Get Your Kicks on Route 66

The other day, while improvisationally surfing through my local cable channels via remote, I ran across a classic tv drama from the 60s called Route 66. The show – inspired no doubt by the Jack Kerouac novel On the Road – involved two young drifters named Todd and Buz who tooled aimlessly across the USA in their Chevrolet (Corvette, that is).

In their inevitable satire (titled Route 67), Mad magazine riffed on one of the show’s improbabilities by having Buz look at a map and ask “Hey, Todd, how do we get back to Route 67 from here?”- to which Todd replied “What difference does it make? We haven’t been near Route 67 in weeks!”

(This is, I admit, a re-creation of the dialogue from my memory, but hopefully you get the point.)

Well, I suppose Mad would have a field day with The Daily Improviser blog as well. Aside from the fact that it isn’t a “daily” blog (intentionally so – the “daily” part modifies “improviser,” not “blog”), many of my articles can seem to cruise as far away from The Daily Improviser’s titular mainline as Todd and Buz's Corvette.

But actually the detours aren’t really so far afield. As I’ve said before, improv is all about making connections – especially between concepts and topics that at first blush might be wholly incompatible. And just as a long-form improv performance can take a while to tie together all of its many threads, ultimately all of the topical routes through which I meander in The Daily Improviser encounter some common milestones along the way.

Since “getting there is half the fun,” I’m still building these common improvisation-based leadership concepts as I journey along, and I’ll make a rest stop soon to pull together some of the common concepts I’ve gathered. Next time, though, I actually will return to my own Route 66 and show some direct connections between improvisation and a topic I’ve been building in my recent articles: How leaders learn to lead.

Visualizing Success: The Daily Improviser Learns to Lead

In my previous two articles, I’ve described strategies that leaders can adopt to transfer their classroom learning to reflexive application of that learning to live situations. Last time I described the stealth learning strategy (“learning while doing other things”) put forth by Daniel Goleman, Richard Boyatzis, and Annie McKee in their book Primal Leadership: Learning to Lead with Emotional Intelligence. In this article, I’ll describe a couple of additional strategies.

Goleman et al. mention another strategy that once again takes a page from the champion athlete’s playbook: The use of visualization.

As Matthew Syed describes in his book Bounce, top-level athletes are masters of manipulating their beliefs to envision the inevitability of success in critical situations. Similarly, Goleman et al. cite studies that demonstrate the power of mental rehearsal in helping Olympic athletes prepare for key events. They go on to say:

“Leadership success depends on your ability to clearly picture yourself achieving your ideal state, and then maintaining that focus…. If you first visualize some likely situations at work or at home, you’ll feel less awkward when you actually put the new skills into practice.”

Using visualization has some definite advantages for the developing leader:

• It can be done anywhere, anytime;

• It provides a safe way to experiment with new behaviors before actually trying to apply them in live situations;

• It reinforces a positive, motivating approach to development by encouraging the leader to develop a vivid picture of what success will look like.

Next time I’ll cover one more recommended strategy the Daily Improviser leader can use to transfer his “book learning” to a live environment – a strategy that relates directly to the application of improvisational skills to the practice of leadership.