This little story illustrates a crucial aspect about communication: In a nutshell, the process is simple. There is someone, referred to as the sender, who intends to transmit a message. Then there is a recipient, whose task it is to decode the information (s)he receives. If successful, the result is mutual understanding between the two (or more) parties. In the parable, the animal knows “The bear has a hit list and I am on it”.

This is largely what we learn from our parents, in schools and universities. We learn to use words to express ourselves. We learn the grammar, spelling and often even several languages to be able to speak to each other, to read and write and so forth. At last, it is communication that allows us to make sense of the world we live in.

Simultaneously, this is also where the challenges and problems lie. Communication is so inherent and central to human life that people often overlook its relevance and complexity. Therefore, miscommunication lies at the root of many problems we encounter in personal and professional settings. These problems form beyond the surface of a message being transferred, heard and understood.

Here are three reasons why communication is often unsuccessful:

1. Communication is more than transfer of issue-related information. Two thirds of what is being exchanged in a conversation is non-verbal. We use visual and acoustic channels and communicate constantly through our appearance, body language and voice. This includes means such as gestures, posture, facial expressions, voice tone, speed and volume.
Our bodies generate, read and understand this information subconsciously and react accordingly. Thus, knowledge about the meaning and application of non-verbal communication elements can help us to align our messages with our intentions and to understand the true thoughts and feelings of others better.

In the parable: Could the animals have read in the non-verbal elements of the bear’s message that there was room for negotiation?

2. Some of the key situations and challenges that can heavily influence our success in life, depend on our communication skills. It is the ability to communicate confidently, authentically and positively that is required if we want to succeed in an job interview, in small-talk situations when we try to make friends and connections, when we introduce ourselves to a prospective landlord, future parents in law or when we are on a first date. We might also intend to negotiate a higher salary or buy and sell products or services. The mastery of communication skills takes conscious effort and practical exercise for most of us, which only plays a minor role in schools and universities to date. Therefore we stay unable to reach our potential. The reality is even closer to the contrary in light of surveys revealing that one of people’s biggest fears is public speaking.

In the parable: Could there have been a better approach of communication when the  animals went to the bear by which, as a result, the roe buck and the wild boar might have still been alive?

3. We all have different value systems and beliefs through which we see and understand the world. These value systems are inherent in our communication and make sense to ourselves. Unfortunately we often fail to bring these across to our conversation partners. We focus on “facts” that are aligned with our personal belief system and fail to connect with the value systems of others when we communicate. This is true for men who say they will never understand women (and vice versa), for managers and their staff who are permanently frustrated and opposing each other and even for religious leaders who claim to know the truth. In each of these examples, empathic, open-minded communication between the parties, guided by the principles of tolerance, equality and respect, would be the answer. This way of communicating requires more effort and time, since we have to ask questions and listen to our counterpart. The alternatives though, if the communication stays shallow, are permanent arguments and frustration in romantic relationships, burn out syndromes and dismissals at work or hate speech and war against an “enemy” we simply fail to understand.

How often do we leave a conversation wondering what the other person actually meant by
what (s)he said, just like the animals have left the bear without inquiring the context around the hit list?

Throughout our lives as social beings, we are interconnected with others in countless ways. Other people are our best resources, as it is usually them who can open or close doors for us. When we start to consider these points and realize that the systematic and conscious use of communication skills can help us to build better connections, reach our personal goals and therefore live a happier life, then this is where the art of communication starts.

Communication works for those who work at it – John Powell

Playing Mantis has launched a new workshop on ‘The Art of Successful Communication’. The first one will specialize on communication in the business context and is for sales people, customer care personnel, consultants and anyone who interacts with customers on a regular basis and intends to improve his customer relations.

Click here to read more about the workshop.

Structure: If a learning experience is structured so that a participant is provoked, acknowledged, trained, challenged, allowed to reflect and rewarded, s/he is more likely to accept and internalise the learning than when s/he is simply expected to accept information poured over him/her. This is true even if the information itself is of excellent quality and the speaker is exceptionally persuasive.

Participation: Most teachers/trainers know the Confucius saying: “Tell me and I forget, show me and I may remember, involve me and I will understand”. Participation and experience is more powerful than show and tell. However, participation can only occur when an atmosphere is created where participants can immerse themselves in the experience, feel safe to make mistakes, share control over their learning, see their contributions are incorporated, share the vision and are having fun at the same time.

