Being Flexible and Adaptable

One of the tools I use when facilitating and training, is improvisation, or more accurately, the practices of improv. Robert Poynton, a friend, and collaborator, in his great books (Everything’s an Offer and Do Improv) succinctly précis these practices into six words.

Let Go
Notice More
Use Everything
With the centrepiece being -everything is an offer

These have been invaluable to me, over the last 20 years, and I to continue to practice them. They are concepts that are useful for life, for work, and in the unusual pandemic lockdown that we have been in. In this time, we have had to flex, pivot, and above all, adapt to change, and do it faster.

I’ll go into each of these practices in more detail as to why in later pieces.

Everything is an offer is interesting to start with.
An offer in imrov terms is anything you can take and use to help create flow. This is as opposed to a ‘block’ which stops things moving.

When issues arise, I like to try and think ‘what is the offer here?’
In this time of the ‘long pause’ the offers to me have been many.

Focussing on myself, getting myself in shape mentally and physically (and to help with the highs and lows many of us have gone through (weekly, daily, sometimes hourly) with the issues that lockdown presents, to appreciate nature and discover new places on my walk on Hampstead Heath as there is less need of sticking to the route that I know takes an hour, that has led to new discoveries. Time to appreciate the importance of my home and family.
Learning new skills and passing them on (how to Zoom for friends and family, and using it for work). Seeing how I need to shift, and still keep to some kind of structure to the day.
Letting go of the frustration of feeling I haven’t ‘done enough’. So, for me, this time has been a gift (let alone for the bigger things that it has done for the environment)

So, as you reflect on this time – what could be the offers that you see?