Jenny Drescher Improv and Acceptance

Michael Scott Eger: Hi I’m Mike. I’m sure if you listen to this show you realize I’m not the best talker around. People like Jenny helped me get my voice and when I got my voice I became happier. When I became happier it was easier to be healthier. So please welcome my friend Jenny Drescher.

Jenny Drescher: You’re listening to the Eager to be Healthy podcast. Learn how to be happy while being healthy and living life to the fullest.

Michael Scott Eger: Michael On this recording we have Jenny Drescher. Jenny is an improv coach. Could you tell our audience a little bit more about you?

Jenny Drescher: Certainly. my my official, my company name is Bridge to Choice and I’m a choice coach and an applied improvisation facilitator, which is a very fancy name. think improv coaches very simpler way that you put it. ⁓ What that means really is that I work with people around being more at choice in life so that they are ⁓ no longer feeling like They are facing a lot of cants and shoulds and supposed tos and a lot of areas where they feel like they are, they are not at choice where they have no options. I teach them how to create options on their own instead, and find their courage and find the freedom to really be who they are. So I’ve taken personal coaching, life coaching, because I’m trained as a life coach. And blended it with improv because I do improv comedy on the side. I’ve sort of mashed those two things together to create other kinds of learning experiences so that it, so they kind of the process of getting out of one’s own way is, is fun instead of painful.

Michael Scott Eger: So it sounds like you make conversation playtime

Jenny Drescher: Yeah, think a lot of times I do. try to make conversation a lot more playtime. Absolutely. That’s a good way of putting it.

Michael Scott Eger: I think I need your services Jenny, I’m a loss for words. ⁓ Are you there? Yeah, I’m there. I am having a bad post moment. ⁓ I’m having personal difficulties. ⁓

Jenny Drescher: ⁓ no, okay, that’s alright. That’s alright, we all have personal difficulties.

Michael Scott Eger: Yeah, so You know when you’re dealing with conversationless and then you’re like, ⁓ maybe I should make my question better and I’m like Live in the moment. Maybe I should make my question better live in the moment. Maybe I should make our You there

Jenny Drescher: That’s great, I love that. ⁓

Michael Scott Eger: Yeah, so. Yes, I guess. What attracted you to improv?

Jenny Drescher: What attracted me to improv? That’s really great question. ⁓ I’ve always been sort of an arts person. So when I was very young, was always on stage. grew up in going to be in the school plays. my first role was in the Grinch Who Stole Christmas. I was six years old in the first grade. was ⁓ in a Cindy Lou who was only two. That was sort of the beginning of my performance history. so on and off again, all through my growing up years, I was always involved in the theater and in music and in creative pursuits. And then when I became an adult, ⁓ I really sort of didn’t pay attention to my creative side anymore. didn’t pursue anything creative and ⁓ sort of… that part of me became dormant. And then when I hit about my early thirties, I started to do music again and enjoyed music a lot and said, ⁓ I need to be doing more creative things. then fast forward to just a few years ago, I, I saw an improv show locally here in the Hartford area. And I said, wow, that looks like so much fun. I’d love to try that. And I talked to the people that were doing the show and they said, oh yeah, we offer classes, come down. And so I went for a workshop and I was immediately, the very first time I ever took an improv workshop, I was completely hooked because I found that it was just a pure play. It was just pure play, pure fun. And I had not laughed like that or enjoyed myself in that way in so many years because it was very freeing. It was freeing to just ⁓ the plane in playing in the myself and it was a totally different environment than anything that i had experienced for years no cell that was what attracted me to it with trying it once in getting addicted

Michael Scott Eger: What I understand through the exercises you went through with me is Improv takes away the big head and starts letting you react more to the conversation. almost like it makes a conversation more instinctual

