This quarter I took two classes that seemed to have nothing to do with each other. One was improv. The other was leadership.
The leadership class wasn’t what I expected. It didn’t spend much time on how to run a team or make decisions. It kept returning to a more basic question: do you know yourself? The class had a line for it — leadership isn’t about managing the external world; it starts with knowing who you are. What kind of person you are, what you’re afraid of, what you turn into under pressure. Before you lead anyone else, get yourself straight.
Improv was more direct. No theory — you go on stage, and whoever you are, the stage says it out loud for you.
Near the end of the quarter, I looked back and realized the two classes were about the same thing. One let me see my patterns from the outside; the other helped me understand, from the inside, why those patterns exist.
Start with what happened on stage.
One exercise asked everyone to communicate in a language that doesn’t exist. Not French, not Japanese, not anything anyone has ever heard. Just make sounds, and carry the meaning with tone and expression.
Something interesting happened. The syllables coming out of my mouth kept sliding toward English phonetics. It wasn’t deliberate — but it wasn’t accidental either. My body automatically chose the safest path, while my brain stood by watching, knowing this wasn’t the point, and did nothing to intervene.
I knew it in the moment. And I couldn’t stop.
It was a small thing — so small that nobody in the room noticed. But it lodged in my mind for a long time, because I later realized it wasn’t a classroom anecdote. It was one person’s default response to the unknown.
Another exercise was long-form scene work. Several people go up together; characters, plot, and conflict all get invented on the spot. Some people walk naturally into the center of the story — starting conflicts, pushing the plot, making choices that could fail in ugly ways.
I would drift, without noticing, into the supporting role. Watch what the others did, then respond in a way that couldn’t be wrong. Present, participating — but never actually standing in the middle.
There was an even subtler moment. Some exercises were competitive: say the wrong thing and you’re out. Being out carried no penalty — you just stood at the side and watched everyone else keep going. And a thought surfaced: if I got it wrong on purpose, I could retire early to the audience and watch other people take risks, in perfect safety, exposed to nothing.
I did exactly that. More than once.
A supporting actor is at least still on stage. Getting out on purpose is giving up the chance to play at all — trading a small failure for the security of never facing a real one.
Three scenes, one pattern: gripping the known when facing the unknown, retreating to the edge when it’s time to stand in the center, walking off stage when I could have stayed on.
Seeing all this on stage, I just thought I was timid. A tool from the leadership class helped me understand what was actually underneath.
The tool is the Enneagram. Roughly, it sorts people’s core drives into nine types, each anchored in a deepest fear and a deepest desire. Not the horoscope kind of fuzzy personality sketch — more like an X-ray. What it shows isn’t your behavior, but the thing under the behavior that drives it.
I’m a Six. A Six’s core fear is losing security and support. The core desire is certainty — knowing the ground under your feet won’t give way.
Once I knew that, everything on stage suddenly had an explanation. Sliding back into English phonetics in the invented-language game — my body reaching for a safety rope in the face of the unknown. Choosing the supporting role in scene work — the center is too exposed; the edge is safer. Getting out on purpose in the competitive games — rather than risk a real failure, trade a small, controlled one for the safety of watching.
It isn’t timidity. It’s the need for security making my decisions for me.
The leadership class drew another distinction that stayed with me: self-perception and audience-perception are two different things. Self-perception is “who I am”; audience-perception is “who others think I am.” For a long time I believed I was doing the former, when I had actually been doing the latter — scanning for what kind of person the situation wanted, then molding myself into that shape. Retreating to the supporting role, getting out on purpose — it wasn’t that I really wanted to be a spectator. I cared so much about how I would be seen that I preferred not going on stage at all to being seen messing up.
To put it plainly: fear. Fear of being seen not good enough.
Improv has one first principle: “Yes, and” — accept whatever just happened, then build on top of it. Don’t negate, don’t predict, don’t try to steer. Your partner says something, however absurd; you catch it, add your own piece, and the scene stays alive.
The system I seem to have been running for years is a different one: “If, but.” If this happens, what’s the contingency? Good plan, but where are the edge cases? That system is excellent for analysis and planning. But improv doesn’t reward preparation; it rewards presence. Presence means you don’t know what happens next — and you trust yourself to respond.
Looking back over the past few months, in many situations that called for action, what actually happened was this: analysis stood in for action, preparation stood in for setting out. There was always a reason to wait a little longer — “the timing isn’t ripe,” “observe a bit more,” “one more round of research.” Every reason was reasonable — reasonable enough that I didn’t notice I was stalling.
It’s not that I don’t know what to do. It’s that I’m afraid of doing it and getting a definite answer. As long as I stay inside the analysis, the outcome stays unknown — and the unknown at least still holds hope. Which comes down to this: “I’m not ready yet” sounds so much better than “I don’t dare.”
What I went through on stage, over and over this quarter, slowly shook some things that used to feel solid.
The best scenes rarely came from the most “correct” response. They came from someone making a mistake — and everyone turning that mistake into part of the story. A mistake isn’t an accident; it’s material. The stiffest scenes were the ones where everyone was trying to say the right thing: everyone protecting themselves, no one willing to take the first risk, and the scene dying inside its own safety.
The same holds off stage. Looking back at the moments that actually pushed things forward, few came from perfect preparation; most came from taking the step while not ready. And the stuck moments almost all share one feature: it wasn’t that I couldn’t do it. I was waiting for a “good enough” version of myself to show up first.
But that “good enough” never comes. The standard rises with you.
John Gardner has a speech on self-renewal, and one idea from it keeps circling in my head: we all want a scoring system that tells us when we’ve made it. Accumulate grades, experiences, achievements — believing that once we cross some finish line, we can finally exhale. But when you get there and stand up, another track stretches out ahead.
I’m twenty-five. Not old by any measure. But I can already feel a particular stiffness setting in — not stagnation, but being too practiced at control. I’ve gotten so good at managing uncertainty that I’m losing the ability to simply stay in it.
The hard part isn’t throwing away the old script, or swapping it for a new one. It’s learning to go on stage without a script. Which isn’t aimlessness — it’s no longer insisting on what must happen in act three, but knowing the rough direction and allowing everything unexpected along the way.
I’m still far from this. I still sneak English phonetics into the invented language, still edge toward the side of the stage, still reach for an analytical framework the moment things turn uncertain — when what the moment actually needs is one breath and one honest response.
But the crack has appeared. The stage let me see my behavior; the classroom helped me read the fear underneath it. Together, they showed me a whole person — someone who dodges the unknown the same way on stage and off.
Seeing it is not the same as changing it. But seeing it at least means that the next time I shrink back into the safe zone, a voice will go off.
The biggest thing this quarter taught me: self-evolution doesn’t start with becoming a stronger person. It starts with becoming a more honest one. Improv gave me a place to practice honesty — those few unscripted minutes on stage are among the only moments with nowhere to hide.
The hardest door to push open is the one with no script behind it.
I’m learning to walk in that direction.
Every improv scene is built brick by brick, with no blueprint. Nobody knows the final shape, but the building itself is the point.
Gardner ends his speech with a story. A young woman died in a car crash; folded in her wallet was a line she had kept:
Meaning is not something you stumble across. It is something you build into your life.
I used to think “build” meant having a plan. Now I’m starting to think it might mean having the courage to go without one.