. And he has been studying flow state in the brain for the better part of a decade now. Right. And the way that he has done it were the first round of the study that he did. he actually put jazz musicians and beatboxers, freestyle rappers into fMRI machines. So an fMRI machine is a functional magnetic resonance imaging machine, and it can be used to study the blood flow in your brain. More specifically, the movement of deoxygenated hemoglobin in your brain, right? So- Nice flex. Nice flex. I'm just using the long words that I've memorized. So what Dr. Lim- And then for the second round of this study, he actually, I've been in this fMRI machine so he could study my quote unquote brain. There have been other improvisational comedians. We actually partnered with Second City and we got some Second City folks in there. And what Dr. Lim has started to see is that when you're improvising and when you're improvising, whether you are an improvisational comedian, so verbally improvising, whether you're musically improvising, He actually created keyboards and microphones and earpieces that don't have any magnetic material in them. So no magnetic metals in them. So that he could have, and there's a great picture of someone laying in an FRMRI machine. I was going to ask. With a keyboard stick. Like a Casio. Yeah. And they're playing jazz piano, right? So that he can study what is going on. So musical improvisation, know, jazz musicians are clearly the best at doing that. Freestyle rapping, you you're given words and you're just creating bars on the fly. ⁓ And then we created some improv exercises that you could do verbally. So I lay in an fMRI machine and I had a headphone in my ear. I had a microphone in front of me and, you know, I was asked to improvise and then recite things that I'd memorized and then improvise and recite things I memorized. And so he was doing that to study which parts of your brain get more oxygenated blood flowing to it, which parts of your brain get activated when you're improvising versus when you're not improvising. And what he found is that there are two parts of your brain largely that get activated when you are communicating with people. One is called the medial prefrontal cortex, and the other is the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. And the medial prefrontal cortex is the part of your brain that houses your creativity and your background, you experience your memories, all of that lives in the medial prefrontal cortex. And the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex is the part of your brain that houses what we lovingly call your judging voice, right? Which is that voice that helps you kind of self monitor, right? It's the voice that says, don't walk into oncoming traffic. You'll get killed. Don't step off this cliff, you'll die, right? It's that voice. But it also tends to be the voice that says, Hey, don't ask that question in the meeting. People will think you're dumb. Don't wear that shirt. People will think you look stupid, right? It's the self-monitoring voice that unfortunately tends to be the dominant voice in our lives, especially when we're at work. It is the voice that says, don't take this risk. No, no, no, conform. Keep your head down, right? It's a survival voice. It's the voice that has evolved in our brain in order to make sure that we can continue to stay in the community. that we need to be in, right? Historically, as humans were evolving, we found communities, we built societies, and if you did something that ostracized you from the society or the community, you would get left behind and then you would die in the wilderness, right? So there is a part of our brain that goes, to survive, we have to just roll. Right, even if we know we could get another job or something like that, we still don't believe it on a deep level, right? It's like we're still getting pushed beyond the pale. It isn't the deep modal network of our brain. this is a survival voice, right? And what Dr. Lim found is that when you get into what we call the flow state, so when you're improvising and you get into that zone and you're just like all systems firing, two things happen at the same time. One is more blood starts to flow into the medial prefrontal cortex, but crucially, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex that self-monitoring voice that exists there gets muted. So less blood flow. Both of those cannot exist at the same volume is what he has found. We get so much blood. We wouldn't get so much blood. wouldn't get so much drink. So it's really interesting, right? Because that explains why when people feel like they're in the flow state, when they're in the zone, they are like, ⁓ my gosh. Like basketball players will say, the basket looks like it was as big as the ocean. I felt like I could throw the ball in easy, right? Writers will say, my writer's block just disappeared and I was just writing. And really what's happening is that your self monitoring is going down. Your self judging is going down and you're not second guessing the things that you're doing. Right. Right. That's not to say that you just need to get into flow state and you're to be able to shoot a ball like Steph Curry. It means that once you put in all that work, then you want to get to a place where You don't have to question, is this a good shot? You're simply trusting that your body's doing the right things, right? And it is, and it's working. And so that to me was this huge aha moment. I think to everyone who has watched his Ted Talk or seen his study is that it's possible for you to get into that flow state when you need to. A lot of people go, I've got writer's block and I just got to wait it out and hope that it goes away. Or I'm one of the people who goes, I'm most creative. for 11 o'clock at night. I don't know why, but if I need to do something creative and I try to do it at six o'clock in the evening, no. But