Finding Mastery with Dr. Michael Gervais - How Improv Can Level Up Our Creativity, Connection and Leadership | Kelly Leonard, VP of The Second City

Episode Date: September 27, 2023

Could improv comedy be the key to unlocking human potential?Our guest today isn't just tossing around this idea—he's used the alchemy of the improv stage to forge groundbreaking strategies that are sure to ripple through business, sport, and life itself.Let's set the stage for Kelly Leonard. His title—Vice President of Creative Strategy, Innovation, and Business Development—only begins to capture his role at The Second City. And this isn't just any theater. It's a global comedy powerhouse that gave us legends like Stephen Colbert, Tina Fey, and Amy Poehler, to name a few. Yet the improv stage is merely a starting point for Kelly's broader mission. He's on an epic journey to inspire and empower people to use improvisation as a tool for positive change and growth. Kelly's best-selling book, 'Yes, And,' and a pioneering partnership with the University of Chicago reflect this mission—bridging behavioral science with the principles of improv.I love how Kelly offers us unconventional wisdom on reframing challenges, daring to risk, and savoring the present moment in all its unpredictability.And our conversation goes deep. We explore thoughtful leadership, building a culture that unlocks radical creativity, tools to deepen relationships and even some remarkably profound ways to approach grief.So, if you're leading a team, wanting to live fiercely in the now, or simply searching for a fresh lens on life's curveballs, this is one episode you won't want to miss._________________Subscribe to our Youtube Channel for more powerful conversations at the intersection of high performance, leadership, and meaning: https://www.youtube.com/c/FindingMasteryGet exclusive discounts and support our amazing sponsors! Go to: https://findingmastery.com/sponsors/Subscribe to the Finding Mastery newsletter for weekly high performance insights: https://www.findingmastery.com/newsletter Download Dr. Mike's Morning Mindset Routine! https://www.findingmastery.com/morningmindsetFollow us on Instagram, LinkedIn, and X.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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So when I think about comedy and improvisation, I think about mess and struggle and hard stuff and the ability to navigate through it and laugh our asses off. Welcome back or welcome to the Finding Mastery podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Michael Gervais, by trade and training, a high performance psychologist. And I am thrilled to welcome Kelly Leonard to the podcast for this week's conversation. If you've ever appreciated the comedic stylings of talents like Tina Fey or Stephen Colbert or Amy Poehler or Seth Meyers, you may want to give today's guest some credit. As the executive director of Learning and Applied Improvisation at Second City,

the world's premier comedy theater and school, Kelly Leonard has spent over 20 years shepherding the kind of creativity and collaboration that not only catapults comedy legends, but has the power to transform people's lives. Turns out, improv isn't just good for laughs. Looking at behavioral science through the lens of improvisation, Kelly helps not just build performers, but leaders, innovators, and everyday professionals

develop transformational skills in business using the yes and principle, mastering the art of co-creation, leading by listening, and innovating by making something out of nothing. Like improv, life is not scripted. The more tools we have to navigate it, the better. So whether you're ready to laugh or learn or cry or a bit of all three, you're going to love hearing the insights in this remarkable conversation. So with that, let's jump right into today's conversation with Kelly Leonard. Kelly, I am stoked to learn from you today and just a sincere thank you for coming on the podcast with us. But before we dive into your insights, can you just set the scene

for our audience and explain what Second City is, your roles there, and then please feel free to name drop all of the amazing people that you've been able to work with. But like, so can you just give us a flyover? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, and maybe you can do this. I can sort of tell you my story at Second City and we'll explain what Second City is through that. Because my first gig at Second City was in 1988. I had just graduated college, and I got a job here as a dishwasher. And the other guy who got hired that week to be a dishwasher was a guy named Jon Favreau, who would go on to direct some pretty famous films. We also both had mullets and my wife has photographic evidence of such. So Second City is a sketch.

Wait, hold on, hold on. I can see where we're starting already. We're starting with mullets. We're just starting with mullets. You and Jon in the kitchen. Washing the dishes. This is perfect. Yeah.

Okay, good. Yeah. With a bunch of like Yale sociopaths and alcoholics. I mean, Second City is a renowned sketch and improv theater. It started in 1959. And so when I showed up, it was legendary in Chicago and nationally. And we have had a theater and still do in Toronto when we produced a television show called SCTV. And people mostly know us as a place that sort of is home to the first jobs of all these famous comedians. So when I was washing dishes, Mike Myers and Bonnie Hunt and Joel Murray were all on the main stage. Jane Lynch was in our ETC stage, our second stage. And then a couple of guys named Tim Meadows and Chris Farley had just been hired into

the touring company here. And the way Second City is set up, I don't know if people know this, but we do two acts of scripted content, the review, and a third act almost every night that's fully improvised. And that's where the cast is just taking suggestions from the audience and making what appears to be magic happen on stage. And lots of celebrities will join up. It was not uncommon for Robin Williams to stop by almost every month and perform with the cast in the improv set. And the improv set's free. So, you know, broke college

students are coming to this and getting to see world-class talent. And the thing is, it appears to be magic. And then you work here for a while and you realize there's a sort of improvisational pedagogy that is going on that all our performers are steeped in, that they learn. And what I sort of figured out is that improvisation is not magic. It's like yoga for your social skills. I often say it's like loud, noisy group mindfulness, right? It's a practice in being unpracticed, which is the way all of us walk through the world. So, you know, the very first company was spitting up people like Mike Nichols, Elaine May, Alan Arkin, Barbara Harris. Then you've got people like Peter Boyle and Joan Rivers and Robert Klein and Fred Willard. And then the group in 1969, which called itself The Next Generation, included John Belushi and Harold Ramis. And then you've got John Candy, Gilda Radner, Catherine O'Hara, Eugene Levy, George Wendt, Jim Belushi, Bill Murray, Betty Thomas.

And I actually was lucky enough to graduate from Washing Dishes. I hosted the room, I worked in the box office. And I actually became the producer of Second City. So I got to hire a bunch of great talent. And I started out in 1992 doing that. And my first cast included Stephen Colbert, Steve Carell, and Amy Sedaris. I hired Tina Fey, Amy Poehler,

worked with Mike Myers, worked with Seth Myers, Jason Sudeikis, Cecily Strong, just Keegan-Michael Key, a host of incredible people. Jordan Peele, who I tried to hire, kept getting other gigs and he actually worked on the bar staff here. So it's just always been this place where budding talent is playing and learning and growing. And we have a school and we work with corporate groups and do all kinds of stuff. But at its heart, it is an improv-based comedy theater.

Okay. So that, you've been around. A little bit. And yeah. I wonder where you're going to take that. But I was going to finish it with, you've been around great. Yeah. I wonder where you're going to take that. But I was going to finish it with you've been around greats. Yeah. Like all-time greats in the comedy world.

You might call them masters. Like deep. Yeah. with just like unscientific approach to your subjective experience which is if you just you know let's imagine that you know you just we're at the i don't know dining room table and you've you've had a couple cocktails and you just kind of push the seat back a little bit and you go you know i i between tina stephen robin williams sudeikis, John Favreau. You know what the common theme is? What would you say?

And I don't think there is a common theme. Oh, there is. But what would you say? No, there is. Oh, okay. Absolutely. Let's go. 100%.