Jenny Drescher: I that sounds really accurate actually. think ⁓ that’s a really spot on description. does. It forces you out of your big head, out of your ego, out of the part of you that says, I have to do this or I have to be a certain way. The rules of this game or that game, whether it’s an ordinary conversational situation or a speaking gig or any kind of… any kind of interaction really, you we all sort of have this ⁓ set of rules that we abide by and many of those are in place for a good reason. But unfortunately what happens is as we become adults and we, we grow into our societal norms and take those on, we get, ⁓ we get more and more in our head. We get more and more into this space where we, we pay attention to following the rules instead of just being ourselves. So yeah, improv does force us to be more instinctive. In order for improv scenes to work, we have to be able to be very in the moment, like you said, live in the moment. So we have to be in the moment, and we have to be real. And why we have to do that in improv is because if we are doing good scene work, then ⁓ We’re just following the emotion of the scene, and we’re following the story of the scene, and it emerges all by itself. We’re not actually, in all the best improv, we’re not making anything up. It comes naturally, it occurs naturally if we’re just following our real emotions and we’re following our responses to others. through really keen listening and awareness, that’s how a scene occurs. A scene actually will get harder and break down and be less funny. if people are trying to invent things. So people trying to invent a lot in improv, it doesn’t work. It’ll make the scene fall flat, it’ll make the comedy fall flat. So this is very true in real life as well, that if things are better for us, if we’re being truer to who we are, if we’re being truer to our feelings in the moment, and being better listeners and being fully present with anybody that we are having an interaction with. and i think that that they figure description spot on that

Michael Scott Eger: Well, you actually said some things that I liked a lot. And one of the things I try to teach my clients is love to strange, be comfortable being weird because the strange and the weird basically are our perceptions that we’re not normal. The thing is, we are that person that wants to be a weird and strange. So let’s accept it. and let’s kind of embrace it and feed that part of you because that part of you leads to a creative and personal freedom that basically says I am me. I’m sure of who I am and I’m OK with myself.

Jenny Drescher: wow that’s i could that’s really incredibly well put there’s no way i could ever put that better i think you captured it you captured it perfectly that’s exactly true i i totally agree that in day i don’t know about you michael but i was always the weird kid i was you know i would i i didn’t fit in i was ostracized i was always the strange no

Michael Scott Eger: Really?

Jenny Drescher: Can you relate to that?

Michael Scott Eger: ⁓ can I relate to it? Have you seen my childhood photos? Yeah. I was cross-eyed and scrawny and… It’s a good thing I had some social skills because I would have been completely lonely in school.

Jenny Drescher: Yep, exactly. Yeah, so you were the weird one too. And now, mean, but I love that you encourage your clients to kind of let to follow that weird and to let that weird out and to just allow it to be part of them as opposed to labeling it as weird or being concerned that it’s different or strange because, know, I don’t know about you, but I have found as an adult that all this stuff that made me weird when I was a kid is all the stuff that makes me magical now as an adult.

Michael Scott Eger: Another thing is you mentioned society’s norms. So we have this preconceived idea how we should behave, how we must behave, we are expected to behave. And then what we’re really serving is someone else other than ourselves. The true awakening I find and one of the things I like working with you about is that your work allows you to be much more in tune to the ⁓ voice that just wants to be, I don’t care what you think, I’m going to say it, and I have confidence that I’ll be understood.

Jenny Drescher: okay. Yeah, I get where you’re coming from. Yep. I do try to listen to that voice and I drew do try to to allow that that inner judge that we all have. try to allow it to be silent or make it be silent and say, you know what? I’m not going to worry about ⁓ not going worry about those norms, I’m not going to worry about trying to always be following the rules, because following the rules has always been a struggle for me. ⁓ And so at some point I realized it was a struggle that was hurting me, so I decided to sort of give up on that, which worked incredibly well, because then I started to have my own natural voice and So yeah, I agree with you that the process of letting go of other people’s agendas and other people’s shoulds and other people’s notions about who and how we’re supposed to be, when we’re living from a space where we’re responding to that, we’re just putting a huge strain on ourselves and it becomes too much work and it becomes really ⁓ painful. And I think that there are a lot of people, lot of people who’s struggle with that and suffer with that, because they’re trying so hard to be something that they’re not, or follow rules that aren’t really theirs, right? Rules that are not germane to who they are. And so, it took me a long time to find that confidence that you’re describing. I thank you kindly for that compliment. It did take a while. took a lot of years and took a lot of effort and so now that’s why I focus so much of my work on helping people be able to do that same thing, their own courage to be that confident and to be that free and live their life on their own terms. ⁓ But my hope is that the teaching and the work that I do with people gives them some of the shortcuts to getting there so that they don’t have to learn it the long hard way like I did.