if I do it at 11 o'clock at night, I'm there. And I think part of it is because the whole world is asleep and I don't feel judged. I don't feel like, you know, like any which way about it. And so I can just kind of like go into that flow state a lot easier. I've heard also another article I think that came out. kind of recently was saying around some creative work is better in the evenings as well because you're physically tired. So that element of like your ego kind of for, know, lack of another word, it's just kind of worn down and it's like, oh, it's like, it's tired. It's been doing its job all day, keeping you alive. And like now it's like shut down and like now the creative trials can come out and you know. That's exactly it, right? And then what we recognized is that there are certain improv exercises that can allow you to more quickly get into that, into that flow state. And so that becomes really interesting because then you go, okay, so this is not like a magical thing that just happens. It's not something that only certain people can do. It's actually something that you can learn and practice and get better at so that when you need to, you can go into it. And like the most, I always, when I, when I start my warmups with with folks that I'm coaching or workshops that I'm running, I always say, we're gonna start with this exercise. And it's an exercise that I developed, I invented it. And it's considered to the fastest way to get into that flow state or calm the vagus nerve, which needs to be calmed in order for you to feel relaxed. It's called deep breathing. I don't know if you've ever heard of this. Deep breathing is, yeah, exactly. Deep breathing is. So clinically, clinical studies show that it is the fastest way to kind of to relax that vagus nerve and start the journey into that flow state. Right. So things like that, when people start to learn about that and then are able to develop a habit around it, it allows them to get into that flow state faster. There are improv thinking games that we do and what we were able to do at Speechless and with the work that I'm doing right now is really about taking those games and adapting them to the professional environment. So that you're not simply playing whose line is it anyway games just for the sake of it. And then being like, ⁓ yeah, guess, well, maybe I can adapt. can do this in my work. But rather, we've already done that work for you. So we can play a game and then I can say, great. Now let's talk about how it made you feel, what was easy, what was difficult about it. And also how you think you can use this in the work that you're doing, right? So for a salesperson, We don't want them to just say yes to everything the client says because product people get really angry when salespeople just say yes to everything. And now I got to build this thing that you just promised. But rather, how can we use that skill for you as a salesperson to deeply listen to what the client is saying, remember, and then put that into the pitch that you're about to give the client and not just what every salesperson tends to do, which is ask the questions, the discovery questions that they need to ask. And then whatever answers the clients give, they go, cool. Well, here's the deck I put together. Three weeks ago, it has nothing to do with any of that. And we're just going to go, right? So a lot of the work now is around how can we take those and adapt it to the specific audiences that we are working with? And that's it starts to get super interesting in the professional realm. Yeah, because it seems like, well, at least my experience of it was, you know, having led some of these workshops with you is like, you have to meet these people where they're at, right? You know, lot of these people had the kind of maybe never had a brush with any kind of improv or just saw it and didn't have like that, you know, I want to do this. It looks really scary. I don't want to, you know, I don't want to jump in there. And so to find that way where it's like, I'm not doing a full on scene. I'm not having to be entertaining. You know, it's like, you're kind of sneaking around the back door as it were to kind of help people be like, ⁓ actually I do have the ability to come up with some stuff or I do have the ability to just like. listen in a different kind of way, you know, and more embodied kind of way. So, well, this is great. I mean, I think this leads naturally into maybe we, you lead us through something and we can maybe, you know, Oh yeah. Let's play an improv game. Let's play an improv game. We'll do a quick one. This is a, this is a game we developed called remember when it's not rocket science. is, it is based on the foundational philosophy of improv, the idea of yes. And right. And yes. in its purest form means I'm going to accept the universe that is presented to me by my scene partner and I'm going to build on that idea. And so it is so I should say quickly, yes and is a phrase that everyone has heard and a lot of people misuse, especially in the corporate environment. Yeah. How does that happen? ⁓ So a lot of people, know, because I'll ask people like How do you think this is applicable in the work? And people sometimes will say, ⁓ yeah, it's a great way to say no to someone. And I'm like, ⁓ yeah, to go on, let's say more. And they're like, yeah, when someone has a really bad idea, you can just say yes, because they like to hear that. And then you can say, maybe we'll try something different. That's not what yes, that's not in the spirit of yes and. Let's play the game and then we can debrief it. bit, right? So the way that I like to do this, I like to play this game is using this concept of remember when where Derek, you and I are going to recount an amazing trip we took together. But the key is we are not going to talk about a place we've actually traveled to together because we've traveled to a couple of