All of these people are trained in the art of improvisation. So it is a embodied study, essentially, of human behavior. That might surprise some people, and it might not if they actually knew the origin story before 1959. So indulge me just a little bit, but there was a woman by the name of Viola Spolin, and she was a social worker in the 20s and 30s working at Jane Addams Hull House on the south side of Chicago. And her job was to better assimilate young people and immigrants into her care. And so she had worked with a woman called Neva Boyd, and they'd been playing around with theater games. And so what Viola did was kind of create this whole new suite of games, improv exercises, many of which were in silence or gibberish because the kids didn't always share language. But what they did was they came together and played, and it taught them to

listen, to empathize, to cooperate, to collaborate. Her son, Paul Sills, was studying at the University of Chicago, and he loved these games, and he taught them to his friends, people like Mike Nichols and Elaine May, among others. They formed the first improvisational theater in America called the Compass Players in 1954. And that turns into the Second City in 1959. So the origin of this stuff was a way to get kids from disparate backgrounds who are scared and everything's new and they're navigating complexity. And it was like, oh, I know how we can get them better or quite frankly, kind of, I think, turn them into sort of superstars is by having them practice these elements in a gamified situation with embodied skill building. And that stuff also makes great comedy. It produces truth, which is really at its

heart what most great comedy is. And it has this other aspect to it which is very pro-social. And I think if you look, you know, no one got into comedy because they're well-adjusted. That is not a reason people enter these doors. But what these skills do teach these individuals, these sometimes broken individuals, is how to work well with others. And when they share that language, they don't want to like ever do it differently. So when I sort of listed off that huge name of Second City alums, if you trace where their careers went, Second City people went with them. Whether it's Cheers, Mary Tyler Moore, 30 Rock, Parks and Rec, writers, actors, everyone's bringing the Second City people with them because they know that they have a shared

language and a shared set of values. So one of the things in improvisation is your job is to save the person across from you and you know their job is to save the person across from you and you know their job is to save you. So if you are going into these very high pressure situations and you know that this person has got your back and you've got theirs, why wouldn't you want to be working with that person? Okay, quick pause here to share some of the sponsors of this conversation. Finding Mastery is brought to you by LinkedIn Sales Solutions. In any high-performing environment that I've been part of, from elite teams to executive boardrooms, one thing holds true. Meaningful relationships are at the center of sustained success.

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slash finding mastery. Let's jump right back into the conversation. So the golden thread that you're talking about is that they have had this embodied skill building study and they're practicing. And so I want to break that apart. Yes. Embodied meaning it's visceral, it's cognitive, it is physical. Yes. And so, right. Yes. Okay. So we're talking about the same thing. So there's an embodied skill building and that skill, I'm going to leave it blank for right now, but you're talking about practicing in an embodied approach, which is essentially what sport practice is. Sure, yeah.

But this practice that you're talking about, like skill building, right, in sport. But what you're talking about here is that the skills are designed to work well with others. sort of the stew of University of Chicago, basically from that 20s, 30s period through that late 50s period, so much thought that we take for granted now in terms of human behavior, psychology, neuroscience, sociology, that stuff was bubbling up there. And it's so interesting that while the founders of Second City weren't necessarily tying together their classes with Martin Buber with the work they were doing on a stage, because again, the University of Chicago had no theater department. These folks were making theater at a place that had no theater department. But the lineage is there. And we work,, you know, we work,

as you know, we work a lot with the behavioral science community now because they're recognizing that it isn't like, it's not role-playing when we're talking about practicing. What we're down is we're breaking down in these exercises, point of focus, listening, status, all the sort of elements, unconscious bias, all these elements that make up how we communicate, how we behave, how we make decisions. And we know, I mean, the yes and concept is actually perfect for understanding this. So most people know about that, right? They've heard it. It's almost a bumper sticker now, this idea in improv that you shouldn't say no, you say yes and. But if you look at it through the lens of, say, behavioral economics, where we know that people's default position is to say no or do nothing, then you could look at yes and and say, oh, that's a nudge. That's simply a nudge to get someone off their couch, not watching Netflix, and do something. Or in the case of a business meeting,

not shut down a conversation too early. And yes, and isn't about like, oh, we have to follow every single thread every single time. It's about, yeah, you want to do that for the first 20 minutes, or you might want to do that for the first few weeks of a process to kind of make sure you've got all the ideas on the table. The idea in creativity, of course, is you cannot be creative if you're in judgment of self or judgment of others. You also can't be creative if you're in fear. And all of that is affected by people saying no to us. So when you create a space, and this is what we do when we're putting together a Second City show over like a 12-week process. First three weeks, four weeks, all yes and.

Every idea, I don't care how dumb it is. Because you don't know what innovation looks like when you're being creative. And creativity and innovation are two different things. When you're being creative, you are just playing and you're failing and it's all good. When you get to innovation, right, you're failing and it's all good when you get to innovation right you're turning it into something but by virtue of it being innovative it means we haven't seen it before so if you're saying no to these things because they seem like they might not work you're kind of being both anti-creative and anti-innovation And so all of that is at play. I mean, there are thousands

of these exercises that address all these different kind of phenomenon. It's really kind of remarkable. And I think we're very lucky that we're turning 65 next year. And we're very lucky that in many ways, we didn't know how powerful this stuff would be off the stage. We just thought it was powerful on the stage. So we had so much time to sort of stew and get our expertise and figure out what we really think, what works and what doesn't. these major university partners and give like, you know, MBA students an opportunity to use these exercises themselves to get better at telling the story of themselves and the thing they're trying to sell, for example. And there's so much gold in here. And I, I, I want to pause on the skill building because in some of the practices, so we're going to, let's come back around to that,

but maybe let's just segue into the thought that you're just leading with is that when people think about leadership and collaboration and teamwork, I doubt that many of us go to comedy to think about best practices. Right. And so how does improv and the Yes, Anne framework help us in these three areas? And those are leadership, collaboration, and teamwork. Okay. I have a funny story that we'll talk about leadership. So I had a truly terrible idea for a show. It was called Juzical the Musical.

I was trying to nail down a certain segment. And so I reached out to the Spurtus Institute of Jewish Learning in Chicago, got introduced to the CEO there, Hal Lewis, and said, hey, could we test out some material? And from your audience, I've got this idea. He thought also it was a good idea. So we were both wrong. This thing was a disaster. However, he said, OK, great, I'll give you a stage, try some stuff out. Could you also lead some workshops? Big comedy fan, love Second City. And so we're at his venue, and we're observing a workshop,

and one of our instructors is doing a classic improv exercise called Follow the Follower. And the idea there is We gather people in a space and we're like, okay right now you're not going to use words We all want you to walk around the space We're gonna choose one of you to be the leader We're not gonna tell the others that that person is leader that person's job is to use their own body Not words to hand off leadership to someone else.

So whether it's like a nod or whatever, and they have to make sure the person receives it. And then that person does it as well. And Hal Lewis is sitting next to me and he goes, you're doing Peter Drucker. And I said to him, who's Peter Drucker? And so I didn't have a computer handy, but he's a quite famous Austrian management theorist who came up with a bunch of brilliant ideas that no one paid attention to. One of which was, and this is the 50s or 60s, right? That command and control leadership doesn't work. And that really this idea of knowledge workers and support and coaching and basically what we were doing in this exercise, which is in improv, what we know is that leadership will change hands continually based on who has the ball and who's the expert in that moment. We've all heard the phrase, your team is only as good as its weakest member. At our place, we say your team is only as good as its ability to compensate for its weakest member, because each of us will be the weakest member at some point. If you have a tech problem or a math

problem, please do not come to me. But if you would like to discuss The Grateful Dead or have me order a good wine, I can do that. And I have other things I can do. And that is true of all of us. So our differences as an ensemble, and that's what we call our teams at Second City, ensembles, is that we're all bringing this weird mix of talents and we are allowing each other's talents to shine and then recede and shine and recede. And there's flow that exists inside of this. So the leadership thing, and this sort of came late because collaboration teamwork, that's the easy thing to see at Second City, right? Is how do you think six people with zero script 12 weeks later

can end up with award-winning comedy reviews? We are the only theater that I know in the world that is commercially successful only doing original work. Right? Think about this.