• A Show is when an experience is designed for change, but non participative - people may marvel at the incredible material and it’s potential, but are unable to apply it in their individual contexts.
• A Game is not designed for transformation, yet very participative – everyone may have a lot of fun, but be left with a ‘so what’ feeling unable to grasp the significance of the experience.
• A Lecture is when an experience is neither structured for transformation, nor participatory – it may leave the participants cold and the trainer feeling disillusioned and ineffective.
• A Change Experience is both designed for change and participative – there is maximum potential for understanding the material as well as the ability to apply it in their own contexts.

At Playing Mantis we now have 7 elements of structure and 5 ingredients for participation that we look for in processes designed for sustainable impact. As we refine our work these numbers may change since we discover new depths to both these elements of structure and participation every day in our work.

What follows is a list of the elements of structure and participation along with questions to help you assess the transformational power of your own work. Alternatively, you can contact us and invite us to your next presentation. We will swap training for an assessment depending on the scale of your workshop/intervention.

Structured for transformation

These criteria come from the world of theatre and story. Through the ages, stories and their enactment for people have followed certain patterns and conventions. All the great theatre makers and story tellers across time have known what elements to weave into their stories to impact the lives of their listeners. Surely if you weave these same elements into the design of your process you can achieve the same result? Note that there is a certain chronology to these elements, but the order is not set in stone. Yet, if you want to break the sequence make sure you know why you are doing it. Also, depending on the specific function and length of your process, all elements may not be present. We maintain though, that even the shortest of presentations can make room for all these elements in one way or another.

1. The Call to Adventure – Provoke and inspire dreams. Do you understand the context of your participants well enough so that you know what they desire? Do you provoke and inspire their interest and invite them to dream?
2. Debate – Acknowledging doubts. Do you allow participants to express their doubts and reservations about your content? Do you acknowledge possible resistance or anxiety? Do you have structures that defuse these without oppressing them?
3. Meeting the mentor – Training knowledge and skill. Do you give them good information and skills to master that which you are teaching? Do you realise that this part of the cycle is just one among 7, or do you content dump for 90% of the time you have with your audience?
4. Tests and trials – Challenging knowledge and skill. Do you give well prepared challenges that help sharpen their ability to understand and use what you are teaching? Do you challenge them in teams and individually to ensure holistic integration of knowledge and skill?
5. Pause and intimacy – Reflecting on the bigger picture. Do you allow moments of quiet reflection to help participants internalise the learning? Do you use both individual reflection and small group reflection strategies for maximum internalisation?
6. Reward – Rewarding commitment. Do you reward people for stretching themselves? Do you appreciate their efforts?
7. The return – Supporting implementation. Do you provide follow-up support for participants trying to apply their learning in their ordinary lives?

Designed for participation

Improvisation actors do not wait for someone to give them a script before they act. They do not look to each other to take the first step. Improvisation actors act and make up the words as they go along. They participate as soon as they understand what is needed. They respect each other’s contributions, use all the offers they can, make each other look good and cause the audience to like what they see. Clearly these guys know how to inspire each others’ participation and they know how to participate so that the product is of good value. What are their secrets?

1. Presence and awareness: Are you present and aware of your own thoughts and feelings as you facilitate? Are you also listening and paying attention to those of your participants, or are you mainly thinking of the content you are presenting? Do you structure activities so that participants need to listen to each other?
2. Safety and acceptance: Are you able to create the feeling of safety so that participants feel able to take part? Do you accept their mistakes as well as your own? How do you create trust so that participants feel they can take creative risks?
3. Giving and taking control: Do you allow interaction? Do you give some of the responsibilities of facilitation away to others? Are you able to check your ego at the door and accept your audience as equals even when they are younger than you or from a different class/race or gender? Do your activities help them to connect with each other as equals?
4. Accepting contributions: Do you structure your facilitation so that people can contribute their ideas? Do you then use and incorporate these ideas? How do you ensure that all voices are heard and acknowledged? Do you appreciate the gifts of contribution in whatever form they appear?
5. Intent and simplicity: Are you clear about your intentions for every part of the workshop? Are you able to maintain that focus in spite of all the contributions and idea sharing? Are you good at reincorporating ideas to follow the shared vision?

Our offer stands: invite us to attend your presentation or workshop for free and we will give you an assessment as to the transformational power of your work using the criteria discussed here. Contact Petro at petro@playingmantis.net or Burgert at burgert@playingmantis.net .