places together. We're not going to pick any of those locations. We are going to pick a random location. And the way we're going to do it is, Derek, you're going to kick us off. You're going to say, Vivek, remember when we went to and you can pick a random location. My role is to respond to you with an enthusiastic yes and, and then finish my sentence based on what you just said. And then you will say yes and, and build on what I just said. And we'll just kind of go back and forth for a little bit, like 30 seconds or so. And we'll create this memory together. Sound good? All right. I'm excited. So, so, and I'm going to dare you, Derek, as you're doing this, just say yes and before you know how you're going to end your sentence. Don't overthink it, you're just gonna roll into it and say yes and and get into it. Let's do a quick warmup before we do it. Can we just do a quick shake out? Let's just do a quick shake shake it out, yeah. I'm sitting here, are you sitting or standing? I'm standing, I'm standing. Once again this for the visual audience. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We'll up and puff real loud for the listeners. Yeah, yeah, what we're gonna do is we're gonna just shake each of our limbs individually. First for a count of eight, then for a count of four, then for a count of two, then for a count of one. Gonna start with our right hand, we're gonna count out loud together. Derek, let's go. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. Four, one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, one, two, one, one, two, one, one, two, one, two, one, one, one, one, one. All right, cool, great. I'm warm, I'm all warm now. An important thing about warmups really quickly, when you're doing deep breathing, when you're doing a shakeout, anything like that, super important to make the warmup specific and intentional. So we're not just kind of like shaking our whole body. We're actually counting as we flick our hands and our feet. When you're deep breathing, inhale for a count of four, exhale for a count of six. By doing that, you're forcing your mind and your body to align and you're tuning your instrument. and counting and doing those things, make sure that you're not thinking about something else while you're doing it. You're actually starting to feel really present. And that's really important. I could talk about warmups just for an hour and how what it's doing to our brain and why we feel the way we feel when we're public speaking and why we get nervous and all those things. But I'll pause on that. Let's do remember when. Okay. And you're going to kick us off. So Derek, go ahead. Okay. Hey, Vivek, remember that time we went to that market in Morocco? Yes, and I really wanted us to find a magic lamp. Yes, and you were going to all the stalls at this night market and you were just like, where's the, where's the lamps? I don't see any lamps. I see all this food, but no lamps. Yes. And the person, every stall owner kept saying, this is a food market. We don't sell lamps, but I persisted and we found that one store that had all those weird antiquities in it. Yes, I remember it was kind of in the corner was like a darkened corner and there was one really scary guy with an eye patch and a monkey on his shoulder. Yes, and we talked to him, but the monkey responded and said that there was a lamp in the back room and that we just had to follow them into the back room. Yes, I mean, and more shocking than the monkey being able to speak was the fact that he spoke in perfect English, which I didn't expect at all. Yes, and it turned out he was trained at Oxford. Yes, and then so he, you know, we were we were very trusting at that because we just wanted to hear a language that we recognized. So we followed him immediately. Yes. And then it turns out they also didn't have lamps. He sold us lamb, a lamb kebab. All right. All right. That's a scene. So, yeah, Derek, how did it feel? How did it feel to do that? felt like old times, man. It like old times and it felt great. Yeah, I think like I'm always scared even after having done, you know, improv myself for many years and things. Every time it's a bit scary because you, you know, you never fully trust it and like you don't know where the story's gonna go, right? And so you're like, am I gonna be able to adapt to it? So there's always a bit of like elevated heart rate and all that kind of stuff. But that's kind of what makes it fun and kind of, yeah, dangerous. Yeah, yeah. So when I debrief this at, when I debrief this when I'm doing a corporate workshop or something like that, I always ask people, know, what felt easy, what felt difficult? And what's interesting is that a lot of times people will say, I found it really easy because I didn't have to think about anything. I could just roll with it. Some people say, I found it really difficult because I wanted to make sure that whatever I said made sense. And that is something that I've found in a lot of people. We're trying to support the other person. So we don't want to make it crazy because we're like, Oh God, this is going to like, um, well, it turns out that if you do make it crazy and the monkey starts talking, is kind of more fun, right? It doesn't have to make sense. never said in the beginning, Oh, and by the way, this has to make sense, right? It doesn't have to. What it does allow you to do, especially when you start saying yes. And before you know what you're going to say next, when you allow yourself for the fantastical to happen. is that it slowly starts to shut down that dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex. Like, ⁓ if the monkey can talk, then anything's possible. ⁓ I don't have to like overanalyze this. I can just like roll with this, right? And then when I say, well, how is this useful in the work that you do? People go, I don't know, I guess brainstorming, right? And that's true. It's a great tool