There's not a theater that is like, oh yeah, no, we're going to do more new plays. The new plays are going to sell everything. No, they've got to do Cats. They've got to do It's not, there's not a theater that is like, oh yeah, no, we're going to do more new plays. The new plays are going to sell everything. It's no, they, they, they got to do cats. They've got to do, it's a wonderful life or Christmas Carol. You know, even, even the cutting edge theaters end up doing, you know, the who's Tommy or

whatever, not us. Every show is original. And that is 65 years of sold out houses. Dang. So, and there's something magical about watching net new. Yeah. And so when you're in the audience, you're experiencing the spontaneity and the clumsiness and the having each other's back in an interesting way.

I think people are craving that. Yeah. In my line of work, obviously we talk about team a lot, but when you double click on team, it really is the mechanics of being a great teammate. Yes. And what does it take to be a great teammate? And everything that I hear you talking about is just that. So much so that that's one of the reasons that when Tina Fey leaves, she brings people with her because she's like, listen, I know they've got my back.

Right. Tina Fey leaves, she brings people with her because she's like, listen, I know they've got my back and I've got their back. And we've practiced that being a great teammate for a long time. And again, I'll kind of round this out. We've practiced it in an embodied way. So we haven't just done the intellectual exercise of like, hey, if I go sideways on this meeting, will you have my back? It's like, no, they're actually practicing it on a regular basis. And so, all right. Now with that in mind, the yes and piece here, the framework of yes and, maybe I can't imagine, but there's maybe a handful of people that don't know what yes and means. So let's go straight into that and just open that up. And maybe, that don't know what yes and means. So let's go straight into that. Sure. And just open that up and maybe, I don't know, this is really dangerous, but maybe we could role play it. As I say that out loud, I'm like, oh Jesus, what did I just say? But maybe explain

what the yes and is. Sure. Well, let me say, I'll give you an example of how this played out on the very first day that we started a partnership. So it was about seven years ago at the Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago. At that time, the Center for Decision Research was run by Richard Thaler, Nobel Prize winning economist, not then, but after. And he greenlit this program. So essentially, for about five years, the Second City sort of improv experts

and scientists from the University of Chicago looked at behavioral science through the lens of improvisation and vice versa. Very first day, we are sitting around a table and we said, well, we need an open space. So we go to an open space and the scientist said, can you just teach us an exercise, like one of your most popular exercises?

So we taught them the yes and exercise. So I'll explain what that is. We pair up people and we had all the scientists pair up and we said, okay, this day has been amazing. So we're plotting a reunion event for a year from now. And person A, you're going to pitch your ideas for this reunion event to person B. Person B, your job is to say no to every single idea in as many different ways as you would like to go. And they do that for about a minute. And you can imagine that that doesn't feel great for person A. It shouldn't feel good for person B. It sometimes does, and that's a problem.

So then we say, okay, person B, your turn. And you're going to pitch your ideas. And person A, what you're going to respond to is yes, but. So you're going to say yes, but to every idea. And what inevitably happens after a minute or so of doing this is we pull the room and we say, who liked that better? Half the hands go up. Who thought it was worse?

The other half go up. We're like, yeah, because you heard a yes, but it was a no with a bow tie. It was a no with a top hat. There was no yes there. You got the shiv afterwards. So some people figured that out and other people were like, I said yes. And then we say, okay, now person A and person B, you're each going to pitch your ideas and every idea you're going to yes and. You're going to affirm the idea and contribute a new idea. You're not going to negate anything. And we're like, look, and the law of physics doesn't apply. There is no budget. You have whatever budget. You could be having sushi on the moon. And that's what they do. And so the room fills with laughter and we come around like, okay,

what are you doing? And it's amazing what people come up with. And this is about the marketplace of ideas. And the thing is, there's been research on this. I think Bob Sutton's done some at Stanford, which is to get to a good idea, you need something like 2000 ideas. And I know, I know, I know that sounds daunting. It is not. If you just let your mind go, and again, like if you think like you're creating a second city show, it's like, it can be a premise. It can be a character. It can be an idea. It can be a line. It can be a color. It can be a place. It can be a time. So suddenly they're right there. And then you can make those categories and you can have 50 under each of those. And suddenly you're at the 2000 and it's fine.

And so generating a lot of ideas and the research I've looked at around when we talk about mastery in music and in different arts is volume. I mean, the amount of music that the Beatles made in like a nine-year period is stunning. Very similar to Beethoven and Mozart. And, you know, the greats produced a lot. And we don't talk about the stuff that maybe they produced that wasn't great, because it doesn't matter, because a lot of the greatness came out of the a lot. So yes and is an approach to additive creativity. You'll never hear professional improvisers use the term yes and, but it's the mindset of I'm going to go in this room and I am going to allow every idea to live a little. I'm going to explore these ideas. I'm going to add to them. If they take us nowhere, that's fine.

We'll go down another path. And we say in our work, you have to learn to replace blame with curiosity. So this idea of like, it's so easy to come in and be like, ah, you know, I've just been handed this terrible thing. But why not go in and go, okay, I've been handed this thing. What can I make of it? You know, we learn to see all obstacles as gifts. In improvisation, we talk about that all the time. Where does Yes, Anne come from? What is the origin of it? Is it you? It's not me. No, no, no. I mean, I luckily got to write the book. But no, I mean, I think, and I don't know that it comes from Spolin either. Some people have credited it to Del Close.

It is just, it existed when I started Second City, and it existed before, and it became an idea that just sort of made sense to the work, and it's kind of rule number one. And I think that's probably because what we recognize with individuals is this stuff to get up and you've sort of seen the studies on fear of public speaking being like one of the biggest fears that human beings have. So I would imagine if you don't have a script or anything, or you don't, you don't know what you're going to do and you can't, because when you're improvising, you're just working with whatever you have in the room at the moment, there may be a suggestion. There may not be a suggestion. That seems incredibly daunting. So you really have to teach people the approach to make it not so daunting. So a lot of that in very early improv classes

is meditative qualities of getting that place of like, get out of your fear brain. We have them sort of fail over and over and over again. And then we work a lot on listening skills. So if you wanted to play an exercise, actually, you and I could do a very early stage exercise, which is all about that listening. And it's called last word. And the idea here is that we're going to have a conversation like we're having right now. And there's one rule is when I stop talking, the first word of your response to me has to start with the last word I just said and vice versa. Cool. Okay.

And there's no, so there's no other rules. No. All right. Who goes first? I'll go first. I'm going to pause the conversation here for just a few minutes to talk about our sponsors. Finding Mastery is brought to you by Momentous. When it comes to high performance, whether you're leading a team,

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great science. And if you're ready to feel the difference for yourself, Felix Gray is offering all Finding Mastery listeners 20% off. Just head to FelixGray.com and use the code FINDINGMASTERY20 at checkout. Again, that's Felix Gray. You spell it F-E-L-I-X-G-R-A-Y.com and use the code FindingMastery20 at FelixGray.com for 20% off. And now back to the conversation. I was very much looking forward to this conversation because you were gracious enough to come on my podcast. And I think we instantly sort of were like, oh, there are surprising connections between what you do and what I do. Do I give you that impression that what we're doing is, is corollary between the two of us? Us for sure. Because I mean, I've read your work and I've listened to

your podcast and, and I am a giant fan of sport sport and i've always felt that this world this sort of improv world is for the people who didn't have team experience like i did playing soccer which is my sport um but they needed a team experience experience like really when when you get down into it it's reference points and experience experience that really provides the context for mastery. And I listen to your stories and I listen to your insights. And not only are you studying it, but you're actually living it through Second City, through dishwashing, all the way into managing the place. Like you're definitely in it. Yeah, it's important.