The world of work is characterised by high levels of uncertainty due to constant change, forcing organisations to innovate recurrently in order to survive. Researchers agree that working as part of a team plays a very important role in the process of innovation within organisations, as teams stimulate creativity and innovation. The development of Team Innovation is therefore crucial to help organisations to adapt faster to the demands of change. This emphasis on team innovation is very prevalent in value statements and guiding principles of many organisations.

Having teamwork and innovation as values laminated on your wall is however not going to improve your team’s ability to work more creatively together. Having people work in teams and expecting them to therefore automatically be more innovative, often has the opposite effect. Individuals become in many cases less innovative when they work in a team. The reason for this is the nature of the team’s climate. Team climate refers to the shared perceptions of team members in terms of what is expected of them, work standards, recognition and their feelings about their manager and one another.

The following table shows the characteristics of an innovative team climate in contrast to a non innovative team climate.

So is your team’s climate innovative or non-innovative?  And if it is non-innovative, how can one change it to become innovative?

This was the question that I grappled with when I was doing my Masters research in Industrial Psychology. I looked for teams who succeeded in working together in a team, very creatively under high pressure and much uncertainty, to see what I could learn from them. I found such teams in a place very out of the ordinary, namely Improvisational Theatre. Improv theatre groups work together very creatively under the pressure of a demanding audience and the uncertainty of having no script. How could these people do something so daunting that most people would rather die than do? And this may also be exactly the reason why most teams tend to be more non-innovative that innovative – it is because being creative is scary. It is making yourself vulnerable in front of others. Yet, somehow improvisers have found a way to make it safe and to create a team climate in which creativity can thrive. Improvisers do this by applying a few basic principles of which I will share two in this article.  These are 1) appreciation and 2) building on ideas or in Improvisation lingo … as 1) “make your partner look good” and 2) “yes and”.

In her book, “Time to think”, Nancy Kline emphasizes the importance of appreciation to create a thinking environment. This appreciation of another’s idea is described in Improv by the phrase “Make your partner look good”. It means that when a fellow player makes an offer you make him/her look good by accepting it with enthusiasm. This relates in an organizational context that whatever idea your team members share, you don’t make them feel foolish for sharing it.  You regard their offer as a gift of great value. When team members start appreciating each other’s ideas by focusing on the value of the idea instead of criticising it and looking for reasons why it won’t work it builds trust amongst the members and people start feeling safe to share their ideas.

It doesn’t stop with appreciating ideas however. After you appreciated your team member’s idea, build on it. Actors in an Improvisation theatre group call this acceptance and building on ideas the “yes and” principle. When an idea is not accepted, it is called a “block”. The way we often block one another in real life is by saying “yes but”. Most people are more used to saying “yes but” than “yes and”. Every time someone shares an idea and it is blocked by another team member, the likelihood that the person will share another idea is diminished. Therefore to create an atmosphere that promotes idea sharing, start applying the “yes and” principle.

The “yes and“ principle is more a mindset than anything else. In her TED talk entitled “Improv not just for comedy anymore”, Cat Koppet states that applying “yes and” doesn’t mean that you agree with everyone, but rather that you accept others reality. It is a mindset of accepting a situation and doing something useful with it. Kline notes that the human mind works best in the presence of a whole picture of reality. This contains positive and negative aspects. Most of the time there are more positives than negatives in the complete picture of a situation. Carol Painter, the developer of the Negative Reality Norm Theory, states that according to society a realistic picture of reality is more negative than positive.  Being positive is regarded as naïve and vulnerable. Whereas being critical is informed and sophisticated. Therefore most organizations function on this negative norm, resulting in the pervasiveness of “yes butting” and team climates that stifle innovation.

Right now you might think “yes, but I can’t say yes to all ideas all the time”.  Yes and you might be saying this because you are already in a mindset of “blocking” rather than “accepting”. It is true there are appropriate times to block, but they are far less than appropriate times to accept. Try the “yes and” principle for a day and see what happens.

Click here for an exercise to introduce the “yes and“ principle to your team.

I recently attended one of the Playing Mantis workshops held by Burgert. The concept of improvisation being applied as a tool for learning was totally new to me and I was very curious to see what it was all about.
The workshop was a great success in my opinion. A fresh approach to the practice of personal and team development: Joyful and exciting, but at the same time instructive. The exercises were simple in their execution, yet led directly to reflections and revealed some rather surprising insights. As a psychologist I believed that I already knew quite a bit about some of the topics and ideas touched upon by the workshop. Amazingly, afterwards I found myself continuously reflecting on these exercises and the new thoughts they brought up, even to this day.
This led me to ponder some questions with regards to the underlying neuropsychological processes of learning. What happens in our brain that makes us learn so easily in an improvisational setting and why does it bring about such an outstanding effect? To understand this, I would like to shortly outline some facts about learning as well as some of the findings of current research.

