Lessons Learned: Part 1

That is two weeks folks! If you thought that I couldn’t do it, you were wrong! I wrote at least 500 words every day for two weeks! There have been busy days where it felt cumbersome at points, but on the whole, this has been an enjoyable experience. Today’s entry shall be some of the lessons learned along with future directions

Lessons learned from writing every day for two weeks about the intersection between healthcare and improv will include some points about the information as well as what I learned about myself. 

Lesson number 1: The main ideas and lessons of improv as I see it, funnel into a few simple ideas. There were several days where I would start writing about what I thought was a new and disparate topic, only to come to roughly the same conclusion I came to a few days before. I would incorporate a new event that affected my life in some way and still land on the same message regarding the importance of Connection to my health and the health of patients. I think this is why improv lends itself to rules so well and people can get hung up on the rules quite frequently. Mick Napier’s book Improvise: Scene from Inside Out is all about questioning the rules and understanding why the rules came to be before blindly holding yourself to them. I feel like my two weeks of writing served as an exploration of why the communication principles suggested for communicating with patients (and are essentially the same as the improv “rules”) came to be. There are endless ways that these principles can be practiced and how it is practiced in one setting may be different than how it is practiced in another setting. I think providing insight into those differentiated applications of improv ideas is beneficial and helps make the practice of improv even more useful to communicating with patients and colleagues. 

Lesson number 2: The surface level lessons are easy to discuss, the deeper lessons of improv require more words or more clarity, probably both. I think many of the simple lessons, like the benefits of Yes, and can be explained in 500 words. The lesson of why I think I am happier because improv is in my life requires a longer explanation to prove that improv is not just correlated but causative of my increased happiness. My hope is that I continue to write more and push myself to go into more depth but within the same rough word limit. The website estimates how long an entry will take to read, so I hope to keep every entry under 5 min read time and increase the depths of the ideas discussed

Lesson number 3: Got to do it. I have to do it every day or I will stop. I’m planning on continuing to do it because it is a thing that makes me feel good and I enjoy it. Every day I think of what I could possibly use for an excuse to not sit down and write, however. I have told myself I was going to do something similar in the past, but this is the first time it’s taken hold for a prolonged period 

Lesson number 4: Pay attention but not too much. The lessons of improv and its applications are all around me. I really don’t want this to be a diary of my life events, however. I want this to be discussion of ideas used in improv that are applied to my work in healthcare. I may use examples from my life for illustrative purposes, but it is not the center piece of each entry. Also, I don’t know how many people actually read these entries. My hope is that more people one day do read this, but that is not the best way to construct an entry. I should aim to provide value to anyone brave enough to read a blog entry, but not just write whatever I think might maybe please people. Ha, thankfully that is not a problem at the moment, but as I thought about my writing, I thought about making the writing more generalizable somehow. I think that would take away from what is provided and limits what can be discovered through this process. Getting the entry in before 10A does seem to have better results in terms of eyeballs, oh well, maybe tomorrow!

Lesson number 5: I am discovering my own aesthetic. I have put in links to various movies, music videos, memes, books, and other references. I would say the aesthetic might best be described as “Elder Millennial Becomes an Adult”. It has some fleeting references to Gen X fodder. Any fully Millennial or Gen Z references are used ironically and self-depreciating how I am becoming old 

That is it for now. I will do another Lessons Learned entry after 1 month. Thanks for making it to the end!