Unfortunately it's time to take a lesson from: Improv comedy

I'm not going to talk to you about yes and, don't worry, it's not that bad.

I used to be an actor. I'm what they call professionally trained. This just means I spend several years of my life and several thousands of dollars learning how to act. Time and money well spent, obviously.

The thing about enjoying acting and wanting to do it a lot of the time is that you wind up spending a lot of time around actors. And a lot of them are great, some of my best friends are actors, but I'm sure no one will be to scandalised if I say that some people become actors solely to show off. And worse, some people people actors because they want to look cool.

The problem with this is that it makes them selfish performers. They struggle to connect with scene partners because they're thinking too much about their own performance. They second guess their choices because they're focussed on how they're being perceived.

Also, it's hard to help them improve because they're not here to get better. They're here because they think they're already great and they want to have other people tell them they're great – and they get what they want because honestly a lot of people are easily impressed by anything a little bit showy.

Briefly, many years ago, I dabbled in improv. And the thing I learned about improv is that all the things that make weak actors are wildly exacerbated when you make actors improvise. Especially selfish performers.

Part of this is because going out on stage without any idea of what you're going to do there is terrifying and your brain will send you right to your deepest insecurities and whatever unhealthy coping mechanisms you've developed to deal with them, and partly because improv as performance is a form of comedy.

And god save us all from people who want to show off about the fact that they are (or think they are) funny.

The one great essential of performing, in any context, is to learn to be confident enough to be fully present on stage. To be able to focus all your energy on the people on stage with you, so your performance is responsive. To be willing to risk looking stupid because you're putting the performance ahead of your own ego.

Challenging for a lot of the people attracted to this kind of extra curricular.

Anyway, when I was experimenting with improv my brother, a seasoned improvian, lent me some of his books on the subject, and I read the introduction of one of them.

As you can tell, I was very dedicated to the craft.

I do not remember what this book was called or who it was by, but there was a phrase in the introduction I have thought about a lot since. The authors talked about running improv classes at RADA and said that there were some students they knew they'd never be able to teach.

Those students, they said, were not there to be educated. They were there to be validated.

For me, that phrase was like a lightning bolt. It's such a clear and decisive way to recognise what the fuck someone's problem is.

It's obviously a very human and relatable feeling. Learning things is really hard! Confronting your own fallibilities sucks! You have to be willing to be vulnerable, you have to be willing to be uncomfortable.

We all know, really, that that's a necessary and important part of being human. Bearing discomfort in order to grow. We also know how much we want that to not be true.

There's a billion dollar self-help industry built on our desperation to find an easier way to improve ourselves; people all over the world buy and read and agree with simple steps to a new and better you, and they do it over and over again because they haven't yet become new and better thems.

Because it's hard. It's so hard.

And what's not hard is reading those books and thinking oh that makes sense and not changing at all. A book will let you do that because it doesn't know you're reading it, and it doesn't know you're not actually doing the work. It doesn't push back at you the way an actual therapist would and I suspect that there's a large contingent of people who choose books over therapy for exactly that reason. (With the proviso that plenty of people who would love to have therapy can't afford it because we live in a late stage capitalist hellscape, of course.)

You can see this everywhere right now. Elon Musk does not want to get good at video games, he wants to show everyone how good he already is. This is why he hires people to play them for him.

People keep falling in love with their AI chatbots because they don't want to deal with a partner who might sometimes have their own needs, who might disagree with them, who might ask a little more of them.

This framing is useful to me for two reasons.

In the first place, it can make it easier to recognise when someone isn't worth engaging with. There's no point in talking to them, they're just looking for validation.

But it's also worthwhile to turn this lens on yourself, from time to time. Are you trying to prove something, or learn something?

I honestly think the most valuable thing going to drama school taught me, more than any of the actual lessons, is how to learn. How to approach a situation – any situation – with the goal of getting something valuable out of it. With the goal of being educated.

I'm mostly bad at this. It's hard and I'm so tired. But I think it's a worthy goal to have. And sometimes that's enough.