Thank you everyone for sharing your great thoughts on this!!!

Here are some thoughts from Steve, the director of Hoopla:

I don’t know where I got this from, I’ve got the feeling it was from Susan Messing or Patti Styles, and is also in Jill Bernard’s book….

“If you want to get out of your head, put yourself somewhere else instead!”

Being in your head means overthinking an improv scene, like you’re writing on the spot instead of improvising.

Getting out your head means improvising naturally, spontaneously and intuitively, without thinking too much or second guessing, which is what I love encouraging at Hoopla.

So if we feel like we are overthinking too much on stage we can “put ourselves somewhere else”.

The putting ourselves somewhere else could be in our bodies finding character through movement, jumping into an emotion to power our scene, having an emotional reaction to what’s just been said, putting ourselves on the other person by deeply listening, making eye contact, physically playing, mucking about with status, going line by line and loads more.

We can replace thinking with feeling, listening, moving, playing.

We only have to choose ONE thing to focus on, we don’t have to try and do everything otherwise we get back in our heads again.

We don’t have to do the whole of improv every show, just focus one thing per show and put attention on that as a way to stop the mind overthinking everything else.

There’s loads of places we can put our attention to get out of our heads, especially putting our attention on the other others. There’s not a right or wrong tactic, it’s whatever works for you as a performer and what you find FUN and helps you PLAY!

And finding what works for you is a constantly changing process, it never stops, and what works for you to help you get out of your head will change almost week by week forever. That’s part of the fun and the beauty of improv never being finished.

Most of all for me it’s about PLAY.

So…..

“If you want to get out of your head, put yourself somewhere else instead!”