Give me three hours with your employees and I’ll return them to you connected to their feelings, willing to explore vulnerability, and eager to take emotional risks.
I’ll also save them thousands on therapy bills. Not necessarily included in our corporate rate, but it’s a service I blissfully provide gratis.
It has been said that emotion is the universal language. It transcends identity, culture, and age. It gives us all the same basic tools for communication, levelling the playing field for all of us regardless of our origins or tastes. As actors, emotion is our currency. We deal in connection and reaction. But I am consistently surprised how most people (actors or otherwise) cannot identify our simple, base level emotions.
The culprit is our conditioning; we’re inundated with too much complicated information. We’re handed flyers in doctor’s offices with fifty cartoon faces all drowning in a myriad of synonyms, false emotions, and confusing red herrings. All this noise obscures our ability to simplify our emotions and relate to one other as human beings. Or actors to their audience. Or salespeople to their client. Or pharmaceutical reps with their doctors. Like I said, it’s our universal language -- no matter what we do for a living.
I love educating people from all walks of life about Discrete Emotional Theory. It’s a popular and simple way of approaching something complex as emotion. Every human being (all 8 billion of us) have the same four base level emotions – fear, joy, anger, sadness. All our feelings and emotions (as complicated and nuanced as they may be) exist somewhere on that spectrum. But, like a gradient of color or a beautiful chorale, they’re all constructed from the same simple elements. Three primary colors, twelve musical notes, four emotions.
Maybe human communication isn’t quite as complicated as we tend to make it.
To be clear, I’m on your side. I don’t want to suddenly create a work environment where everyone is a raging torrent of emotion. Probably not the most efficiently run office. You’ll end up replacing a lot of cabinets and those are expensive. But by using improv, reaction, and Discrete Emotional Theory, we can learn to be far more connected and far more intuitive about the needs/wants of those we communicate with.
In Groundlings-style improv, we explore emotion as our primary tool of turning a moment from something casual (“slice-of-life”) to an imperative moment (a “big day when”). It doesn’t take much to see how those lessons can be applied to work presentations, client calls, or meeting dynamics. Not to mention a higher emotional IQ can facilitate a more accurate, empathetic, and effective partnership between people. And what about simple intuition? Having a strong grip on the emotional spectrum allows us to better read those we interact with so we don’t waste precious time, energy, and resources on disagreement.
I see it in almost every corporate workshop I run. When I ask my participants to explore emotions, I see them respond with any of the following: confusion, apathy, indifference, sleepy, shyness, etc. These are all fantastic and wonderful traits, all of which deserve attention and consideration. But NONE of them are emotions. How we can all go this far in life without having a full command of our hearts and feelings is not just surprising, it’s downright dangerous.
So let the professionals -- us actors and improvisers who deal in emotion like bankers deal in capital – illuminate for you that universal language we all speak. That way, your employees can turn their communication from circles, loops, and Mobius strips into glorious straight lines.