for brainstorming. It is not a great tool necessarily for for actually making decisions around innovation, right? Because you do this and suddenly everyone's trying to invent talking monkeys, right? What it does do though is because it forces you to use that medial prefrontal cortex, you are now unlocking that part of your brain that you can use it really effectively when you are innovating or when you're actually brainstorming for things that you could actually do at your company, right? So I always tell people, If you're doing a brainstorming session, time box five minutes at the beginning where you can just yes and each other and you can come up with crazy ideas and you can riff on it and you can come up with whatever and then say, okay, now what's the problem we're trying to solve? Because at that point, now you have access to this whole part of your brain that was shut down when you walked into this meeting because you want to make sure that you didn't mess up and that you gave the right answer and you did all the right things. Right? So that to me, is a very exciting unlock that happens when people do this exercise. The other thing is it forces you to actually listen to what the person is saying. often in our lives, we are simply waiting for a person to stop talking so that we can say what we want to say. And as a result, we don't truly deeply listen to what they are saying. We're just waiting. We're like, oh my God, I can't wait for them to finish talking because I've got an amazing talking monkey story. Right. And so that to me is this like ancillary benefit that you get from this. You're like, ⁓ I actually had to listen to this. And that was interesting. Like actually having to listen and giving up control of the narrative. That's the last thing. Like salespeople have a really tough time. These leaders have a really tough time with this. They don't want the conversation to go anywhere it goes because they're like, no, no, no, I have to control this narrative. We have to get from point A to point B. And so sometimes that's true. But a lot of times what that does is it shuts down the portion that you're speaking with. Cause they go, ⁓ yeah. You know, it's really interesting because I used to have this other piece of software that could do this, this and this. And you're like, ⁓ God, I know where this is going. I want to shut that down. You go, right, right, right. But let's talk about this. And now your client is going to feel not heard and not listened to. And so this allows you to continue to have that conversation and build into that, give up control of the narrative and have faith. that that journey will get you someplace that is useful, right? And can be acted upon. A great example of this is a case study that Airbnb has called the 11 Star Experience, where they actually used a tool like this to figure out what their next great product line was going to be early on in Airbnb days. Early on they said, okay, we have this product, this Airbnb product, you can go and you can rent a space from someone and you can stay there. What does a five-star experience look like? Well, you get to the house and the key is where it's supposed to be and the house is clean. You're like, great. What's a six-star experience? Well, all of that is true. And there's coffee boiling. Or what's a seven-star experience? There's a mint on the pillow or whatever, right? And we kept going and at some point, just like in our story, some point what happened is someone said something absurd and then it ramped up. They just kept building on it. Right? So by the time they got to the 25-star experience, it was... A private jet flies you to San Francisco, a limo takes you to a space shuttle launch site, you go, you spend a week on Mars. That was the 25th. But they did this exercise, then they sat back and they said, all right, what was the 11 star experience? Well, the 11 star experience was you get to a house, it's clean, the keys were supposed to be, there's coffee brewing, there's a mint on the pillow, all these wonderful things. And there's a note from the host that says, I saw on your profile that you enjoy surfing. Here is a map of all the local surf spots and a freshly waxed surfboard. And they were like, well, that's interesting. And so that's how they came up with the idea for Airbnb experiences, right? It's a great tool to open up that part of your brain and become more creative and lean on your past experiences and memories in order to help solve a problem. But also in that process can unearth these nuggets of gold that you can actually use and act. So that's, that's a big thing. And then the last thing I love to do with this exercise is that I ask people to go into their, their AI platform of choice and put in a two word description of this amazing vacation and generate a postcard. I'm going to do that right now. And then you can superimpose it onto your, onto the video. it in the video. We'll put it in the show notes. You can see our monkey adventure. So, so what is the, what's our, what's the, the, the prompt for our postcard? Cause I'm going to say generate a postcard. for a trip to a Moroccan night market with a talking monkey. Yep. And a man with an eye patch. And a man with an eye patch serving lamb kebabs. I love that exercise. It's so great. It's so immediate and it gets you... Part of it is just like the silliness of it, right? Is that it immediately kind of takes you into this weird place because it's very unusual that you do that exercise and it ends up being very boring. You like, know, it always goes into like the stratosphere. Like if you give anyone more than like two minutes to go into that thing. And, and I think one of the things about like creativity, which, which I think a lot of people struggle with when they're trying to make something creative is that they're, they're kind of, I feel this too. if I'm making music is to kind of edit while