I mean, what I discovered, and it was through writing the book, right? So we got this book contract. And I would write in the morning. I'd close my door in my office. I never used to close my door. I'd close my door in my office. And I would write in the morning because I get here my door in my office. I never used to close my door. I'd close my door in my office, and I would write in the morning because I'd get here early.

I was still the first person here every day. And I'd be done by around 10. And what I noticed was my staff, the people who immediately worked for me, just filled my calendar at 10 o'clock for conversations to have with me. And I later found out what they realized was when I, because I'm not an improviser myself, I didn't come into this as an actor. I was a writer, you know, but I've really worked at the applied ideas. So thinking about this work and then how it applies places. But my staff figured out that because I was writing about the work and the exercises, I was in such a good improvisational headspace that they knew I'd be a really good listener at 10 Oh one.

When my door was back open, I became kind of the mediocre boss. I was normally later in the day, but it was that sort of fresh, like fresh off the, the, the good ideas of how to listen, how to collaborate,

how to co-create that we made me kind of a better human. Human. We can stop there. Yeah, we can stop. Yeah. I was going to leave you with like two things just for fun for that. I was like, oh, I got to really dial up the listening. It's a point well made. And then, um, so as soon as, as like, I listened to the last word, then I figured out the first

sentence and then I could go kind of just about anywhere. And then at the same time, I was thinking about the handoff and like, what's the word I wanted to leave, uh, leave with to give you an assist. And I was going to leave you with on this last one, Nanya. And it's just because my son keeps like, I'll say, hey, Grayson is his name. Like, hey, Grayson, how's practice? And he said, Nanya, dad. Nanya. What does that mean? Yeah, Nanya business. Oh, Nanya business.

And he just laughs. Oh, that's so funny. So I was going to see where you go with Nanya. Well, I think. So anyways. There's a few things going on there, right? Which is, yes, you have to listen to the end of my sentence, which most human beings don't do. We think we get the gist. And so we're kind of like, and we don't want to look.

We want to look at our smartest selves, right? So we're sort of preparing what's the clever thing I can add in. When you're on stage improvising with someone else, the last few words they say might contain crucial information. Of course, that's the same in real life, but we have shortcuts. And we have shortcuts for a reason, right? These biases are built in to keep us safe, and also because the world is complex. And if we pay attention to everything, we're going to go out of our minds. But many conversations that we have throughout the day, we're not giving our full weight to. And so when you practice listening to the end of a sentence,

and when you are patient and not worried about the pause at the end, that's the other thing, right? A lot of people feel like, well, if I pause, that's going to be upsetting. It's like, it's the opposite. When I finished talking and I saw you sort of trying to calculate what you were doing, I knew you had been paying attention to me. I knew you saw me. And that felt good.

So it's kind of the opposite of the way a lot of people enter these rooms. Yeah, that's really fun. That's really fun. I would like to go into, you've written about the core principles of improv. So I do want to go there with you because I think there's a nice segue. However, before we hit that, Robin Williams, Tina Fey, Jon Favreau, you had mentioned public speaking being so terrifying. And it is one of the things that we're tackling, we're squaring up with in the book that we just wrote called, that's about FOPO. And we call it, the book title, I don't

know if I shared this with you on your podcast, is The First Rule of Mastery. And essentially, it's squaring up with this deep fear that we have of being critiqued and judged and this chronic desire to see if we're okay based on what you or others might be thinking about us. And it's this constant chronic scanning to see if we're okay that is just exhausting. But public speaking is like culprit number one for FOPO. And FOPO keeps us from going for it because we're overly trying to manage approval and rejection. And so with Tina and John and the folks you've been talking about, did they have any FOPO? How did they work with FOPO? How did you see FOPO in these folks? Well, yeah. I think a lot of people come to improvisation because they're experiencing some sort of break.

It can be a breakup. It could be they don't know what they want to do with their life. It could be, you know, I mean, a lot of pain, a lot of tragedy, a lot of trauma. Stephen Colbert lost his dad and brothers to a horrible plane accident. Tina Fey, when she was a little girl, doorbell rang, she opened the door and someone slashed her face and she has a scar. And she sees herself or saw herself as a deformed human being. That's what she has said in the past. So, and that story goes on and on and on. And so they enter this world of improvisation in part because what they

discover is these spaces that they occupy when they're taking classes and then when they do it professionally, they have to be deeply, fiercely present in the moment. They can't linger in the past and they can't linger in an imaginary future. They have to stay present. One of the things we say is you need to learn to play the scene you're in, not the scene you want to be in. So what is the scene you're in? Play that. And it is incredibly freeing. There are no phones. You are just have, You have your other humans working with you. And in the classes, we are putting people up to fail in volume over and over and over again. There's a classic game called 1001. And it's basically, you throw throw out an object give me an object like plunger and then there's a format for a joke a thousand one plumbers uh plungers walk into a bar bartra

says we serve your kind uh the plungers say you know stick it or whatever some stupid you know joke like i just made it was terrible and you just have to keep getting it you have to keep getting it and and the what happens is is the the rule for the rest of the group is no matter how bad your joke is, they have to applaud like it's the funniest thing they've ever heard. And so you're building up like a callous for your bad failing work. And there's so many of these exercises, but they're about like, nope, this is the batting average. I think we might have talked about this if we didn't. I use this when I talk in my speeches all the time, which is, you know, Nick Epley is one of the scientists that we work with at the University of Chicago. And he has research that shows us that human beings get it right in typical conversations probably 20 to 30 percent of the time.

So 30 percent being kind of generous, right? And then you're missing, you're just missing stuff. You just are. And if you think about that in the context, if it surprises you, and you think about that in the context of a major league baseball player at home plate batting, if he's missing the ball 70% of the time, he's a 300 hitter. It's pretty good. So this idea of being, and that's, you know what they've done? Is they've taken a lot of swings and missed. Wait a minute.

So go back to Nicholas's insight, is that we're getting conversations about 20% right? 20 to 30% right, that we're understanding what's going on inside the conversation, understanding the full intent of what the person is trying to convey to us at any given moment. I had no idea. Nicholas Epley, Chicago. I know his work, but I didn't know this. I'm going to go dig in. That's really terrible. That's disheartening. It is, I'm going to go dig in. That's really terrible.

Yeah. That's disheartening. It is. But it's also funny. So Epley has this joke in his book Mind Wise, which I highly recommend. He's got this great joke where it's just a man walks up to a riverbed and he sees another man on the other side and he yells to him, how do I get to the other side of the river? And the man yells back, you are on the other side of the river.

Yeah. That's so good. That's the world we live in. And again, not surprising if you take a beat and just, you know, if you go online or read a newspaper, you know, it's like the framing is terrible all the time and there's always framing and context is so hugely important, yet we don't necessarily always consider context. So when you understand that we're getting it wrong more than we're getting it right considerably, what an awesome, awesome opportunity for you to listen a little bit more deeply, ask a couple more questions, do all those things that might give you an edge in not just up to 35 or 40%. And I would say that great improvisers are understanding what's going on in a conversation

or a room much more than a regular human being. And it's in the same way that great athletes know to move to space this is such a soccer thing but i think it's true with the other with the other sport certainly basketball uh but that idea of like no no no like you just got like how is messy passing it there like he just knows you're you're should go to that space um and i grew up with the with the championship bulls teams thank god here in chicago and just watching the flow of those folks once they got the triangle and they just started figuring out how this works, it was beautiful to watch. It was like ballet, like some form of dance. And there's synchrony that happens, right?