What is learning?

If we talk about learning, we usually refer to the act, process or experience of gaining knowledge or skill. Psychologists often define it as acquiring of modifying patterns of behaviour or cognition, usually after practicing or experiencing something.

How do we learn?

Firstly, we need to know that our brains will experience lifelong physical diversification and development as a result of learning.
A human brain contains about 120 billion neurons (nerve cells) that are interconnected three-dimensionally. One neuron can have a few thousand connections, which means that we command a dense network with a fibre length of about 400 000 kilometers. Every piece of information reaching our brain will be transformed and decoded into electronic patterns. Neurons pass this information to other neurons, to muscles or to gland cells. This information transfer can be optimized through an expansion and modification of the existing network: Learning materializes through changes at the synaptic clefts between neurons or through the creation of new neural conjunctions. At the same time, every process of learning provides a basis for the continuation of learning in the future. In other words, every new connection becomes a stepping stone for further development beyond what has just been learned. The opposite effect takes place as well: Connections which are not being used anymore become degraded. This is for example what happens when we “forget”, which means, we lose access to the knowledge that was saved in the brain. Learning therefore shapes the individual micro-structures of our brains, neuro-scientists call this “plasticity”.

Improvisation and learning

These above mentioned learning processes take place throughout our whole lives, and the brain changes according to its usage. The question then to raise here is: How can we optimize these processes? What can neuroscience tell us about optimal learning and where do improvisational learning techniques fit into these findings?

1. Improvisation exercises are fun

One of the most significant memories of the improvisation workshop for me, is that it was a lot of fun. Even if Burgert’s description of the upcoming tasks may have sounded weird at first, I got the impression that everybody enjoyed them once they began, leading to many smiles and laughter in the group. What does this tell us about their effects?
Emotions play an essential role in learning and neuroscience helps us to understand why this is the case: There are some areas in the brain which are particularly involved in learning and memory. This is the so called “Limbic System”, which consists of the Hippocampus and the Amygdala in the medial temporal lobes, the basal fore brain as well as the prefrontal cortex and areas of the brain stem.
These structures serve as a kind of operational centre: The Limbic System executes the emotional evaluation and selection of incoming information. It can be seen as a filter, which any information has to pass before it can be further processed and encoded. Emotionally coloured contents, which are perceived as relevant and important to ourselves, pass this filter more easily and will receive preferential treatment during further processing in the brain. This means that they will be encoded more quickly, firmly and deeply. The ability to remember is in the same way strongly dependent on the emotional content of the learning material, as well as on the personal concern, mood and involvement during the learning process.
Emotions are of great importance for learning processes because they allow the personal identification with everything that has to be learned. If we therefore manage to combine a learning experience with positive emotions by means of making it enjoyable, we can be sure that its content will be memorized for a long time. This means that the playfulness that Playing Mantis incorporate into their improvisation techniques, strongly increases their effectiveness.

2. Improvisation exercises induce creativity

The exercises we did in the workshop contained guidelines, but often demanded from the participants to develop ideas, movements and stories for themselves. There was never a sheet of paper or model we were supposed to comprehend and memorize, and the outcome was open to our personal explanation and interpretation. This kind of framework leads to creative learning.
Human creativity is a specific kind of thinking or cognitive process, because it involves making new mental connections rather than analyzing or commenting on existing ones. On the neural level, this commensurates with the build up of novel neural pathways or the reconnection of previously disconnected ones. An FMRI-study, conducted at a university in Bristol in 2005 by Paul Howard-Jones and colleagues, aimed to identify those areas of the brain associated with making up a story creatively. Tasks involving story telling will usually result in increased activity in the left side of the brain, which is associated with language processing. This study however, found that those participants who solved the task creatively, showed an increase in activity in certain prefrontal areas of both hemispheres of the brain.
These results suggest that parts of the right hemisphere are required for creative thinking. An explanation for this, is that creative thinking demands higher cognitive effort: We have to access different areas in the brain and combine the relevant information into a new, creative solution. The additional effort required might have been needed to access contextual memory that was necessary to learn a new insight. This memory might have become inaccessible and eventually even forgotten otherwise.
Self-derived, creative solutions therefore generate a type of learning which manifests across the brain and is thus more successful, while being told what to do merely generates temporary, superficial knowledge.
Additionally, it has been shown that the kind of “Aha! experiences” we get through our own efforts, also activate the brain’s reward system and thus improve learning as explained in the last chapter about emotions.

