Earlier tonight at my improvisational comedy class I was struck with the idea of how much coaching and improv comedy have in common. Being both a Success Coach/NLP practitioner and an improv student, I couldn’t help but notice some pretty significant similarities between the two activities. For those unfamiliar with improv comedy, it is a form of group comedy popularized by the TV show “Who’s Line is it Anyway?”. It is entirely unscripted yet not without rules and guidelines. Improv places emphasis on one’s ability to react effectively in real time and work with others to accomplish a task, which in the case of comedy is to make people laugh. What stands out to me is how certain key themes of improv comedy actually fit in quite well with what I believe to be a effective coaching philosophy. Now before you click off elsewhere thinking I’ve lost my marbles, take a look below at some of key attributes that I believe good coaches and improv comedians share in common. The bold headings below are some of the actual course outline topics taken from my syllabus for Improv 1. What’s my contribution? My perceptive genius 
lies in seeing a greater significance to how these same concepts also relate to coaching and to helping my clients achieve their goals.
Listening
In improv a huge emphasis is placed upon paying attention to what is going on in the scene. It’s hard to contribute effectively when you don’t know what is taking place around you. You simply can’t anticipate what the other players in the scene are going to say or do, as that is one of the surest ways to screw up. Presupposing you know their intentions, you begin to formulate a response before they act. When they act differently than what you expected, you are hopelessly lost and unable to contribute to the scene because you stuck yourself with one preprogrammed response that didn’t fit the situation. So it is with coaching. Without listening to a client, it is absolutely impossible to help them in any meaningful way. Presupposing that you know what their problems are or what they “should” do prior to hearing them out will not do your client any good, and is also one of the best known ways to avoid encore performances. It is only by becoming fully engaged in the scene that is the client’s thought processes and environmental landscape that coaches can generate effective responses to real time situations.
Accepting offers…don’t block
In improv, a cornerstone of the training is learning to accept the “offers” your fellow actors give you. If you are in a scene and are told that you are a chicken, well…you’d better start clucking and act like you enjoy it. If you’re setting up a scene thinking of one physical location but the next person to appear onstage plays it out that you are somewhere else, you just have to roll with it. Scenes are built upon mutual acceptance of ideas and themes. Declining offers, or “blocks” as they are known, create dissonance and can often throw a scene into a state of confusion.
An important cornerstone of my coaching philosophy is that I am not there to tell the client what is “right” or “wrong” for them. That is their decision to be made in accordance with their own values. My role is to help clarify the process for them and to help them remove any potential “blocks’ that can prevent them from accomplishing their goals. I also help them to consider what effects their desired outcomes will have on the greater landscape of their lives and the lives of others around them. My role is to help them build their desired outcomes into their lives by acceptance of their offers. A client’s “offer” to me is their statement of what they would like to accomplish, and my role is to support them in a way that will help bring that scene into the reality of their life.
Energy, Commitment, and Attack
Confidence is a huge part of improv. Play a scene timid and weak and the audience will quickly sniff it out and grow bored with it. When a scene begins to go downhill due to a lack of confidence often there is no successful recovery. In improv, you have to play out each scene like you mean it, even if you have absolutely no clue what you are doing. The key idea is that audiences love commitment, and will often “buy” what you are trying to covey even if you have no clue what you are actually supposed to be doing. So it is in life. When a client fully internalizes a goal because it is something that motivates them and they have been helped to remove any limiting beliefs and destructive patterns of behavior, they will often attack their goals with energy and commitment, much like an improv comedian acting onstage. This energy and commitment is perceived by others in their real life environment as confidence, and often helps pave the way to better results in their lives than acting timid or weak. Just as it is onstage, people can and do pick up on your commitment level and often give you only as much credibility as you are willing to endow yourself with.
Coaching and improvisational comedy share some important concepts and guidelines. An important life skill is the ability to relate effectively to others in real time in the context in which the interaction takes place. This is true in improv, and it is true in coaching. The job of a good coach is to keep the client’s mind focused on the present, to be a good listener, and to help the client develop his/her own internalized sense of energy and commitment toward their goals.
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