Positivity and the First Rule of Improv

In recent articles I described what I call taking a widescreen view of life, that is, looking at the events of one’s life as broadly as possible and using a positive filter to interpret those events. I contrasted this widescreen concept with the notion of learned helplessness, in which a person’s interpretations of events as permanent, personal, and pervasive lead to negativity and lack of resilience.

This past week I was excited to rediscover another body of work that echoes the widescreen concept – and backs it up with solid research.

I’m referring to the work of Barbara Fredrickson, a psychology professor at the University of North Carolina who is a pioneer in the field of positive psychology and the author of the book Positivity. Fredrickson has developed what she calls the Broaden-and-Build theory to describe how positive emotions (such as joy, interest, contentment, and love) produce their benefits in our lives.

First, says Fredrickson, positive emotions “broaden an individual's momentary thought-action repertoire: joy sparks the urge to play, interest sparks the urge to explore, contentment sparks the urge to savor and integrate, and love sparks a recurring cycle of each of these urges within safe, close relationships.” By contrast, she says, negative emotions are marked by a narrowing of our mindsets and a limiting of our action repertoire to such options as attacking or fleeing.

Second, Fredrickson notes that this broadening of our awareness of possible responses “promotes discovery of novel and creative actions, ideas and social bonds, which in turn build that individual's personal resources; ranging from physical and intellectual resources, to social and psychological resources.”

Like me, you may have always intuitively sensed the link between positive feelings and the Broaden-and-Build effect that Fredrickson describes. If I think back to the times in my life when I’ve felt most creative and productive, most in tune with my environment, most alive, I would describe my feelings in such terms as expansiveness, openness, wholeness, and receptivity to new possibilities. By contrast, when negativity takes hold of my outlook, I feel constrained, limited, stuck in “this or that” thinking,

The Broaden-and-Build concept is also perfectly reflected in the primary rule of the improv stage: Total agreement at all times. Only by saying “Yes And” to the offers of her onstage partners can an improv performer open up the possibilities in a scene. As Charna Halpern writes in Truth in Comedy: The Manual of Improvisation:

“[By saying ‘Yes And’], one step at a time, each player provides a building block, until they have easily, painlessly constructed a scene. Answering ‘Yes , but …’ stops any continued growth, while a flat ‘No’ erases the block that has just been established.”

As a Daily Improviser, do you Broaden and Build by saying “Yes And” to whatever comes your way? Do you Accept the Possibilities in life’s offers and Advance with Positive Purpose, weaving supposed “mistakes” into the larger pattern by taking a widescreen view of life? Or do you stop continued growth – your own and that of others – by saying “Yes But” and “No”?