Month #12: Making myself uncomfortable
A Year of Monthly Challenges
My final challenge was to try something that makes me uncomfortable, so I decided to join a class at Endgames Improv.
I chose improv, first, because performing makes my palms sweaty, and second, because I’ve heard it’s a great way to develop useful skills like active-listening and collaboration.
Once a week, I pile into a small space with 15 other adults and make a fool of myself for three hours. It’s refreshing, hilarious, and sometimes uncomfortable (but mostly refreshing and hilarious).
At first, I was nervous about performing for strangers, but as we’ve gotten more comfortable with each other — and I’ve realized that messing up only makes it funnier — the nerves have eased up a bit. I’m still not very good at it, but no longer feel the pressure to be witty or original in every skit. I’m also learning which skills need the most improvement.
In improv, mutual understanding is everything. If I enter the scene with a rigid plan, I find myself scrambling when someone inevitably takes it in a new direction; Maintaining an open mind and keen attention to others are critical to success (not just in improv, of course), and skills I’m working on developing.
But beyond all the fancy lessons and applicable skills, the class is just really really fun. It creates space for a kind of play that gets choked out of most adulthoods. Spending time constructing and inhabiting absurd new universes lets me remove myself from my own daily context, and offers new perspectives on human behavior.
So far, the class has been really rewarding. I’m looking forward to the remaining weeks, and still a little nervous about our public graduation show.
It’s a wrap!
That’s it! I completed a year of monthly challenges. What’s next?
When I started these challenges, I had a mental list of habits to change or adopt. Now that I’ve spent a year focusing on them, I’m planning to take a few months to just observe my current habits and see where I landed — What stuck? What didn’t?
Once I’m ready, I’ll write a recap of the entire experience and talk about how it’s affected my mindset moving forward.
Next blog entry to be posted in early 2019.
