I finished my Improv Level 1 at Second City last week and am proud of myself for sticking with it and keeping my promise to embrace the uncomfortable. It’s funny—never in a million years would I have dreamt of doing improv, but here I am, writing about it. I am pretty sure my past self would have had a heart attack seeing me do this.

For starters, what is improv? It’s short for improvisation. And what is improvisation? It’s the act of creating or performing something spontaneously, without a script. Scary, right? I am one of those people who overthink and doubt myself about whether something is right or wrong, good or bad, etc. Improv is not like that—it’s about accepting change and knowing that it will be alright.

The overall theme of Improv Level 1 has been the idea that it’s okay to be silly. You can do embarrassing things, and that’s fine. The course spanned seven weeks, filled with fun games and reflections on what we learned.

Here are a few memorable activities from those seven weeks:

Yes, And: Receiving a Gift

This is the most important principle of improv. Two players are in the scene. One player pretends to find a gift for the other player, who has to guess what the gift is and accept it. For example, I might pretend to get a bouquet for my partner, and they just have to guess it. There’s no need to correct them—just accept their guess.

Five Things

This was our warm-up game where the whole class formed a circle. We would ask the person beside us a question involving five things. For example, “Tell me five things you hate about Toronto?” The idea is that there’s no wrong answer; you just say whatever comes to mind. I remember asking someone to name five Marvel superheroes, and they responded with five colors instead.

Freeze

This game involves four people—two in front, two in the back. The two people in the front start a scene, and at any time, one of the people in the back can yell “freeze” and replace one of the people in the scene, assuming their frozen pose. This was challenging because sometimes you could put the person in a difficult pose, and they would have to continue the scene from there.

Word At A Time Expert

In this exercise, several people on stage become one expert. It starts with a question from the pretend audience, and each person contributes one word at a time to create a sentence answering that question. For instance, we pretended to be a scientist who made a cobra dance, and people asked us questions about how we did it.

Only a Certain Number of Words at a Time

A group of us would get on stage, and each person would receive a number from the audience, representing the maximum number of words they could say. For example, we pretended to work at NASA and tried to sell rockets, each speaking only the designated number of words.

Beyond those games, I learned some key lessons:

• There’s no right or wrong answer.
• Trust your partner. This is also essential for teamwork at work.
• Yes, and—always.
• What, how, when—setting context right away is crucial to avoid confusing the audience.
• Be specific.

Overall, this has been a very enlightening experience, and I am excited to start Level 2 next month, where we will focus more on character work. This is getting exciting!