I spent close to three decades thinking I was a good listener because I was a good lawyer. Deposition questioning trains you to listen for the gap — the inconsistency, the opening, the word a witness didn't mean to use. It's a real skill. It is also, I've come to realize, a fairly narrow one.
Then I started training in improv, first at Second City in Hollywood and later teaching my own classes here in the Triangle, and I had to unlearn something I didn't know I was doing: listening to win the exchange, rather than listening to build something with the other person.
The rule that changes the room
Improv has one foundational rule: "yes, and." You accept what your scene partner has offered as true, and you add something to it. You don't block. You don't redirect to the thing you'd rather be talking about. You don't wait for your turn to make your point. You take the offer and you build.
A negotiation where both sides are "yes, and-ing" instead of blocking doesn't feel like a negotiation. It feels like problem-solving.
Try that in a client meeting. Try it in a partnership dispute where both sides have dug in. The instinct in most legal training is to block: to say "no, but," to find the flaw, to protect your position. Sometimes that's exactly right — you're there to advocate, not to concede. But I've watched "yes, and" open doors in negotiations that "no, but" had welded shut. A negotiation where both sides are "yes, and-ing" instead of blocking doesn't feel like a negotiation. It feels like problem-solving.
What this looks like in practice
It's not about agreeing with everything. It's about receiving what's actually been said before you respond to it — a distinction that sounds obvious and is, in my experience, rare. Most of us are composing our reply while the other person is still talking. Improv makes that impossible to hide, because if you're not actually listening, the scene falls apart in front of everyone. There's nowhere to fake it.
That's the version of the skill I bring into a classroom of total beginners — lawyers, first-time performers, retirees, whoever shows up. Nobody needs acting experience. What they need is the willingness to actually hear the person across from them, which turns out to be harder, and more useful, than most of us expect.
If any of this sounds relevant to how you negotiate, manage a team, or just want to get better at being in a room with other people — that's most of what six weeks of improv actually teaches. The stagecraft is a bonus.
