The Resistance
Wow wow wow, it has been a while dearest reader. Time to get Sister Act 2 with writing. I have been active with healthcare, improv, and healthcare improv in 2022 but less writing about it. The writing helps me make meaning of all of these activities, helps me collect my thoughts, and helps me notice themes in my work and life. Today’s entry will mostly be a simple run down of events that have taken place this year and looking forward to upcoming events. I hope at the end to have a call to action for myself and to take a look at The Resistance.
We will start by going over events since the turn of the new year. My last entry was right before Christmas. I was planning on taking a week off for Christmas, then I took a week off for New Year’s, then I took a week off for my children’s birthdays, then I took a week off because work was so hectic, then I took a week off because I was catching up on other stuff, then I took a week off because I was getting stuff done before travelling, then I took a week off because I was travelling, then I took a week off because I was catching up from travelling, which brings us to now. In between taking all of those weeks off writing, there were a number of healthcare improv activities and I also started teaching Level 2 Improv to a wonderful group of people that also took the Level 1 Intro to Improv course I taught in the Fall. Here are a few of the highlights…
January: Started the Level 2 class mentioned above, did 2 customized workshops for our Palliative Medicine and Geriatrics team
February: More Level 2 Class, did a workshop on Emotion for the first year medical school class, did a workshop on Empathy for the PA students, did Faculty Development workshops on Wellness and Growth Mindset, and the highlight was the Level 2 Class show
March: I did a workshop for the Ob/Gyn department (faculty, staff, and residents).
Also, during this time, I made some great connections and made plans for some future events. These meetings were mostly over Zoom (Booo!) but were incredibly exciting because of the topic and discussion (Yes!). Coming up in April, there will be the final two Faculty Development workshops of the year on Emotion and Trust. In between them, I am doing a workshop for the Heartland Juvenile Services Association Conference with people I met at the theater I perform improv at. This will be an audience that is in my Zone of Proximal Development, so a little outside my comfort zone but no so outside that the ideas will be difficult to relate to (I am very excited for this opportunity). Then in May, I will be doing an hour-long talk at the Physical Therapy retreat and an hour long talk for the Pathology Department Faculty Development. Both of those are great opportunities to engage with new audiences and I am excited to hear each group’s perspectives on these ideas. I keep ending every sentence with an exclamation point because of the excitement, but then that causes it to lose meaning, so I am going to go back and take the ones at the end of sentences out!
Well it is time to talk about The Resistance. If you have not read any books by Steven Pressfield, I would make the strongest possible recommendation you do that the next time you read/listen to a book. He introduced the idea of The Resistance in his book The War of Art and basically, The Resistance is everything in your life that prevents you from the creative output that you were meant to do. As an example, see Paragraph 2 above. My life had plenty of reasonable reasons to give into The Resistance. I have plenty of perfectly acceptable excuses for not writing like I wanted to. Those excuses will not help me develop my understanding of improv and how I can use it to help patients and their families, however. The Resistance is mostly geared towards keeping me exactly where I am, preventing me from moving forward and developing. I have a busy work schedule in the coming month. I lean heavily towards healthcare in the month of April. Steven Pressfield talks about the idea of Turning Pro as the way to battle The Resistance (he discusses Improv Wisdom in this book). He also has a book called No One Wants to Read Your Shit so I hope to battle against these ideas in spite of the busy work schedule this month. I hope someone reads this, but if no one does, I know that this activity will help me push forward against The Resistance, which defines the person I will be in this life
The practice of improv has helped me battle The Resistance, not always successfully. When I find myself on stage in unfamiliar territory, the practice of making the best of the situation and discovering where it takes you is very rewarding. I have yet to encounter the perfect scene for me in improv, just like in life, when the circumstances are never exactly how I would like them to be. Improv has helped me to just start on the journey and figure it out as I go, realizing that taking the first step is more important than whatever talent I bring to the journey. Starting the journey is another way of saying I am battling The Resistance. Well, the battle wages on…