So I know I have been posting a lot about this conference, and today is the last one, I promise! I just had a refreshing and insightful time, and it’s important for me to process and share my experiences when I go through those moments! Today I want to share a little bit on how NACURH is the ultimate “yes and” positivity experience, and think about how can that be translated to everyday life.
So this conference involves a lot of cheering to represent your school or different regions of the country. It also involves a lot of dressing in crazy costumes, and playing childhood games when there is down time. This automatically puts people in a heightened state of being, and provides an atmosphere where you can step outside of your normal comfort zone to try new things. In improv world we set ourselves up for these experiences by playing warm up games or giving ourselves a moment to shout ready before a scene. It’s taking that moment to hype yourself up, get a bit of adrenalin flowing, so you can really put it all out there on stage. Now imagine being in that heightened state for a weekend where you can just have fun!
So the conference is not just going to crazy town with costumes and yelling, there are a ton of learning elements throughout the weekend. From motivational speakers, roundtables, to educational sessions called programming put on by conference delegations. While I was at the conference I presented a program called Bold Choices. It was meant to show some improv games and techniques and connect those ideas to personal development and leadership. My session did not go as well as I had hoped, and I was really in my head about the whole thing. Leading up to the start of the program I was having doubts, and thinking about ways to change the ideas, on the whole my flow was not in a good place.
Luckily NACURH gave me just want I needed, the top 40 programs, as picked by the participants, get to be resented again, and somehow mine was selected. With my second chance, I decided to rock it out, and I put more positivity and a huge gush of excitement into the event. This allowed me and the participants get into a great flow, and really put the program on trajectory for higher level of success. Afterwards I had several people staying around to talk about the event, and one of my favorite comments was, “I always wanted to try improv but never did it, and I thought where else then NACURH to really go and do it.” It was awesome, and I totally felt in the zone.
Sometimes we get exactly what we need, and NACURH gave me that chance. I had the opportunity to “yes and” the opportunity to present my program again and it rocked. Coming out of that experience I evaluated the difference between those two programs and how I approached them. That insight will help me to be a better presenter in the future, and I am excited for the next time I really get to teach some improv!
So my question is how do we take the NACURH environment out into our everyday life. To end my session I challenged the attendees to make bold choices in really taking their organizations and the people in them to the next level through a positive manner. I also asked them to evaluate the number of times they said no in the coming week, and to step into the opportunity of saying yes!