Michael Scott Eger: You mentioned your personal choice coach. Mm-hmm. Okay, so how how does that relate to? How does that relate to improv and how to use improv to improve people’s personal choices or the other way around?

Jenny Drescher: Well, so an interesting thing about improv is that improv requires us to do certain things. Improv forces you to develop certain muscles, I guess you could say. So in improv, for example, you know, we talked a little bit before about how you have to be very present and aware. you know, so improvisers develop strong muscles in listening and awareness and responding to the people around them. Some of the other things, though, that that improvisers learn to do, or they learn how to take risks. Right? So if you are stepping out into a scene, that’s essentially taking a risk. You’re allowing a really high level of vulnerability. And so you’re taking a risk and you’re taking a risk and you’re also putting a lot of trust in your scene partner and ⁓ you’re, you’re risking failure on top of it. So you’re going towards the things that, that frighten you. Right? Because that’s essentially what you’re doing in a scene. you’re stepping out on stage and you have no idea what’s going to happen, that’s a high stakes situation, or at least it feels like one. Right? So there’s risk, there’s trust, there’s going towards something that’s really frightening, and there’s the possibility of failure. Right? So every time an improviser steps out on stage, they could look like a complete fool. The scene could fail. The scene might not be interesting. the scene might not be funny, the audience might hate them. There’s a really high level of all kinds of things that could go wrong. So in going towards ⁓ the risky, scary things, as improvisers do this and get better at doing this, they build those muscles and they also build muscle around building from failure. So in other words, there really is no failure in improv. Everything is simply building on the last thing that occurred. So improvisers really turn the whole concept of failure completely on its side because ⁓ they learn to look at everything that comes up in a scene as a gift. So if ⁓ I’m in a scene and my scene partner say, points a gun at me, right, his intention with gesture is to point a gun at me, and I look at that and I say, hey, can I have that banana? then there’s, know, we run the risk that there was a complete breakdown in communication. He might look or feel stupid because he meant that as a gun, I perceived it as a banana, right? So that’s a situation where the scene is going in two different directions. But what we’ll do as improvisers is he will change on the fly and he’ll say, ⁓ yes, well this banana is blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And we both take that quote mistake, that quote failure. and build something further from it. So the story will only be changed and enhanced and added to as a result of that quote, mistake. So these are the kinds of things that we all also need to do in everyday life all the time. These are the exact same skills that we use in real life every day all the time. We improvise every day. Nobody wakes up with a script next to them. At I didn’t. Did you wake up with a script this morning? Exactly. So all of these elements are all the same skills that we use every day. We go towards risky things. We trust in other people. We have to listen and accept offers. We have to have situational awareness. And if we really want to achieve ⁓ super level confidence and success and move towards something bigger and better for ourselves and

Michael Scott Eger: No, I normally wing it.

Jenny Drescher: and a solid security that becomes unshakable, then we have to develop those same skills in a really strong way. But we don’t actually, you all those skills that I listed off, the listening, the awareness, the taking on failure, those are not skills that we generally are taught with any degree of rigor in school environments. So the way that we learn them is we have to decide to learn them on purpose. So that’s A very long explanation of the connection between improv and personal development is that I developed those same skills in other people that improvisers learn. when you learn, mean, think about how different your life would be if you hadn’t started your journey a few years ago when you were unhealthy, right? Before you became eager to be healthy. And you took some those, you took some pretty big risks, right? Prior to that, you’re risk taking muscles and you’re probably not quite as strong as they are now.

Michael Scott Eger: You mentioned something there that I really want to expand on. Listening to you, it seems like improv teaches you faith. Faith that you will survive the scene. Faith that you, you know, no matter what you’re given, can, you can work out faith that as long as you roll with life, the scene will be perfect. What do you have to say about that?

Jenny Drescher: think that you are extremely perceptive, Michael. I think that ⁓ is absolutely true. Improv does teach you faith. And I really like the examples that you just used. I totally agree, because they do. A lot of people tend to think of faith as some sort of religious thing. And I do not. But I do have a tremendous amount of faith in the moment. I have faith in myself, and I have faith in other people. ⁓ I could not possibly come up with better examples than the ones you just gave. think those are absolutely perfect. That yes, improv definitely teaches you how to have faith and how to build trust in yourself and in the people around you and the things will work out.