I'm making something and that kind of like, you cause you're hoping to just be like, I'm making it perfect as I go along and I'm changing little things, it's like separating that editor from, the creative source of it. And it's like, you know, in that instance there with Airbnb, you know, and going to 25 stars is like, you're taking it to this no edit, no judgment zone. Right. And then you're kind of seeing, well, once you've just kind of blurfed out all this absolute ridiculous stuff, someone may have said something like useful, right? And then you can kind of drill into that, but you're not editing and like judging it along the way. Exactly. And it's such a tough thing to do. And it's only something that you can truly do if you're in a space where you feel safe to make those mistakes, to show things that are not fully complete, to be vulnerable, right? And that I think is the important lesson here. And I know because... Early on, I remember I was coaching people and teaching people to be themselves and be heard and amplify their voice and find the courage to speak up. And I quickly realized that if you don't, if you teach people how to speak up, but don't teach people around them how to listen, then you're creating more problems for the person because then they get branded the squeaky wheel or, you know, not a culture fit as a good, as a big one in the Bay area. Right. Like, ⁓ you're questioning me. That's not a good culture fit. Right. I think it's super important for us to remember public speaking has been coached and taught for, you know, a long time, right? Decades and decades. And it has traditionally been rooted in, in a white kind of patriarchal structure, which is how do you dominate the space that you're in? How do you make people listen to you? How do you just like capture the audience, own the room? It's all these things around possession, right? I like to think about the coaching. from the perspective of, from the improv perspective, which is a lot more about having a conversation. And having a conversation requires that both sides are actually listening to each other and talking and going back and forth and building on the conversation on each other's ideas. And when you do that, it allows you pretty quickly, even as a person speaking to a group of people, to feel comfortable in order to be more vulnerable and your confidence level goes up. The more authentic you are, the more confident you actually become because your brain goes, oh, we're talking about us? Yeah, I can talk about that all day. I feel good about that. Well, this was fantastic, Vivek. Is there any kind of like parting thoughts you have around this? Is there anything else that you feel like we'd like to cover? Well, I think the big thing for me is, and this is in all the work that I do and I run workshops, I do one-on-one coaching for executives on public speaking and presentation. But I run a lot of workshops around authenticity and the idea that if you are able to be your authentic self and bring your authentic self into the work that you do, it is not just better for you, it's also actually better for your team, better for the company you're working with. It works on so many different levels. And the thing that I want people to take away from the work is that you are here because of your past experiences and your life. and everything you've gone through and not despite it. There are a lot of people who are like, man, I'm here despite all of the stuff I've had to go Against all odds, yeah. Against all odds. And as a result, they hide that side of themselves. And when you do that, your brain has to do all this extra work to be someone else or to be this version of yourself that you think is the right version to be an adult in this world. And as a result, we don't play, right? We are told playing is for kids, not for adults. Well, it turns out when you play, all of these wonderful things happen. This part of your brain lights up. You're able to find joy in the work that you're doing. We have told too many people to do what they love, and we haven't taught enough people how to learn to love what they do. And the first step in loving what you do is to allow yourself to be fully present in the work that you're doing. So you have to be authentic, and you're there. The way that you can be authentic is to embrace your past experiences and say, listen, the reason I'm the person here talking about this is because of the fact that I grew up in different countries, because of the fact that I've had careers in fundraising and tech sales and software development, because I've said yes to opportunities that have presented themselves to me. And when you do that, you recognize, ⁓ I'm here because of all those things, not despite them. So let me bring those all to bear. And when you do that, the people you're working with start to see you as a full human being and not just as your job title. And they want to help you succeed and they want to collaborate with you. It unlocks so many beautiful things. And so that's my big thing is remember you're here because of your experiences, not despite them. I love that. That's so great. Yeah. Lead with that authenticity. Well, fantastic. Well, thank you so much, Vivek. This was really super, it's always fun, you know, when we get a chance to be in a room together and play some improv games. And I've missed that quite a lot. like I said, we could, we could have, I could talk about each of these little things for two hours. We could have played games for two hours. So anytime, anytime you need it, call me and we can do that. And man, I can't wait for you to see this postcard. It looks so great. There we go. There you go, folks. There's the little teaser that we were looking for. Well, fabulous. Well, maybe we'll have you back on for a volume two at some point and you can... Sounds perfect. some more games. Alright. Alright. Thanks again, Mame.