3. Improvisation exercises encompass comprehensive demands and information

If we talk about the attainment of “knowledge”, we do not only think about cognitive structures, but also include behavioral patterns, which contain diverse impressions. The concepts and behaviours that participants of these workshops are supposed to gain, should also be applicable in complex and dynamic real-life situations.
Playful, spontaneous and practical exercises like improvisation techniques fulfill these requirements and challenge a person in real-time, involving all his senses. Again, this fact promotes successful learning based on neurological principles:
Our brain doesn’t have direct access to the world in order to gain knowledge. Sensory cells will transform every incoming piece of information into signal patterns which will then be distributed to different brain centers, according to their qualities. For example, impressions concerning movement will be processed in other areas than input about the properties of materials or sounds and language. These signals turn into information and obtain meaning only through their concurrent processing in these different brain regions. In the same way, knowledge is not being stored and retained as a whole. When we memorize something, our brain uses particularly notable pieces of information, which are then recombined into one impression.
Therefore, the most successful learning methods are those that cultivate the ability of the brain to link and build networks. Ideally they should stimulate all the senses and activate multimodal skills to thus challenge the brain in different aspects and vice versa enable it to activate the attained knowledge through various triggers. Multi-faceted activities advance the development of the brain throughout a person’s lifetime. Therefore it is playful activities, not passive, uninvolved parroting of knowledge that leads to physical changes of the brain and hence to enduring, applicable learning.

What do we learn from this?

In a nutshell, improvisation can be seen as a distinct type of dynamic, experiential learning, which promotes creative problem solving and innovation through processes that correspond with the operating principles of our brain.
But without trying it out, this knowledge might be of little use

__________________________

Howard-Jones, P.A., Blakemore, S.-J., Samuel, E. A., Summers, I. R., Claxton, G. (2005). Semantic divergence and creative story generation: An fMRI investigation. Cognitive Brain Research, 25, 240 – 250.

Schipol International Airport taunted me like Huckleberry to Tom – daring him to trust a raft made of sweat, spit and good old fashioned nylon rope. My heart and stomach clung awkwardly to the Boeing’s ceiling, unconvinced of a safe landing….both on the runway and on the stage. My husband reminded me of a Sunday afternoon frozen yoghurt in Stellenbosch…were we in the same aircraft?

The landing gear brushed the runway with an impressionists, well, impression. We were is Van Gogh’s valley. Land of Bicycles , Stroopwafels, Marijuana, Heineken & Bitterballen…

The AIN conference was scheduled from the Thursday morning until the Sunday afternoon. Our venue…The Felix Meritis, staircases’ would be home to 24 accents trading experiences, laughter and general out of breathness as the building was spread over 5 floors.

As an introvert, the idea of 3 people crammed days was daunting to me. The deer caught in the headlights image pops to mind.  Beautifully contrasted with this thought was my husband… a healthy, well fed wild mustang…energized by the breathing in and exhaling of gusts of words from strangers about to become friends.

We both joined Adrian Jackson’s pre conference workshop on Augusto Boal’s “Theatre of the oppressed” on Thursday… “Yes, an additional day with, what my very unhelpful conscience, proceeded to tell me, were people living the Improvisation dream. I had recently fallen in love with it, but we were by no means an item in my eyes yet…unbeknownst to me…Improv had found its soul mate, and he was planning to propose every day from then on for the rest of my life, and I was going to say yes.

Have you ever met really nice people from a certain country at different intervals in your life? They inadvertently form your opinion of that country. Improv people are like that country; I have never met an improviser I didn’t like. They are open, accepting, honest and possess an enviable children’s quality called a sense of wonder.