And that's, you know, you want to avoid group think so you can get to group mind. How do we all think the same in a way that will guide us in our individual work and our individual skill? That is a hard thing to achieve, but I would imagine is the thing that ties together championship teams across all the different sports. Well, when you said group mind, I want to make sure I'm hearing that correctly because I hear group mind and I go to group flow. Yeah. And I think I mean group flow. And the distinction I want to say is it's not group think. It is not. That's right. Yeah.

It is not that because that's a danger, but it is about. Group mind is a cool. Yeah, that is cool i think that group flow is it's probably happening on stage if you think about the same thing like whether it's two people or three people and i i'm nodding my head um infusely thinking that group flow is one of the unlocks for great teams yeah And there's a bit of science around flow and there's less science around group flow. Yes. And I would imagine that fear and risk are part of those triggers for, and I know it's

one of your principles for improv, but fear and risk are, they're a forcing function to be all in to this moment. Yeah. And if you can't embrace the fear with deep focus and listening and take the risk of staying in the next moment too, then the whole thing does unfold because, or not unfold, unravels because you've ejected out of what's required to stay on time. Maybe I can say that better. You've ejected out when what is required is to stay on time. Yeah. And so I'd love to hear your take on this. Sure. So there's a phrase in our work,

the need to follow the fear. And there's a teacher, he was an actor here first, and a teacher, Rick Thomas, who used to say, you need to learn to fall into the crack of the game. I'll say it again. You need to learn to fall into the crack of the game. And the idea there is like, these mistakes and these fears are all opportunities. And not to get too, you know, erudite, but it's not unconnected to Kierkegaard's existential leap of faith, which was also not unconnected to the term beat generation, uh, which was coined by John Cleland Holmes, not Kerouac, but Kerouac built off it. And, and all of that is about when you're in this beaten space, but it's also beatific and, and this idea of them leaping into the unknown.

It's, it's those that, that, that's where all the good stuff is. And it's hard. But it's easier if you've got a group. It's easier if you're not alone. And you're right, it hasn't been studied because when you're doing legit scientific studies, you need to have volume. And the way to really understand this kind of group flow is following six people who are putting up

a Second City show for a year and a half. And that hasn't happened yet. I keep trying. Because I do think that that's where they're going to discover this idea. Because we're ruthlessly experimenting in front of audiences. We're doing rapid prototyping of creativity in front of audiences, this third act of improvisation. And when we're in a process for creating a show, and this is very risky, right, is that we are just, that third act is just all made up. But understanding if you're going to have your people have that element of risk, you need protect them so you've heard the term psychological safety the environment that is set for this third act is all about setting that sort of psychological safety it's free so anyone coming off the street can come to to the improv set when we end the two

act show we take our bows and the cast is you know they're in their their nice clothes and they're taking their bows and they go well we're thinking about doing a little bit more. Would you want to stay? So it's almost an apology that they're saying. And then when they come back, they're usually dressed down. They might be in jeans, they might be in other stuff and it's late at night and there's drinking. So you have all these cues that are set up to like, let's all just kind of loosen back and play and see what happens. And it's people's favorite part of the evening. But it is by far the riskiest and the least successful if you use the metric of laugh, laugh, laugh, laugh, laugh, because there's going to be groan, groan, groan

when stuff doesn't work. But it was set up right. The founders of Second City instinctively understood this idea that we need a safe space to play and to risk. And this is the thing that businesses need. If they're in the business of making something out of nothing, creating new things, all of that, where is their laboratory for people to play? And especially what we understand now in almost all businesses is you can't do it in a silo and that you want to use your audience. So how do you engage them in such a way that's not going to put it at risk your product or the thing that might not work? And that's not always easy, but I think great, great businesses have found a way to find that space of play for themselves.

And now one final word from our sponsors. Finding Mastery is brought to you by Cozy Earth. Over the years, I've learned that recovery doesn't just happen when we sleep. It starts with how we transition and wind down. And that's why I've built intentional routines into the way that I close my day. And Cozy Earth has become a new part of that. Their bedding, it's incredibly soft, like next level soft. And what surprised me the most is how much it actually helps regulate temperature.

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our community. Again, the code is FindingMastery for 40% off at CozyEarth.com. Finding Mastery is brought to you by Caldera Lab. I believe that the way we do small things in life is how we do all things. And for me, that includes how I take care of my body. I've been using Caldera Lab for years now. And what keeps me coming back, it's really simple. Their products are simple. And they reflect the kind of intentional living that I want to build into every part of my day. And they make my morning routine really easy.

They've got some great new products I think you'll be interested in. A shampoo, conditioner, and a hair serum. With Caldera Lab, it's not about adding more. It's about choosing better. And when your day demands clarity and energy and presence, the way you prepare for it matters. If you're looking for high quality personal care products that elevate your routine without complicating it, I'd love for you to check them out. Head to calderalab.com slash finding mastery and use the code finding mastery at checkout for 20% off your And with that, let's jump right back into this conversation. Do you think that's why teams in business don't operate as teams? Is it because they haven't built that play on, uh, unstructured way that

they are taking care of each other. Uh, there's a great quote. I came across the other day and it was from Francis Fry and Ann Morris who have a terrific new book. Uh, and they, we had them on the pod. They were, they're awesome awesome, right? But I think the line that I really respond to is that a bad system beats a great person any day of the week. And I think that you can teach your people to all these great skills, but if you don't have a system in which they can then do this work, then it ain't going to work. So I think it's less about the necessarily the individual team as what's the system they're operating in? You know, are they given a level of autonomy and freedom and opportunity? Are they given a lot of instruction and knowledge ahead of time? This is the thing about improvisation is it may seem like we're talking about just making it up.

There are so many rules and so many conditions and so many walls very specific well that stage is a specific size and We're doing this work at a specific time and then we stopped doing the work at a specific time and then there's note sessions And there's other there's all these things surrounding it because you want to have all that information To that this like, you know Charlie Parker the great saxophonist wouldn't be able to do the incredible improvisation that he became known for if he couldn't have played bye-bye Blackbird note for note beautifully so it's that tension

that right yes so from form to break form yeah is something that I've picked up from the arts that really has stuck with me like you have a rock-solid on form to be able to break form yeah yeah and same with structure no structure to break structure and um and there's a play on words no structure to no structure but k-n-o-w-N-O-W. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I love that. Or N-O, yeah. And okay, so do you think that the switch that would need to take place in business is more suited for an entrepreneur startup where it's like,

we're gonna create a whole new way of operating? Or do you think that it's small little incremental changes that would take place at the multinationals that would allow those enterprises to be able to get a bit more psychological safety, a bit more structure to play, a bit more practice on taking care, a bit more awareness on how to actually fail and fail fast and fail well and fail forward and all those things. What do you think? Yeah. I think it's easy to see the analogy to startups because having worked in theater my whole life, not just improvisational theater, but theater at large, the best training, and most startups, people who work in startups will tell you this,

the best training would be putting on a play, putting on a show, because you have to do everything. What is the play? What are you calling it? Where are you doing it? How are you doing it? How are you selling tickets? How are you promoting it?

Then it's got to go on. There's got to be lights. There's got to be a stage. There's got to be sound. All this stuff. The multinationals are the people who hire Second City to come in and work with them because they recognize that they want their teams to be more effective. And there are places like IDEO and other businesses, Zappos. Zappos has a YesAn library.

