Did you get a chance this last week to think about how your outlook on life might change if you started responding to offers or opportunities with a “yes and…” answer, rather than a “no because…,” or the dressed up version of No — “Yes, but.”
I didn’t realize how transformational an improv night would be for my personal goals until I watched the premier improv group Second City to DC perform for a school program at the Kennedy Center recently.
For the first activity, students were partnered. Partners could only talk in questions to each other. No answers. Just questions. It became a pretty pointless conversation as they responded to the other’s questions with yet more questions!
All they were doing was putting the burden of the conversation on the other person. When we respond to a question with a comment or story, we are advancing a conversation. We are furthering the story if you will, so the goal of conversation is not to just respond with questions, but to take the burden of the question, own it, and reply to it.
Listening
For the next activity, Partner A was instructed to start the conversation. Partner B then had to use the last word Partner A used to start their side of the conversation.
It was actually quite entertaining to see the students try to form a conversation using each other’s words, especially since they had to stay in listening mode so they could hear the final word before figuring out what they were going to say.
Like most of you, I am reflecting on the year of 2017, which has been a year I’ve tried to focus on listening to love. In past years, I’ve listened only to answer, rather than truly listening and pondering about what is being said. In fact, I’ve worn a bracelet all year to remind myself of my goal to listen.
I’ve learned that we really are better together, especially when we listen to one another. In the past, my favorite definition of teamwork was a lot of people doing what I say, but I’ve since learned that teamwork is really about listening to the contribution of different opinions, different viewpoints, and different insights so we can become more than we could have ever hoped.
As a leader, the most important thing I can contribute is to listen to those ideas and make sure those ideas are celebrated and brought into the pool of wisdom that we have together. As we move forward into a new year, I challenge you to set a goal to really listen with love and discover a new direction of life as you respond to new offers and opportunities with “yes, and…”