Some of our favorite sites:
Little Green pig Theatrical Concern
Past Mouthings-Off:
Perfection Is Created, Not Achieved
Seeing the Refrigerator in the Road
Why Improv Is Absolutely Essential
Soft Focus and the
Go Ahead, Screw Up.
Creativity: What Is It
Art of Telling a Story
It's Good for You!
and Who Has It?
Mouthing Off
The True Comfort Zone
If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end; if you look for comfort you will not
get either comfort or truth only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin, and in the end, despair.
Many of the students who take the FIZ and improv courses and programs I lead say that they're there to expand their comfort zones. That's a noble and useful goal, I think, and improvisation is a wonderful way to pursue it because improv is a fun and safe way to act silly and not take oneself too seriously.
Unfortunately, some of those students who say they want to expand their comfort zones don't do much to make it happen. I believe that when some people say they want to expand their comfort zones, they mean they want to become more perfect when what they really need is to achieve a sense of peace about their imperfection.
The only way I know to expand your comfort zone is to get out of it. You have to court what you want to avoid--making yourself look like an idiot. It's like how athletes work themselves to exhaustion and weakness in order to build stamina and strength.
By venturing outside of your comfort zone, you are likely to encounter befuddlement, incompetence, a sense of being lost, and embarrassment, among other things. And you will find that none of these things in itself is fatal or even very harmful--at least not immediately.
The long-term effects of these feelings can be harmful and perhaps even fatal because they are stressful emotions and the deleterious effects of stress have been well documented by science. So it behooves you to address the causes of stress and learn how to handle stressful emotions. You learn how to handle them, just like anything else, with exposure and practice.
Students report over and over again that the activities they do at the start of an improv course cause anxiety. Perhaps they're doing something as simple as improvising an abstract gesture and yet they experience an elevated pulse rate, sweating, and shortness of breath. However, by the end of the course, these responses have almost always diminished and have usually disappeared.
What happened? Through repeated forays outside their old comfort zones, the students have annexed new territory. They are not more perfect but they realize they don't need to be and that perfectionism is often a barrier to excellence.
My UNC MBA students came up with a term for this new territory outside one's comfort zone, the F***-It Zone or FIZ (the mystery is revealed). You enter the FIZ, get comfortable there and it becomes your new comfort zone, leaving another frontier of FIZ outside to be conquered.
One of those MBA students wrote that the FIZ really isn't even a zone because it's infinity. FIZ represents opportunity, the limitlessness of yes. The comfort zone is definitely limited; there is a fence that offers a false promise of safety from the unknown and the frightening, which is what opportunity and adventure look like from inside that fence.
That fence around the comfort zone not only keeps things out but it also keeps you inside.
When I have students give spontaneous speeches in improv classes, I frequently push them to exaggerate emotions that they're only hinting at. (I frequently direct actors this way too.) Sometimes students object, saying, "That's just not me." I see their point but it's not really the point.
I want these reticent students to burst out of their comfort zones and into the FIZ. I want them to risk appearing foolishly enthusiastic about seemingly inconsequential things like chili or shoes so that they can bring that same fervor to truly important things like their dreams, love, and justice.
Go too far, I exhort my students. When they do, it is astounding the reception they receive. Audiences repeatedly comment that they now not only understand what they might not have understood before but they also share the speaker's passion. Emotion isn't just about sharing your heart; it also helps you to be comprehensible.
So what seems like outlandish exaggeration to the speaker from his or her interior perspective, usually seems just right and real to the audience from its exterior perspective. This going too far develops an innate potential for speakers too. Somehow, because they can go over the top, they don't always have to and the audience is aware of that potential. I can't articulate why this is but I've seen it often enough in speakers, actors, and singers to know it's true.
After leaping into the FIZ and surviving it, the next step is practicing. With repetition, what once seemed outrageously risky and scary becomes a matter of course. Part of that is familiarity and part of it is expertise. You get better with practice. So, for example, a speaker striving to communicate more passion becomes more adept at it. You learn.
And yet you'll still make mistakes. But because your comfort zone is bigger, the mistakes won't get to you like they once did. Your comfort zone may become so big that others may never even be aware or care that you're making mistakes in delivery. (This is not, incidentally, an argument for doing sloppy work but rather one for letting confident, comfortable delivery enhance your solid efforts.)
Good communicators and performers must be vulnerable. You cannot share passion without sharing yourself and I think audiences can tell when you're faking that. Being at ease sharing yourself, mistakes and all, is the comfort zone to be sought. If your comfort zone is less than that, it is not as safe as you think and it carries the risk of great limitation.
-Greg Hohn, Director
We have
video footage
on the site!
Anoushka (who prefers her new nickname Anoo) has added
Dancing Moon Bookstore in Raleigh as
a venue where she does intuitive readings. Follow the link to find out when to catch her there.
Dan got three bottles of booze for Christmas--and he's not even much of a drinker!
Greg ran an 8K (five-mile) race on Thanksgiving morning in 34'11"--not bad for a guy who
considers himself a cyclist first and runner second.
Jeffrey is currently rehearsing The Waves, an adaptation of the Virginia Woolf novel by
director Jay O'Berski, which will be presented at Duke, Feb. 27-28. Jeffrey also starred and
co-wrote A Trailer Park Christmas with Rachel and they were interviewed on North Carolina
Public Radio's The State Of Things.
With three daughters, Jill has the most kids of any Transactor.
Mike quit smoking a year ago and is still clean!
Nancy is celebrating her 10-year anniversary as a Transactor this year by buying the company a
roll of aluminum foil.
Rachel has directed Souvenir for Ghost & Spice Productions. It's a wonderful musical play
about the true-life figure Florence Foster Jenkins and stars Lenore Field and former Transactor
Mark Lewis. Souvenir runs Jan. 9-24 at Common Ground Theatre.
Steven and his wife Kelly welcomed their first child, Eli Jaxon Warnock, into the world Dec. 30.
Transactors Improv has T-shirts! They're black with our lightbulb on the front and our logo and
motto on the back in white. Available in S, L, and XL sizes, they are 100% cotton and cost $10.
Contact us at
transactors@transactors.org if you want one or even more.
To subscribe to our e-mailing list, write
transactors@transactors.org.
- C.S. Lewis
Winter 2009
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