Improvise Your Way to High Performance in Sport and Life

By David Smith

“Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face.” – Mike Tyson

This famous quote really hit me hard, not as hard as a punch in the face but almost so when it comes to the very foundation of what we consider “performance” within sport. Athletes will spend hours upon hours in training and practice to develop their physical conditioning, technical skills, and tactical strategies. Sport psychology itself highlights the importance of developing mental and psychological skills as well, helping athletes, coaches, and other performers learn how to execute their well-trained capabilities in various performance scenarios.

Yet, with all that training, preparation, and strategy toward high performance, what happens when you get punched in the face? Maybe not (or maybe so) literally, but more like when you encounter adversity or unexpected situations. You’re caught with your pants down and everything you planned is out the window, you are left holding the bag so to speak. So, what are you going to do? Improvise!

In fact, the best performers in sport hardly bother with predefined strategies, they are a master class of flying by the seat of their pants. Able to operate and perform with high levels of competency and effectiveness within a dynamic situation where unpredictability is the name of the game. Think about some of the best athletes in the world, from Muhammed Ali, Wayne Gretzky, Maradona, Pelé, Michael Jordan, Diana Taurasi, Megan Rapinoe, Serena Williams, and others.

Rather than going in with a plan, these high performers are strong in their ability to perceive the situation as it develops, identify opportunities for action (affordances), and make a decision to act quickly enough for positive effect. Relying on their own knowledge, experiences, motives, and relentless training to guide them, they rise above others in their game intelligence, quick wit, creativity, courage to take risks, and ability to perform under pressure. When it comes to challenge and adversity, they improvise, adapt, and overcome.

In American culture, we often perceive the arts and athletics as polar opposites. Most theatre and band kids will tell you that competitive sport is the last place they would ever want to be. Yet, for as much as what separates the arts from athletics, there is much more that brings them together, to the extent that when it comes to performance, athletes have a lot they can learn. For example, learning how to improvise, adapt, and overcome when facing challenge and adversity. These aren’t inherent traits reserved only for the best of the best, they are skills to be learned and practiced alongside the physical, technical, and tactical competencies that athletes work on every day. For this, we can ask, “whose line is it anyway?” and take a page out of the book in Improv Comedy.

Improv Comedy is a form of live theatre where performers create scenes, characters, and dialogue on the spot and without a script or plan. Taking suggestions from the audience for guidance, improv comedy requires creativity, quick wit, collaboration/team work, boldness and willingness to take risks. Every scene created is a unique expression of those who create it and is always different. It is fast paced, unpredictable, spontaneous, and fun. It serves well to help performers learn how to:

• Think on your feet and stay in the moment
• Adapt to new and unexpected situations.
• Make, self-correct, and move forward from mistakes.
• Be creative using only what you have available around you.
• Take what’s given to you and roll with it.

In fact, when we learn more about our favorite high performing athletes and what makes them so successful in their capabilities, we will see many of these same skills that improv actors use on stage, every time. Yes, they are skills, which means you can learn and train them too, doing improv comedy! In fact, the rules of improv serve well as a philosophical guideline that I think all good athletes and teams should embody.

• “Yes, and…”: Affirm what your teammate has created and add to it. 
  • “Yes”: Accept the reality your scene teammate establishes. If they say you’re a wizard, then be a wizard!
  • “and…”: Add a new piece of information to expand on that reality. For example, “Yes, and I just used a spell that turned your hair green!”.  
• Avoid blocking: Blocking opposes “Yes, and…” undermines teamwork and inhibits creativity.
  • Blocking is for opponents, not teammates.
• Listen actively: Pay close attention to your teammates and opponents, both verbally and non-verbally. Perceive and understand what they are adding.
• Make statements: Offer information and ideas to guide and add, rather than only asking questions which forces your teammate to do all the creative work. 
• Make your teammates look good: Focus on supporting and elevating your teammates rather than trying to be the star of the show.  
• Embrace mistakes: Treat each error as a new opportunity to explore and build the scene. Recover quickly and move forward.
  • If treated well, a mistake might just turn into an unexpected advantage.
• Commit to your choices: Be bold and stand behind the actions, statements, mistakes, and decisions you make.  
• Stay in the present: Focus on what is happening in the “here and now” of the moment, rather than relying solely on pre-planned ideas. 

Individual performers (athletes, coaches, etc) and teams as collective performers who embody these basic “rules” of improv serve to set themselves up for success at high performance, regardless of the final score. By “rules” they operate as constraints, structural guidelines that help to let your creativity flourish, develop a shared language of trust among teammates, allows you freedom to play and ultimately to achieve flow. In fact, playing out a scene in improv is often likened to playing a sports game. Once you learn the game, you can play. The flow and energy of each game is built upon the dynamic you build together as a team toward achieving a common goal.

Sport, just like the arts, is an expression of the best of who we are. Contributing the very foundations of who we are into our performances to express ourselves and show what we are capable of achieving while having fun along the way. Win or lose, you won’t find a better measure of success.