Michael Scott Eger: Alright, I’d like to talk about how these skills help you in everyday life and gives you that personal freedom to talk to anyone.

Jenny Drescher: Well, that’s a great question. ⁓ So I guess when it comes to the everyday life thing, one of the things that I think is dangerous about the time we’re living in is that we’re so overwhelmed with information and a lot of people struggle with how to put all that information into perspective. ⁓ One thing that improvisers develop ⁓ a good skill in is situational awareness. That’s a skill that I think I see more people in need of that particular skill in real life. know that I have seen personally in my life since I’ve become an improviser that over the last few years, my situational awareness has increased and has served me well. ⁓ I mean, everything from, to use a really sort of silly example, ⁓ at the store today, was at the grocery store and I noticed something going on because I was paying more attention to my surroundings, I was able to observe a situation at the grocery store that I wanted to avoid, an interaction that was going on with a couple of people, it was very subtle but it was not something I wanted to be a part of, and I was able to just veer away from it. And I think that that kind of situational awareness is something that’s becoming a little more No, not a little, but a lot more difficult for people to come by because of the overload of information. And we have, we all are walking around with cell phones and there’s information and technology surrounding us. So we actually are living in a time where we need to raise our awareness because there’s, there’s more coming at us that we need to be able to manage in any given moment. ⁓ You know, outside the safety of our own living room. I’m sitting next to my wood stove and it’s snowing like crazy right now, but if I were outside my front door, that would be a different matter, wouldn’t it? So that’s a skill I think that helps a lot is awareness. Listening, certainly everybody needs to be a better listener. We all always need to be working towards being better listeners because listening is, I mean, it’s the crucial skill for any form of communication that has any meaning or any hope of success. It’s also the primary means through which we really truly connect. ⁓ If we’re not really listening, then we’re not really present and we’re not really connecting with other people. And it’s smoothed the path. I think also improvisers work around accepting offers, a concept called accepting offers, which is really to say that everything we do in life is an offer. So every interaction we have, improvisers refer to those as offers. Right now you’re making an offer to me by being present on the line with me here today and asking me interesting questions. And I’m making an offer back to you by replying to those in the best way that I can. So those are, we classify all of that as offers. And when we respond to other people’s offers, we have the opportunity to ⁓ accept those fully and build upon them the way that we would in an improv scene, or to summarily reject them, which is what happens in an argument. And we all do that. We all do both of those things. I mean, we have an argument with someone most of the time. We’re starting out with blocking their offer, denying their offer. So the relationship between improv and accepting offers as it pertains to real life is that ⁓ say an employee in an employer situation, an employee comes to the boss and says, hey, I’d like to take Tuesday afternoon off, and the boss comes back with something like, you take too much time off and I don’t think you should do that. He’s essentially blocking it. He’s not accepting anything about the idea that’s been presented to him. So that’s considered blocking and denying. We have very, very strong blocking muscles, all of us. We are culturally and societally raised to have much stronger blocking and denying muscles than accepting muscles. ⁓ Improv really works to teach us to accept what other people offer and build from it, which means that we’re building agreement, we’re building solutions, we’re creating options that we would not otherwise have access to because we were so busy blocking that that door couldn’t even be opened. So I think that probably accepting offers is one of the most important skills that most people need. Most people need a lot of development in. I know that it’s made a huge difference in my life.

Michael Scott Eger: Before I met you, had a conversation coach by the name of Wayne Elise. Apparently, I still need a little bit of work, but he did teach me a few things. I’ll share two of them. One is focus on what your audience is thinking about and talk about that. And the second one is in terms of conversational dynamics, the correct answer is always yes.

Jenny Drescher: Tell me the first part of that again. Are you talking about like speaking to an audience or just a normal?

