Responding to Change: Move Forward by Looking Backward

Quick question: When change hits you, do you look to the present, the future, or the past?

 

The most obvious approach is to look at the immediate: “what can we do right now to adapt to this change?” 

 

Sometimes that yields an obvious answer. When it doesn’t, the next logical place is to look to the future: “How can we use this change to move to a newer, better future?” This is a powerful perspective and I recommend and talk about this quite a bit.

 

I am not going to talk about that here. Instead, I am going to offer a third perspective: look backward.

 

Before I explore that idea, a quick word about the simple but powerful improv comedy idea, “justification.”

 

Justification is the technique of explaining exactly why you made whatever random offer you make. If you justify effectively, you can say or do almost anything, and do it to great effect.

 

Put in other terms, the idea of justification is to make the interruption (change) meaningful, and to use it to help drive things forward.

 

As with dealing with change, the first two ways of justifying a random offer are to A) find an immediate justification that makes sense or B) create a justification that only drives things into the future.

 

The third way to justify is to look backward. If you can connect the new offer with something you established earlier, it not only tightens up the escene/story but can also add depth and lead to a new direction for the scene.

 

Off-stage, when dealing with change, you can apply this same perspective. Rather than leaping forward, take a look back.

 

What are some things you have done in the past that you could bring forward now and use to respond to the change?

 

For example, I am a professional speaker who is very interactive and uses a lot of humor. It’s very much an in-person experience. When the world shut down due to COVID-19, my business slowed waaaaaaay down. The immediate, obvious response was to figure out how to adapt what I do to virtual (I did! Click here to see more about that)

 

But then I also looked back. What are some things I have considered, pursued, tried, etc. in the past that maybe got left by the wayside?

 

It didn’t take long for me to realize that the main thing I had let drift away was pure comedy performance. I started out just performing improv. I loved it, and still do.

 

As I transitioned to speaking, the focus on performance dropped and the focus on the speaking/content side of things went up. I was still doing improv and having fun, but it wasn’t the focus.

 

With this current change, it gave me a chance to look backwards instead of forwards and say, “hey! This is a good opportunity to bring back something I used to do and still love.”

 

Since that realization, I have increased the amount of straight improv I do, I have developed plans for a new show/offering coming in the near future, been developing new elements to my speaking and training programs that have more performance, and I have even launched a virtual improv comedy class.

 

None of these are brand new ideas. They are just things in my past that I am revisiting to respond to this change as best I can.

 

How about you? What are your:

• Past goals?
• Past projects?
• Interests you stopped exploring?
• Relationships you let drift?
• Random ideas that kicked around your head that you never pursued?

 

Revisit them, and you just may find an answer to the question, “how do I come out of this situation in a better place then when it started?”
This post discusses just a section of a longer Facebook Live I did in my Motivational Improv Group – to watch the full video, complete with an improv comedy example, join the group here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/MotivationalImprov