You’d think good improv would be about who can speak the best. The pros will tell you that’s not the case. Those who are the best at it understand that good improv is about who listens the best. It’s the ones who have the capacity to fully listen to what is being said by the other actors (as well as the audience for that matter). Those are the ones who are able to make amazing things happen in improv comedy. What we know is that listening is not the same thing as simply being quiet while you are waiting your turn to talk. Listening is hard work that requires discipline and confidence and really a strong sense of personal maturity.
The line separating improv comedy and marriage is about to get pretty blurry. These are four ways people who do improv have to listen while doing their thing. Pay attention to how well this fits into marriage. Here are the four. First: listening (ok or paying attention) to physicality. They say 93% of all communication is non-verbal. In improv that means in particular if the actors are doing pantomime you have to pay attention to where the stove and the table are so you don’t accidentally walk through them. In marriage, it’s paying attention to body language and facial expressions in a conversation with a spouse. Second, listening to the words that are spoken by the other person. In improv mishearing the words can be the stuff of comedy. In marriage, mishearing each other can get real weird real fast. Third, listening to the emotion behind the words. Are they being said with anger or sadness? Is there pain behind the words or does the speaker say it in a sarcastic or humorous way? Hearing that impacts the way you respond. Fourth, listening for the overall story. You know your spouse well. Presumably better than anyone else. How does what is being said fit into their overall story? Understanding that can dramatically impact how you hear it and then how you respond.
I would suggest of the ten principles this one is the toughest. What makes it the toughest is that it is so important and we operate on the assumption that we are good at it when in fact we are not. I mean we’ve got ears and assuming we have 20/20 (or whatever you call it) hearing, we can hear things. We hear the low hum of the refrigerator. We hear the traffic noise outside. We hear the baby crying that somehow always ends up in the row behind us on the plane. We can hear. We can hear. So, when our spouse talks to us, we can hear. We hear him. We hear her. But as we know all too well, hearing is not the same as listening.
And there is such competition for our listening isn’t there. It’s those little boxes that we carry around with us every day that we are paying attention to on average five, six, and seven hours a day. It’s what’s on television and the radio. It’s the things that occupy our minds whether at work or the latest madness we get off our newsfeed or what’s happening with family and other people we love and care about. The irony of it is that by the time we get to be with this one person we love the most and want to be with more than anyone else, lots of time the LAST thing we want to do is all the work that goes with listening. So we sort of half listen since we think we already know what they’re going to say anyway. The night before I sat down to write this particular blog my wife and I were talking about something. She was sharing and at one point, like a dope, I responded to what I thought she was saying while she was still in mid-sentence because I just knew what she was going to say. She gave me a “let me finish” and naturally I was completely wrong about where she was going.
Let’s face it: we live in a noisy world. I love to do long distance bike riding. One of the things I love about it are those stretches when it’s just you and the road. Some people like to listen to music or podcasts while they ride (not with headphones by the way. That’ll get you killed!). I like the connection I experience with the road without the distractions. That’s how we need to approach time with our spouses: Embracing the idea of shutting out the noise long enough to connect. It’s turning off the TV and the phone, and the computer screens. It’s shutting out all those distractions long enough to say: Tell me what’s going on with you and then actually paying attention to and engaging with the answer.
And for most of us that does not happen by accident. It requires commitment to it and intentionality about making it happen.. I was interested to see in preparing this principle that of all the exercises there are in learning how to do improv, it appears there are more games designed to make the actors better listeners than literally any of the others. They have one exercise in which the actor is required to start their line with the last letter from the last word the previous actor used in giving their line. That makes you listen in a different way, doesn’t it? Another exercise has one actor making a statement, the second actor then must restate what was said accurately but in their own words and then find a way to affirm what was said. As I said at the beginning, the ones who are good at improv work very hard at listening. That says a lot to me. It says a lot about how hard it is to listen well. It says a lot to me about the degree to which real listening does not come easily or naturally to us. It also tells me a lot about how important listening is. It reminds me that the people who excel at improvising marriage are the ones who work hard not so much at speaking as they do listening.
Improvising Conversation (these are more pro-tips than question)
- When your spouse is talking, let him or her finish. You’ll be glad you did.
- When you have an angry spouse in front of you, don’t listen to the anger. Listen for the pain. All anger is rooted in pain. If all you do is respond to the anger, it probably won’t end well. But if you can hear the pain that’s driving the anger, and respond to that, that’s when healing and understanding can begin.
- Make it a mutually agreed upon priority to turn off the phones, TV’s, computer screens, and other assorted electronic distractions at certain times raising the possibility of actual talking and listening. If you have distractions, I mean children, at home obviously it needs to be a time when they aren’t around.
- Listening well and asking questions that indicate you have listened deeply is more important than coming up with great advice. I don’t know about you but most of the time my advice isn’t that great anyway.
- What exercises or strategies might be helpful in your marriage to help you learn to listen well to your partner?
Next Principle: Be in the moment