Michael Scott Eger: I mean anytime you’re like, anytime you’re out in public and you see someone you want to talk to, sometimes you just have to look at their eyes and see what they’re looking at and make educated or a or feel what they’re thinking about and start talking about that. And then you have initial commonality and it could It could be like you’re just asking about how that painting makes them feel, but you start off where they’re thinking and it’s a lot easier to start the conversation there than where you’re thinking. Yeah.

Jenny Drescher: I think that’s really great advice and is directly related to improv principles because yeah, mean you’re reaching out to meet people where they’re at in essence. That’s kind of how I interpret what you’re saying and I think that that’s fantastic advice. I would agree that, I think most people need to do that more.

Michael Scott Eger: And as you were talking about blocking and accepting offers today brought me to think about yes is always answer. I might disagree with something you’re saying, but by me saying yes first and maybe then changing the course of it, it flows a lot easier than the… No. Because nose are cold, yes it’s warm.

Jenny Drescher: get where you’re coming from with that. I think that that’s probably true. mean, what I’m hearing is I’m hearing you reflect the foundational, sort of the foundation of what we mean when we’re talking about accepting offers. ⁓ So yeah, think that, there’s definitely ways that we shoot people down right away or we don’t shoot people down right away. It may not always literally be the word yes. So accepting an offer doesn’t necessarily mean ⁓ Accepting an offer doesn’t always have to show up ⁓ as the actual word, yes. But what I love about what you’re saying is that you’re expressing the idea that we have the mindset in place, that we have a yes mindset, which I think is even more powerful than the word, because the yes mindset that you’ve taken on, it allows that space you’re creating, you’re automatically creating that space in every interaction where you’re saying, I’m accepting what this person offers me and I’m going to add my own to it and you’re taking the judgment out of it. So when we talk about accepting offers, you’re doing it without that judging. You’re doing it without deciding whether it’s right or wrong or whether you agree or disagree. What you’re doing is you’re accepting the reality of what they’re offering in a charge neutral way. so the fact that you’re doing that is powerful and more people know it. need to be doing that exact thing that you just described. think that’s awesome.

Michael Scott Eger: Okay, well, I’m taking your group with April.

Jenny Drescher: April 18th, yes. The ⁓ speakers.

Michael Scott Eger: and Okay, I guess it’s time to start wrapping up. Is there any actionable steps that you’d to give to us before you plug yourself?

Jenny Drescher: ⁓ I would say one of the best tips that I can give you is as an improviser and I’ve given people that I’ve trained in improv this skill is that when somebody asks us a question, one great way we can train ourselves to start accepting other people’s offers is very simply to count to three very slowly before we respond, which sounds like, sort of trait advice, and I know that a lot of times people get advice like, ⁓ if you’re angry, count to ten before you answer. But what I would encourage people to do is, in any interaction at all, no matter what the emotional charge of any given conversation is, that you train yourself to fully listen, and listen for the sake of listening, as opposed to listening ⁓ in order to give a response. And counting to three forces you to be more present with other people. forces you to listen better. It will help you to become a better listener. That would be probably my chief tip off the top of my head.

Michael Scott Eger: Cool. So what would you like to plug today?

Jenny Drescher: ⁓ Well, I would love to see folks come out for my April 18th workshop. It’s going to be a ton of fun. It’ll be 9 o’clock in the morning to 1 o’clock in the afternoon on ⁓ Saturday, April 18th at the Ramada in East Hartford. And ⁓ people can buy, you can register online on my website, is www.bridgetochois.com. and click on the header that says, and stand out. And that’s the name of the event coming up. So it’ll be, it’s for anybody that wants to become a better speaker. And it’s also for anybody who wants to improve their confidence with public speaking and ⁓ feeling confident in front of an audience or even in their ordinary interactions.

Michael Scott Eger: cool. Well I want to thank you for coming on the show. I look forward to talking to you again. Well next time we’re out at our speaking engagements.

Jenny Drescher: Thank you so much for having me on Michael, this has really been a pleasure and I look forward to having you on my show and I get it going hopefully in just a few weeks. I will be, yeah.

Michael Scott Eger: Are you working with Doug? Excellent. Till the next time.

Jenny Drescher: Thank you for listening to the Eager to be Healthy podcast. If you liked our show, please give us five stars on iTunes and sign up to become a healthy bee at eagertobeehealthy.com slash podcast.