Come Friday, fear slept late and I attended a workshop by myself whilst Burgert sat in on another. His was on “Deepening your Debrief”, the key element of an Applied Improvisation Learning Experience, and mine was on “Status, the language for describing and understanding situations”…I hope these sound like exotic dishes, because they are, but with that “home cooking” edge to them. Oh, but the nourishment was no where near finished. Next up was a workshop by the marvelously honest and down to earth  Marjin Visser on “Prejudice, and how to be playful with it”

Saturday, fear was up before I was. I could have sworn I smelled it smoking a cigarette on the porch, nervously tapping its foot. Burgert and I were presenting our “Make your Partner cook good “a cooking workshop for couples later that afternoon. Burgert and I had attended pre marital classes based on Imago relational therapy and were so moved by the principles that we designed a workshop that married it with our other great passions – Improvisation and Creative cooking. We had presented this to test couples in South Africa and were left speech less at the beauty of 2 people working at a relationship.
My fear, in retrospect, was that I would be out of my depth. But, the thing with relationships is – if you’re in a committed one…it is a ship, and it will float and brave every storm without fear of failure.

We started our day with 2 different sessions again:
I joined Amy Carrol – her topic was “Are you predator, pray or partner?”, The Art and Science of Positive Influence. Burgert found his way to “Creative Conflict Resolution” with Barbara S . Tint. These are 2 remarkable women with finesse for performance with depth.

Just after lunch we both attended the “Hero’s Journey as a universal pattern for Personal and Cultural change in Organizations” …again, rich with content and the freedom of expression.

And then we were up… The proof is in the pudding. The feedback ( I love this word) on our workshop was down right pleasing  and instilled a quiet confidence that what we do has the potential to make a lasting difference.

As we flew home the next Sunday I closed my eyes somewhere in mid flight and smiled…for I was in the absence of fear.

Recently I listened to a talk by Eckhard Tolle called “The Journey within”. In his talk he says that creativity doesn’t come from thought but from a place of stillness. I tested this theory by asking my wife, who is the most creative person I know ,what happens just before she gets a creative idea. After a brief moment of silence she said in her metaphoric way of speaking, “There is stillness. It’s like the wind dies down and there is this moment of utter quiet and then the creative ideas come like a cloud burst. First just one large drop falls into the dry sand then it is followed by this shower of creativity.” “What is the wind?” I asked. “Its thoughts” she replies. I concluded that Eckhard is right. A creative idea isn’t a thought that you manufacture in your mind by trying really hard. The term “creative thinking” is therefore an oxymoron. Isn’t it unfortunate that school only taught us to think and not to be creative by not thinking?

It is also crutial that you trust your own creativity. All people are creative; we just lose it over time. The good news is we can reclaim it. The first step is to be still, and trust. Improv helps one to do this. A great improv game that helps to develop this trust in one’s own creativity is called Freeze Tag. In this game 2 people start a scene. At any moment anyone else can say freeze and tap out one of the players. He/she then takes that player’s position and starts a new scene in a completely new context justifying the position. A variation of this game is called Pimp Freeze Tag. In the variation an outside person calls freeze and tell the participants who should go in and replace another player. This way you don’t have time to think about what you want to do. You just have to trust yourself and see what arises. Participants in my improv class often comment that it is easier to come up with something good if they didn’t have time to think about it.

The next step is to trust the other player that they will take your creativity and do something with it – accept it and build on it (“yes and” it). I believe that the reason why we are afraid to trust our own creativity is because we are so use to other people rejecting our creativity and not accepting it. We all know how much rejection hurts. For most people it is not worth taking that risk anymore, so they label themselves as uncreative to protect themselves from rejection.

Now it’s your turn. Become still. Focus on the sounds around you. Become aware of your breathing. Write down in a comment below what arises.

Can self confidence be learned? Is there a set of skills you can master and once you have them, you will be self confident? When you have self confidence, do you also automatically have good self esteem?

Self confidenceis the belief and feeling that you can accomplish something worthwhile, something that somehow expresses who you are. You feel you can face whatever life throws at you. You may not win every time, but you will find a way to make it. It is a ‘can do’ attitude as opposed to an ‘I can’t’ attitude.

If you do not have a sense of mastery or personal power, you have no self confidence. You feel like you are good at nothing and fail at everything you try.

Self esteem, on the other hand has two components: Self confidence and self worth. The one can not be without the other.

Your self esteem is a combination of how much you like yourself (self respect) and whether or not you think you can cope with life (self confidence). It is both an appreciation of your inner beauty and a recognition of your innate ability.

Self respect is the belief that you are okay with all your idiosyncrasies. You know that you have inner beauty and you are worthy of receiving love and admiration. Self confidence is the ‘can do’ attitude that makes you believe you have the ability to measure up to the challenges of life.

Looking at our definition of self esteem, it seems clear that self confidence is only a part of self esteem.