They've embraced this idea within their team. So there are many organizations. Anyone who's doing Agile, that whole idea around Scum masters and sprints and all that, very improvisational, like design thinking, very improvisational. So it's out there under other names. It's out there under improv. And I think it's becoming increasingly, God, when I started here, so again, late 80s, but then in the 90s when I was starting, you know, I was running things and working with leadership team, we had to do so much convincing to the Fortune 500s to hire us to do work. That's done. That's not the problem anymore. The problem might be budget. The problem might be time or what to focus on or how to focus on, all those things. But it's like people get it now. And I think that that, and now that more and more studies are being done and coming out about this particular form of improvisation and how it's been used in these different domains, that path is just going to become easier and easier and easier. The work itself is hard because it does demand both these individual sort of human practice that happens

and then the greater system by which these teams are allowed to operate in ways that they can be successful. And that's not the model Jack Welch was talking about at GE. How would you suggest a startup or a multinational start in practicing this? And I mean, the easiest thing that I think of is the problem, which is people that are no buts or yes buts. That's an easy one that I think you can knock the calcium off that. And the other one is when people know the yes and idea, but it comes off as dismissive anyway. And so it's like yes and, and then it's orthogonal to the original idea.

It's not actually a build. It's like an assertion of their first idea that they are just kind of trying to ramrod through. Like, how would you help create? I want to push back on the safe space, but I want to stay there for a minute. How would you help create that safe space to practice? Yes. And or to practice being a great teammate to have each other's back?

Well, I want to acknowledge the thing that you just said, which I think is very true, which is Nir Eyal is a guest I had on the podcast. And he has a phrase that it's not a superpower unless it can also be used for evil. So yes, it can absolutely be used for evil in just the way you're saying it by just saying it, but not doing it at all and discounting it. There are people who do that. If you have an experienced improvisational educator, such that come out of Second City and that come out of other places as well, working with one team at a time, because this is the thing, man, I want us to change the world. It's not going to happen one person at a time, and it's not going to happen en masse. The only place it can happen is team by team by team by team.

And we all work in some level of team at some point. So I would say to any business, it's like, start with a team. Start with one team and see what happens when these people are trained and then get let loose inside your company. Measure it. It's going to be better. So we talked about psychological safety. Do you know that origin story of Amy Edmondson when she was the postdoc and worked at the hospital where this whole idea came from? No. It's amazing. So people know the term psychological safety probably because

Google did a thing called Project Aristotle looking for the top quality of good teams. And psychological safety came out number one, this idea of creating a space in which you feel safe to make mistakes. So Amy Edmondson was actually studying as a postdoc at Harvard, and Richard Hackman was her advisor. And a hospital was having some difficulty with a study they were working on. Hackman was too busy, recommended Amy follow up on it. And the data she was getting was pretty troubling. So they were studying these nursing pods, these groups of nurses, and it was kind of clear that the nurses who were kind of the meanest and toughest to each other, they had the least mistakes in the data. And the nurses who were kind and empathetic with each other, they had the most mistakes.

And this was like backwards from what everyone's thinking was at the time of like, well, no, you know, like if you're mean to each other, that's going to cause more problems and then the opposite. And, you know, Amy was really worried because like, this is my first big study and I'm blowing it and it's going to be a failure. And so she had sort of an insight when she got taken to this dark space that maybe something else was happening that the data wasn't telling them. And she convinced the hospital to hire a third party to observe what was going on. And this person didn't know what the study was about. They were just there to observe these nursing pods and report back what was happening. And after two weeks, the report was kind of stunning because what they discovered was it wasn't that the sort of mean, non-collaborative nursing pods were making the least mistakes.

They were reporting the least mistakes. And the opposite was true of the collaborative, cooperative people who, because they were reporting the most mistakes, they wouldn't make those same mistakes in the future. That's psychological safety. That's great. Because the thing that I would say after reading some of that research, not knowing the origin story, is psychological safety is great yet. Yes. And you know, for what aim is the thing that I always make sure that we are agreeing on. That's right. This is not therapy at work, right? This is to create enough space that you can raise your hand and say, I made a mistake or I fundamentally disagree, or this is actually, there's some danger in this,

you know, like it's to create that space that you can get in the messy middle and be honest with it. Yeah. And so, cause you, cause you don't want the mistake on opening night and you don't want the mistake in the Superbowl, but we are going to make mistakes. So if you are in your training, in the times when the stakes are low, allow people to sort of practice those mistakes. I just interviewed Sally Jenkins, the terrific Washington Post sports columnist who wrote that great Martina Navratilova, Chris Everett article that came out a couple of weeks ago. And I hadn't realized that kind of, first of all, Michael Phelps, she talks about him and his coaching. And I didn't realize, really, I don't think I paid attention to all his level of social anxiety, but also what the coach would do with him, which is

he was real scared of getting water in his goggles. So they practiced him getting water in his goggles. I'm like, oh, that's, and you talk about this, you know, in your work too. It's brilliant. Bob Bowman is his coach. Yeah. And so they talked about the practice of imagery about that. And we even got down, Bob was on the podcast as well. We talked about the relationship between seeing success and seeing mistakes.

Yes. And so we were, oddly enough, like we didn't know each other for a long time. And he was doing the 80-20 and I was doing an 85-15. So 85% of the time seeing success, exactly how you hope it will go, laying that neurological pathway. And then 15% of the time seeing it go sideways and then figuring out spontaneously how to fix it. That's right. You know, while you're in it. And so back to your point though.

Yeah. Simply that this isn't easy. Being a human being is not easy. And I just turned 57, had a birthday last week. I am sorry to say this, it does not get easier. It really doesn't. Your body starts to break down, you lose people, you lose more people, you lose pets. Work gets harder in all these ways. However, if you have a practice and I, I do, we're talking about it and, and hopefully some, some wisdom and you continue to allow yourself to be curious, you are going to have so much incredible, um, an incredible toolbox from which to deal with all this.

You've had trauma in your life and we've been talking about, you know, the YesN framework for teamwork, collaboration, and building trust. Can you maybe share how this framework, how you used it or how it presented being useful when with your mom and your daughter. And maybe you can open up for the audience that doesn't know that part of your life. So actually, the story started before. And Adam Grant gave me a call. And he's the Wharton professor.

And I've been interviewed for like three or four of his books. And I ended up in none of them. But he's a friend. And he had a friend moving to Chicago. Her name was Ai-jen Poo. And he said, would you meet with her? And I'm like, of course, we meet with her. And Ai-jen was the executive director of a group called Caring Across Generations, as well as the National Domestic Workers Alliance. She was a MacArthur Genius grantee and like the best human being in the world. We hit it off and we ended up co-creating, my wife Anne and I with iGen and her team, co-creating an improvisation for caregivers program. We collaborated with the Cleveland Clinic and it was basically, we're going to take the behavioral science that we're doing and the improvisation and we're going to center it in

this care experience, whether it's you caring for your mom with Alzheimer's or whether it's you in a hospital setting. And, and one of the things, you know, my mom got Alzheimer's and I didn't know how to deal with it. And I noted and I blocked it. And I didn't recognize that you could use this power of yes and to navigate really successfully, you know, mostly successfully, uh, that, that relationship. And then where this really hit home is when our daughter Nora got diagnosed with cancer when she was 16. Um, and this was five years ago and, um, it was, you know, um, in her liver and lungs. And, you know, suddenly we're at the Lurie Children's Hospital here in Chicago and we, we used everything. So here's an exercise that, that, so there's an

exercise based on Nick Epley's work that we talked about. Um, and, uh, we talked about the fact that, you know, Epley says people get it wrong a lot, and one of the reasons that they get it wrong a lot is because we as individuals are oddly reluctant to share personal details about ourselves, and this is even sort of low-stakes stuff. So Anne, my wife, created this exercise called Universal Unique, and we pair two people up,

and we give them a banal topic like grocery shopping. We say, okay, person A, describe how human beings grocery shop, just everyday human beings. And they do that for a minute and it's boring. And we say, okay, take a beat. And I want you to think about how you personally grocery shop. Now do that. Completely different. And when you break it down, people are like, I learned about them. I relate to them. I understand something about their values. And this is from grocery shopping. So when we're in the hospital with Nora, and you get these new nurses and new doctors continually throughout even a day, and then new people the next day, and we wanted them to see her and see us and not just a disease. And so

