One of the main reasons I got into improv was not to just learn to be someone who could be funny on stage. A lot of my reason for starting in this art form was to learn to overcome stage fright, learning to speak in front of people, and what a lot of it has turned into is learning to cope with failure. To perform on stage, especially in this art form, is to fail.
In my personal experience, I was raised to believe that in failure, the way you learned to show you cared for something was by being angry with yourself. The idea of walking away from a failure not feeling some form of shame, self-deprecation, or anger was not something I truly was able to move past until my late twenties, and obviously even now I continue to struggle with this disjointed idea of what it means to “care” about something.
Let’s be real here, I perform improv in a small rust belt city where chances of becoming some big name in the acting/ theater world are slim to none. Even if that was something that was on the table I don’t always know if that is something I truly want, but that doesn’t hold back my brain from destroying my confidence after a single poor set.
What I can say, is that with time, the pain has (very very slowly) been reduced after each poor set by continual renewed effort in training my brain and thoughts to approach these failures as opportunities for growth. (And of course with the help of an excellent therapist. If you want a referral let me know!)
So for any of those improvisers out there (or you know, just people who struggle with self-confidence issues) here are a few tools, reminders that I reiterate to myself after a particularly hard moment where I didn’t meet the expectations I set for myself.
Focus on Mastery over Results:
What this means in the context of performance (improv or otherwise) is that the essential skills you need to be successful have nothing to do with the desired outcome. If you want the audience to piss themselves laughing I can guarantee the way you get there is by being focused on the specific skillsets that make you excellent at your craft. Perfect a (not racist) accent to show off. Do excellent object work (make eggs on stage better than anyone else), be the best listener (“I loved how they brought back that tiny detail from the beginning of the set”). Ultimately all of these skills are things you can master individually, and if you get them down perfectly in rehearsal, they’ll become second nature in your shows where you’re almost guaranteed to kill. So when you are sitting there angry/ sad/ upset/ however you feel, spend that time focusing on what wasn’t effective and use those failures to propel your growth.
Individual performances never define you. Don’t say “I had a bad set” say “That was ineffective, what went wrong?”
It’s easy (well it is for me) to walk away from sets feeling like “That was an awful set, I’m awful at this, and I let the team down.” At the end of the day, no individual set/ performance defines you. Moments of failure are just as fleeting as moments of success. So when you don’t perform well, remind yourself to separate your distaste for that last performance from who you are as a person. If you are looking for some additional thoughts on this, there is a fantastic bonus episode on the “Yes, Also” improv podcast about “Reducing Improv Anxiety” where they speak with a Clinical Psychologist about how to deal with our negative thoughts.
Nobody can make you feel like shit but you.
This was one that has taken me a long time to embrace but slowly I am getting there. Having been raised to see failure as a time to be overcome with grief and anger, it’s taken me until just the last few months to recognize that ultimately we have control over our emotions and thoughts (With some exceptions aka people with serious mental illness). If you truly sit down and decide to tell yourself “I am not going to let this ruin my day” and decide to act on those thoughts, it will take time, but you will begin to get better at letting the negative thoughts subside. Two quotes that really help nail down this bullet point are from a podcast I enjoy called the Daily Stoic:
“Don’t let the assholes get you down.”
“The greatest form of protest to a tyrannical leader is to not become them.”
I’ve been using these quotes to help cope with the fact that the “free” world is turning into a mix of Idiocracy and the Evil Empire (Watching the US turn into dictatorship is a blog post for another day) but besides the external entities that we can’t control, there is that asshole that lives in our heads that tells us what we can’t do, what our limits are, and what we “deserve.” Don’t let the asshole in your head get you down. Fight the urge to let those negative emotions sweep you away. You don’t need to become the negative thoughts in your head. Choose otherwise. (For anyone struggling with serious mental illness I recognize this is not always the case. Sometimes it's not necessarily a choice but an imbalance. If that's you, keep fighting like hell.)
You chose this because you wanted to grow, which means you need to be uncomfortable sometimes.
Growth is not easy. I started doing this because I wanted to better myself and that means embracing what sucks sometimes. The first two years of performing I had extreme anxiety the week leading up to the shows I was in. Slowly, that became a few days from performances, then a day or so, and now it doesn’t hit me until a few minutes before going on. That’s enormous progress from where I used to be and that’s something that needs to be recognized. Just because you might not be getting the external validation you’re looking for, does not mean there aren’t other aspects of you that have improved since you started doing this. So when you’re feeling a bit down, remember where you used to be.
Don’t you dare compare yourself to others.
“The killer of joy is comparison.” There are going to be people that go on and absolutely kill. On your worst nights there will be people that showed up and excelled. The thing to remember is that every single one of those people have shown up and had a bad show. You just weren’t there for it. For every person that shows up and makes us laugh our asses off, there are several other performances where they awkwardly washed dishes while talking about a scene that went nowhere. We are human, we fail, and if we compare our worst work with the best work of our peers we are never going to feel good enough.
Fuck the audience (Aka who cares what the audience thinks)
I owe this one to my previous coach Jo Rou. There will be people in the crowds who may be there to make a snap judgement on what kind of performer you are based on this single performance. There are going to be some people who were dragged there by a friend who hate this art form. There are going to be egotistical/ arrogant performers who show up to re-affirm their beliefs in themselves (luckily my theater has very few of these). But regardless of who is in the crowd, what you need to focus on is never the audience, it's on your craft, on stage with your friends/ fellow performers. For me personally, my best shows have always been the ones where the thought of doing well was my last thought. The only thoughts I have are “I’m having fun, where can we take this?” Those are the times my characters are most believable, the most authentic, and that’s because I’m not trying to be anything I’m not. I can guess what some people are thinking “well what about a performance on a big stage/ when someone I care about shows up, etc.” Regardless of who shows up that night you are only as good as the authentic person that you allow yourself to be on stage. The external factors don’t matter. If pulling your authentic self on stage is difficult, then you know what you need to work on.
There are a few more ideas I could crank out but it’s Sunday and there are other things I want to do today. Ultimately what I hope anyone can get out of this is to learn to speak to yourself more kindly. The world can be a brutal, unforgiving place and the one part of it that we truly have the most control over is the one between our ears. We can let the negativity of the world seep into our thoughts or we can actively fight it and carve out a space in our heads that not even the Evil Empire can access.
A big shoutout to Imposters Theater for the opportunity to grow, and to all of the friends I’ve made from doing this silly art form. If anyone ever wants to chat about this, the door is open.
If you’ve made it this far, thank you for reading. I hope you don't let the assholes win today.