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Hello everyone, welcome! I know I see some of your light. I've got a 14-hour trip home for our British friends.
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Alright, everyone welcome to the Yes And workshop. My name is Julia Cuppy, and I am here today representing a regional theatre company called La Jolla Playhouse. I will be presenting with this fine fellow next to me.
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Thank you! And your name is what, sir?
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So, I'm Adam Cuppy, and I’m from Coding Zeal. We are a software consultancy specializing in web and mobile applications. But more importantly, we make a lot of fun of ourselves.
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That's true! And for those of you who are wondering, yes, we are married. No, we are not brother and sister. We don't want to confuse that.
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Okay, so we're going to get started right off the bat. For those of you who are familiar with improv, raise your hand. Excellent! Very good!
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Some of you are like, maybe, maybe not. Alright! Well, today you’re going to learn how the skills required in improv can enhance your own collaboration and communication skills in your everyday lives. So that's what we're going to attempt today.
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Why are we here though, Mr. Cuppy, even further? Oh God, I was doing these slides. Yeah, so here we are.
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So, the big question is: Why would you want to learn about improv in conjunction with programming and software development? This is something that I've been pondering for a long time.
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When we submitted this talk, it was like, let's hope we can come to a conclusion on that. But the bottom line is this: the skills required to perform improv can be used as an additive technology for creating ideas.
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This is where it becomes really important. For all of us, as we've learned not just at this conference but many times over, a lot of the things that we do are exploratory. That's almost the nature of our job.
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Our value is presented at a time when we're creating something new. So improv presents a great opportunity to correlate those two because you're exploring ideas that you've not explored before.
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That's the whole idea. And it is in a pretty low-risk environment. Super low risk!
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In most improv scenarios, everyone goes in knowing that you're going to fail a lot. Yeah, right? You're going to fall down a lot.
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In improv, failure is actually a gift. Mistakes are gifts that can take us to places we never expected. We like to celebrate them in improv.
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So we're going to actually practice failing a lot to start off this workshop. How does that sound?
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With that being said, we need to set some ground rules. It’s really important that when we start doing these types of exercises, we have a safe environment where we all can feel like we can take risks.
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Even though it might seem low risk, for some it might actually be embarrassing to talk in front of people. Psychology Today says the number one fear for most people is public speaking. Do you know what number two is? Death.
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So, to go with the death theme of our conference, I just need you to sneak that in there. We're gonna do the thing that's even worse than death.
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So with that being said, we are in a safe environment. We’re just going to put four parameters for us to talk about.
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First, we need to turn off the internal editor in our heads that says, 'Wait a second, I don’t think I can do that because I’m going to look stupid.' Nope! That needs to be shut off for a moment.
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We need to be fully present with our partner. That might mean I’m going to ask you to go to someone you might not know, and say, 'Hi, my name is…'