I used this and a new person would come in the room. I'd say, Hey, I'm Kelly. This is Ann. We've both worked at second city for over 30 years. This is Eleanor. She also goes by Nora. And we have a hundred pound Bernese mountain dog named Benchley. Who's an asshole. Who who are you and they would tell us and suddenly it wasn't cancer it was Nora and suddenly it was like oh Kelly and Ann and and I remember one doctor we you know we we're home sometimes at the hospital at home that's just so complex and you know like the temperature was up so we we called and And I remember he said, come in. We'll check you in. And he said, when it was you who was calling, I kind of knew, well, if Kelly and Ann are calling, it's probably right that they come in because he knew us.

And the thing is, we're on this floor, floor 17 at Lurie, with all these kids with cancer. And there are so many kids who either don't have a parent who's advocating for them or can be there, or a parent who's just so scared they don't know what to say, or they want to be completely deferential. And I understand that, but everyone's going to make mistakes. And we all are in this together. We're in the soup together. And so we utilize this to create, you know, a team of caregivers, an incredible team. We lost Nora four years ago. It was about a year. And that's a whole other thing, man. That's, that's, that's this, this idea of, okay. And, and, and I will tell you the thing that if there's, if there's one aspect of this work that through the sort of grief period that helped me, it was the idea of relationship, right? That, you know, in improvisation, you have your ensemble, but your ensemble isn't just the people on stage with you.

It includes that audience and it includes the people who are cleaning up the room and the box office. And that's the way I've always been at Second City. We make heroes of the audience. And in turn, they make heroes of us. And that's what I needed. So I think it would have been very easy to just like go hide in a hutch somewhere.

And instead, you know, we rallied the team and to hold us up when we couldn't hold up ourselves. And they did it. It's still hard, you know, we, we rallied the team and to hold us up when we couldn't hold up ourselves and they did it. Um, it's still hard, you know, uh, it's, it's, it's, it's not the scene I want to be in, you know, but I, we had to play the scene we're in. Hmm. Finding Mastery is brought to you by iRestore. When it comes to my health, I try to approach things with a proactive mindset. It's not about avoiding poor health. This is about creating the conditions for growth. Now, hair health is one of those areas that often gets overlooked until your hair starts to change. That's when people pay attention. Now, that's why I've been loving iRestore Elite. It's a hands-free red light therapy device that helps stimulate dormant hair follicles,

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25% off and then plus an extra $50 on us because quality sleep is just too important to leave to chance. How much of you now, after what I would consider being one of the hardest things a human goes through is losing you are and how much now post post this grief and loss are holding back who you are yeah and i feel like the that type of well all trauma we go we swing one way or the other you know it's either like fuck it, here I am. Or it's like, uh-uh, you're not getting me because that shit's too painful. That's right. So how did you swing? So I've always lived out loud. My wife, Lyssa, much more of an introvert. I've always been an extrovert. I'm that on steroids now.

I have no room for small talk. And the other thing is, you know, I kept a CaringBridge journal through the entire experience and for a year after she passed. And so. What is that? What's a CaringBridge journal? So one of the wonderful things that exists out there in the world is this website called CaringBridge. And if you're ill or you have a loved one who's ill, you can update what's going on in sort of a blog form and people can then communicate with you. And if you've got a GoFundMe, you can have a link there and it's wonderful.

Like millions of people who signed on to our hearing bridge, strangers, who would reach out and either ask how she was doing or after she passed and checking in. And I wrote about everything. And then what I discovered, because I had done this as a way to help me, this was a selfish, this was a, the way to make me survive through this thing, is that then people would come up, all kinds of people, and share their trauma. And lo and behold, what I didn't understand and didn't realize is the vast majority of us are holding on to some really dark stuff. That was a surprise to me. So now that I know this, it has changed me immeasurably. I mean, I like who I am more now. In what ways? Because it makes, when someone does something that seems weird, bad, whatever, my first instinct is not to yell at them. It's to wonder what pain they have that is making them do that. I find that to be a healthier and more true

and human response. And it's not true always, whether it's an illness or something else that someone's lashing out. I'm not Pollyannic about this. I don't think the whole world is out to, you know, help everyone. But I think more people are probably good than bad. And we're all both, right? We have moments. I mean, meaning is made in moments. Life's made in moments. And, you know, I don't want to be defined by my worst moments. And if, you know, there are some that aren't so great. But I really strive for trying to understand and be curious. And then also to show some grace, you know, and that's this idea of can I take a beat? Can I just take a beat, try to reassess the situation, try to give some opportunity for whatever bad moment might've just happened to maybe get a little bit better.

And inevitably, like a good portion of the time it does. And that's just, I didn't have that patience before all this. I didn't have the wisdom before this. And I didn't know what I didn't know. And I continue now to know I don't know a lot of things, which is a great burden to take off my shoulders, uh, to, to, to not realize, to realize I don't need to have it right. Um, all the time. Cause, cause I don't, um, we have a mutual friend, Scott Berry Kaufman, and he taught,

he taught me the term post-traumatic growth. Um, and this idea that potentially you could take the worst thing that happened to you and have it affect you in a way that can be positive for yourself and for others. It doesn't make the bad thing not happen. It doesn't mean you're not going to be sad or angry or all those things. But it does give you a frame for moving forward, broken, bruised, battered, but move forward and try to find, you know, joy and flourishing and all the things that we're trying to find, you know, in our lives. And we have a son who's 25 and wants to be an actor and

is about to go down to Atlanta to start an apprenticeship with the Shakespeare Theater there. And I want to see him attack that stage. And we have friends, and Anne's got students, and I have colleagues, and there are all these people who are counting on us to bring what we can bring to our various ensembles. And we need them to do the same for us. So I don't know. I don't have the answers, but I got a playbook.

And luckily it's my life's work. Whew. I mean, Kelly, thank you for sharing that part of it, your insights through the pain that you've had. And thank you for clarity on the playbook. And we don't have play one, two, three, four lined out here, but that's really what your book is about. And that's why people hopefully can be interested in bringing you out to their organization and through you know we've got a first principle here at finding mastery is that through relationships we become yeah and it's the relationships that is at the center of this whole thing and you know it's evident here that improv

is more about connection yeah that's right it's more about seeing and listening and having someone's back and trusting that they're going to have your back far more than it is about comedy. That's right. And you're teaching the skills of relationships. You're teaching the skills of connection in an embodied way

so people know how to trust it. There's real evidence that they can get on the edge and then there's somebody else out there with them that's going to be in it and take care of them and do their very best. And like I'm I'm I'm stoked to have this conversation with you. And I'm like my heart swells a bit for folks that are feeling that they want to they want to grow. And they know that it's about taking some risks.