The difference between self esteem and self confidence is that the first comes from inside and must be coupled with respect for your own worth. Self confidence by itself can be learnt by mastering the skills of presentation and communication.

Self confidence can be learned

Learning the skills of looking self confident from outside, is a great way of starting to build your self esteem. You start outside and work inward. This is why parents who want to help their kids gain self confidence enrol them in drama or acting class.

To act you must learn certain techniques and skills to overcome your fear of doing stuff in front of other people.These skills can be transferred to any other context where you must face other people like going for a job interview or asking a girl out on a date.

Many situations in real life can be compared to performing in front of people. Performance skills can help you act confidently in these contexts.

How can a feeling be learned?

Now you may be wondering: if self confidence is a feeling and a belief, as stated at the beginning, how can it be learned from outside? Surely it must be cultivated from within…?

The truth is that even amongst the best of actors and directors, there is not agreement on this matter. One side insists that acting is best when it comes from a feeling inside and the others disagree saying that you can act out any feeling without having to truly experience it. This is the difference between Stanislavskian acting and method acting as opposed to Brechtian acting.

A Story

There is a story about Dustin Hoffman, an American method actor, who had to play a mentally disturbed man. He spent days in a mental institution attempting to feel what it must be like to be mentally il. When he met Laurence Olivier a famous British actor on set Olivier asked him: “Why did you go to all that trouble?” Hoffman answered: I have to be that man.” Why, asked Olivier, “can’t you just act it?”

I will not take sides, but rather say that the two: action and feeling is inseparable and are conversation partners just like self confidence is the conversation partner of self worth when you are building self esteem.

However, when you want to start cultivating a feeling, where do you find it? My anser: start acting the way you want to feel. It is what people mean when they say : fake it until you make it.

I like to say Fake it until you feel it.

Test it for yourself:

Right there where you are try the following sequence of actions and notice the change in how you feel:

1. Rub the palms of your hands together
2. Bite your lip.
3. Breathe faster and more shallow.
4. Look from side to side and even over your shoulder.
5. Wipe your hands on your thighs and take a deep breath…

What are you starting to feel inside?

Here are some of the answers I often get:

I feel anxious, nervous, suspicious, like I am hiding something, guilty, paranoid.

And all this just because of a few physical movements.

Now try the opposite:

1. Sit up straight.
2. Open up your shoulders.
3. Breathe more deeply
4. Smile.
5. Wink at the computer.

Now what are you beginning to feel inside?

Action and feeling feed each other

By learning certain skills, or ways of behaving, you can cultivate a feeling of confidence and power. If you act confidently even though you are nervous, people will respond to you as though you have power and know what you are doing. This will feed back into your feeling that you have power and confidence and you wil act even more like it.

In the words of Aristotle, ” … we become just by performing just actions, temperate by performing temperate actions, brave by performing brave actions” (Kilpatrick, 1992:97). I would add: to become self confident you need to perform confident actions.

So what are these skills and how do I learn them?

I can teach you my ABC of self confidence. These are all external skills that you can try out and use. They are a kind of checklist for you to tick off as you enter a potentially nerve racking situation where you need to muster as much confidence as you can. They are easy to understand and you can practise them easily by yourself and try them out anywhere.

I have used this ABC to teach Rap artists and singers to market their material to record companies. I taught it to actors and performers to improve their acting. I used it to teach environmentalists to present proposals for changing policy. I even used it to teach some ‘boring’ University professors to get their students interested in their material. Now you give it a try.

What about self respect?

However, without also cultivating self respect the outward appearance of confidence remains just an empty shell. You can be enormously successful from the outside, but feel unfulfilled, worthless and frustrated on the inside.

This is because you are not expressing who you are in what you are achieving. You do not think that what you really have to offer is worth the time and effort so you only do the things you know will work and feel confident about. Yet, you will always end up feeling empty.

How do you fix this problem?

The short answer is: follow your passion.

By all means apply the skills to any situation where you need them, but do so especially in contexts where you are afraid and nervous. In the pursuit of your passion you will have to make many difficult choices where you are uncertain of the outcome and where you will risk all sorts of things: money, reputation, relationships… It is in these moments especially where you must act as though you are confident and fake it until you make it… feel it.

These moments define who you are and prove to yourself your own self worth.

This brings up three crucial questions for the success of any business:

1. Can a computer do it faster?
2. Is what I’m offering in demand in an age of abundance?
3. Can someone overseas do it cheaper?

When these questions are present, creativity becomes the competitive difference that can differentiate commodities. Pink outlines six essential senses:

1. Design – Moving beyond function to engage the sense.
2. Story – Narrative added to products and services – not just argument.
3. Symphony – Adding invention and big picture thinking (not just detail focus).
4. Empathy – Going beyond logic and engaging emotion and intuition.
5. Play – Bringing humour and light-heartedness to business and products.
6. Meaning – Relevant feelings and values connected to a person’s passion and purpose..

Playing Mantis specialises in both story and play.

Storytelling

Story is the skill to simplify that which is complex and organise it into a sense making whole. It also helps you to make concrete those aspects of your reality that is abstract and hard to grasp. When it comes to relationships and team work, the way that story places characters in sense making relationships with one another highlighting the causes of conflict and their resolution, can be of great help in managing business relationships.

Similarly the way in which storytellers organises human attributes and role functions into archetypes, can be of great use in understanding the different roles people play in your life. Stories can also assist you in understanding how you can develop your own character by looking at how the hero of a story grows and develops.  This can greatly assist in leadership skills development.

What makes this sense so accessible is the fact that we all already use it. The way in which you relate your day and how it went to your partner before bedtime, the way in which you tell a colleague about your weekend or how you sum up an overseas trip all carry the characteristics of a well made story. You pick a theme and select scenes to support and carry that theme. You populate your story with characters that either worked with or against you. You shape it with a beginning middle and end. In fact, any experience can be made sense of in retrospect by organising it into a story, Even the most confusing and emotional experiences, perhaps especially these experiences,  are made sense of by trying to organise it into a story.

Story is also the way in which we remember things and make sense of the world by linking seemingly unrelated events and ideas. Simple lists of facts do not make sense to us, but linking them with cause and effect turn the facts into one story and makes it memorable. The king died and then the queen died, are two seemingly unrelated facts, but saying that the king died and then the queen died of grief, immediately makes it into a story by adding an emotional component that link the two facts logically. We all do this with things we read and learn and experience. It is a sense well worth cultivating and understanding so that its power can be utilised in areas of our lives where meaning still escape us.

Play, on the other hand, is the most effective way of learning, working and enjoying it.  It is the way in which children learn. It is their method of organising their worlds into sense making sections. Through play they discover how the world works and what their own place in it is. And while their games are fun and light-hearted, they take it very seriously. Improvisational Theatre utilises the same characteristics of play in a way that makes it accessible and usable for adults. Through this kind of play it is possible to learn how to deal with things that happen in your life that is hard to make sense of – especially if the situation ask you to change how you have done things or understood things until now.

Again improvisation is something we all are able to do in ordinary circumstances. When unforeseen things happen and you have to adjust your plan, you improvise. When someone asks you a question you sort of know the answer to, but not quite, you improvise. When you are cooking and discover that you miss a certain ingredient, you improvise. You use what you have and, maybe more importantly, you use what others have to offer. Honing these skills can greatly help you in dealing with change and uncertainty so that you are less apprehensive and are able to trust you own ability to adjust.

Perhaps even more poignant is that improvisation helps you to remain light-hearted and playful amidst times of stress and confusion. The playful attitude is not the same as being frivolous and superficial, but rather one of great seriousness, but with a certain detachment to the outcome. Think again of the seriousness with which children engage in play. To them it is not at all unimportant and inconsequential. Marrying work and play is the goal of cultivating the sense of play in business..

The other four senses of empathy, symphony, design and meaning all are cultivated during the workshops where we create a creative experience for learning. This experience aims to involve all of the multiple intelligences including emotion (empathy), sprit (meaning,), lateral thinking (symphony) and aesthetic judgement (design)

Summary of benefits:

The most important reasons for using story and improvisation both for team building and for dealing with change relate to the kind of play that is stimulated by these activities. This kind of play

• Unlocks hidden potential, opens up all your intelligences and puts you in touch with your instinct and intuition,
• Enhances focus and effectiveness and provides a sense of purpose which is absorbing and motivating,
• Raises self esteem and self confidence and rekindles your spontaneity,
• Inspires individual and group creativity, forms a communal paradigm and lets group knowledge surface,
• Provides understanding and insight into fellow players and creates common focus and priorities while allowing for the safe expression of feelings,
• Clarifies and simplifies things that are abstract and complicated and produces innovative solutions.

We will teach you this kind of play, help you to reflect on its significance for you and apply the skills you learn to your real life situation.