And this might be a really safe, fun, meaningful way for folks to, yeah. So encourage folks to get your book and give you a jingle to come out, you know, and give it a go with the team that they're on. And so where do you, just before we wrap up, I just want to get your, your hint at the future here. Where do you think comedy and AI and where do you think tech and connection are taking us? So here's what I... And that's a multi-part question. Yeah. I mean, the thing that the robots are not particularly good at is improv or comedy. They can tell some bad jokes, but jokes are one thing in comedy and they're not necessarily what

most of us consume, right? I mean, if you think about the comedy you consume, it is the sitcoms and movies and stand-ups, and they tell a lot of stories, and they're talking about their own experiences. So my wife is a tenured professor of comedy. She runs the first ever BA in comedy writing and performance at Columbia College. And she talks about, one thing I think that I love that she talks about in the realm of comedy is that in improvisation, we're doing a lot of perspective taking. We are getting suggestions from the audience and taking those suggestions and then spitting back what we think they mean to the audience. Stand-up comedians do and have to do a very different thing. They, and especially in the first five minutes of their act, they have to do perspective giving. They have to teach the audience how to watch them. And if you think about

your favorite standup comedians, that's usually talking about their flaws. Patton Oswalt is a schlub. Amy Schumer is a slut. John Mulaney is a drunk. So keep going. And then, and then from there, and it's, and this is a leadership thing, I think, which is like, I don't want your success story. I want your fiasco and the fact that you made it through. So when I think about comedy and improvisation, I think about mess and struggle and hard stuff and the ability to navigate through it and laugh our asses off. Because we're all kind of just figuring this crazy thing out together. So the future is the blend. The future is not that AI takes the place of.

It's that AI is additive too because you're going to need the storytellers and the problem solvers and the creators. And that is just not going to be that particular kind of technology. And we are going to need deep places of human connection and the shortest distance between two people is a laugh. So comedians who are already are truth tellers, you know, I mean, Colbert, Jon Stewart, Seth Meyers, I mean, you know, we, the, the, the late night, which used to be news, I know it's still there, but not in the same way. It's, it's now these comedians who are trying to show us, um, maybe a better way to live. Um, I think all of that sort of coalesces andces and I think it's a very powerful

concoction when done well and I think you can see it on the opposite side too you know I think you can see how people can use comedy to otherize individuals I have been asked to come on many a

program to talk about whether Trump is funny or not and indeed he is using comedy he is i think he is using it to make people separate and others and and that sort of thing um but it's definitely using wait how how is he using how is he using comedy oh well i mean it is it is uh he's he because he is getting us to all the names he calls people. He is an insult comic. He is Don Rickles

insulting people to have that tribe feel connected by making that other person an out person. They're out of our group and we're going to laugh at them as opposed to what we do, which is how do we bring you in?

How do we celebrate the thing that's different about you when we bring you in? So comedy can be used in both ways. It's a very powerful tool. And he has the cadence of a comedian. If you just, it's why, you know, when Patty Cooper, who is a standup, who does the sort of lip syncing of Trump, it's the reason that is effective is she is using her frame as a comedy

standup to simply use his words and facially deliver it in such a way. It's like, Oh, this is funny. That's what's funny. I see both of those points. I see both those points. Yeah. And you know, I guess a light segue here is that it's I don't know the psychology here. And I'm imagining you might have at least a hint at it is why we laugh, you know, in dark situations and like the gift that is. And it's like right at the edge of irreverence and like disrespect. And but when you're in it and like special operators have like this and special operators have that type of connection. And if anybody were to hear, we just had two seals on, special operators on, and they're like,

yeah, if anyone would have heard what we joked about and laughed about, we'd be instantly canceled. So can you open up a little bit of that, like the dark situation? Yeah. Well, there's a fMRI study that was done fairly recently in China, which exposed that the same part, region of the brain that processes an insight is the same part that processes a joke. So it is discovery. It is also a mechanism by which we diffuse our apprehension and our fear. So it's in the same way that you're looking at this, what looks like a really sweet behind of a fine lady that you're walking by and you realize it's a guy. And if you're a man like myself,

you laugh at it because you're like, uh-oh, what did I do there? And so there's many of those oopsie moments that we all have that then we laugh afterwards, which is really just sort of like, okay, I didn't want to go there in my mind. I went there in my mind. I can acknowledge it and now move past it. Or we use it as a way, which happens in traditional comedy all the time, which is a truth is revealed that you didn't expect inside comedy. So the processing, the understanding of humor, certainly there's

philosophers and sociologists and other kinds of scientists who've studied this stuff. My wife has a book coming out next year called Funnier. It's her theory of comedy. And the title is based on dads and moms coming up to her and saying, hey, are you going to make my kid funny? And she goes, I can't make them funny. I can make them funnier. I can take the thing that they have and then push it to the extent that they'll allow me to push it or discover it. And a lot of that is just these skills that we're talking about. And she has every one of these students, they all have a writing practice. They need to observe things in the world. They need to write them down. I mean,

we should all be doing this for, for whatever our jobs are, but, but, you know, like especially the young people who, you know, enter her program are, are what many people define as E2, right? They're, they're terrible on testing and they're all brilliant. And so she has to push them to do this work and really focus and be disciplined so that they can then let their incredibly facile, rebellious minds work in the most positive way possible and entertain us while also giving themselves a career that they can buy groceries and pay for rent and insulin and things like that. All the things that one needs. So yeah, so I think this stuff appears to be magic and it ends up not being and that's okay.

Give us one takeaway, something we can do at the dinner room table besides the universal unique which is a fun one you know give us one more that we could do at the dinner table or yeah this this is based on uh so our son nick was always a natural improviser very good could completely yes and through everything uh our dear departed nora was not uh in which she had a thing that that nick i think coined as norologues, which were her own personal monologues where she just wouldn't stop talking. He created a thing called the story bucket. When she had a story that turned into a Norologue, she had to drop it in the imaginary story bucket so that it would never be found again. So we created, we didn't create this,

there was an improv exercise that we used at the dinner table. You can also use it in the car with the kids. And it's called one word story. Very simple. You tell a story, one word at a time. So everyone just has to say the story, but they can only say one word of the story. And when we get to Nora, and she would say hippopotamus, when really all that should have been there was a the or an and, it would cause her essentially to lose the game. And she did not want to lose. So she learned how to's, the's, and's, of's could be very useful at different times. And every once in a while, she got to say hippopotamus. And that was a game that allowed her to build the ability to share a conversation. So you don't know where the story is going to go. And you just like, if you were to say the word today, and then the next person says,

I, and the next person says, went. And so we're just building a story. And you see where it goes. And it's amazing when it actually kind of all ties together and you just know there's a natural end. It's beautiful, but you can only do that if everyone's listening to the person before it, the person after. And,

and is, is making this. How does that work with a cell phone in your hand? It does not work with a cell phone in your hand. No, it doesn't. There's no cell phones. You've seen.

Listen, Kelly, thank you for teaching us about connection and comedy and improv and creativity and innovation and leadership and teammates, being a great teammate and teamwork. Like, thank you. And I'm stoked that people in our community that might not have known you or Second City now definitely do. And where do we drive people for your book? And where do you want to just kind of suggest people go check out your work? Yeah. So, you know, the book is available everywhere, but, you know, Amazon's probably the easiest right now. And then if you come to the Second City website, the Second City Works section is where my podcast is. We're also on WGN Radio. But if you come to the Second City website, you'll see the podcast and I'm easily found on social and I'd love to interact with folks. So feel free to reach out. And thank you

so much for having me. This has been a blast. Appreciate you, Kelly. All right. Thank you so much for diving into another episode of Finding Mastery with us. Our team loves creating this podcast and sharing these conversations with you. We really appreciate you being part of this community. And if you're enjoying the show, the easiest no-cost way to support is to hit the subscribe or follow button wherever you're listening. Also, if you haven't already, please consider dropping us a review on Apple or Spotify. We are incredibly grateful for the support and feedback.

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Until next episode, be well, think well, keep exploring.