 It is obligatory to start with a story, we all know that. So mid-70s, I'm an old guy, I was in college and my heroes were the people in theater, I studied theater, the people in theater who were tearing down the proscenium and confronting the audience naked, smearing them with paint and screaming no more war, that kind of thing, it was a crude theater. But I really believed in it and I loved it. And in college, one of the people from the open theater who had worked with Joseph Chacon and done all those things had now started something called the Medicine Show Theater Ensemble and he came to teach us and I was so psyched. I was just like, wow, one of my heroes is here. And a lot of what we did at that point, new employee orientation. That's not what that's supposed to say at all, that's really awful. Okay, I'm gonna just get rid of that, yeah. Okay, so what this guy did was, he said, you know guys that moment when you're all doing a chord together and you're in a circle and you're tight and you have total contact and you can just feel each other and you're completely in touch and we're like, yeah, yeah, yeah and he said, that's wonderful, isn't it? It's almost like a whole body and spirit orgasm and we're like, yeah. And he said, yeah, the audience doesn't care. You are boring then. Stop doing that on stage. So that was like a real jolt to me. So it changed the way I looked at process versus performance really for all time. So if I had a PowerPoint that was right, if I wasn't short on time, you'd right now be looking at a picture of Ricky Gervais. And I love his work, I love his characters, especially in the English version of The Office, that guy who is so concerned with his own status that he's incredibly low status. He's so concerned with holding on to control that everybody just is like cringing all the time, right? Personally, as a trainer, I have to watch out for my own Ricky Gervais. I've got to do that because it is not about me, it is about serving the process in the moment. Can we agree with that? But I know that guy's in me, so I really have to get humble first, right? Does that make sense? So I run a performance improv troupe and with my wife, Cat Caput, whose logo would be prominently displayed at this point if things worked. We also run a consultancy and because of the performance improv troupe, I think, we get, I regularly get phone calls from some guy in like an insurance company and they says, hey, I want you to do a half day team building thing, right? And my spider sense starts to tingle. And I say, well, what exactly, why do you want that? Well, you know, we're doing our annual thing and we just figured at the end, we half day before we go to cocktails, we'd have you guys come in and do some team building. I don't want that gig, I really don't want that gig, but it is an opportunity for a needs assessment. What I want to do with that guy is say, well, really, why do you think that's a good idea? And what are you facing? And start to ask questions and do the need assessment and then maybe, maybe I can come up with a need that this organization has that I can approach. So here's kind of my whole point. Applied improv is amazing, it's transformational, it's wonderful, it's kind of like the 18 year old me and that group of people making a cord, full body contact, it's spiritual and wonderful. It is, it is fantastic, but it isn't the end. It's the tool. And I know a lot of people here know that and I'm boring you, but a lot of people I think are new to this and we tend to go out there and say, I do applied improvisation, nobody cares. What they care about is what can you do for my organization, help us solve specific problems. So that awareness was a jolt and that's one of three kinds of exercises, a jolt is designed to change a mindset or an attitude or an opinion. I would also suggest that jolts are great and be careful with them because if your jolt is too jolty, right, then you're gonna flip people over into cognitive dissonance and they're gonna kinda shut off and disassociate and look at you as a bad person, right? And then you've gone too far in the jolt spectrum, right? Think joy buzzer, fun little thing, ha ha ha, versus electric chair. They're all in the same spectrum, just keep it more on the joy buzzer side, especially when you're dealing with frightened corporate people who have a lot of power and a lot to lose and they don't really trust you yet, keep that, right? It makes sense, so that's a jolt. Everybody got that, yeah? Okay, because I see people here saying, oh, I love that game, I'm gonna bring it into a training and then they don't, I've seen this happen, they bring a great game into a training and then the debrief doesn't happen and the people, the participants say, yeah, that was an amazing experience and they don't know why they did it. They don't have anything to nail it to in their perceptual set. It's really important that you know why you're using a game and what it's for. Five, thank you very much. So then, if you've changed a mindset or an attitude or at least opened people to that change, right? Then maybe you wanna build a skill set with them. For example, listening, right? So that would be an exercise and guess what? The same game can be used as a jolt and then turned around and be used as an exercise and exercise is where we say, I'm trying to play this game, I'm learning to play the game, I'm doing this new thing and now I wanna get it into my body and get it into my mind and develop this new skill. Does that make sense? So the first iteration is a jolt, whoa, I don't listen. And then we debrief, we get that real awareness and then we do the same exercise again as an exercise when we start to develop the skill of listening. I'm using listening as an example because you are doing such a great job of that, right? No, see how I just did that? That was really like, just sucked up to you just enough to get you back because some of you may have been wondering, wondering about the buses. So we've had a jolt and we've done an exercise and maybe just possibly your client has some content that they really wanna underscore. They want some information to be transferred. They may want it to be done debrief style where people are, the group is elicited and they supply that information or they may want you to actually be a trainer. See that's what I'm talking about and this talk is actually training. So to be a trainer and actually give them information that by the way may be something you know nothing about. We also tend to think that we're amazing but there are people out there that just know incredible things that I know nothing about. And then they think I'm impressive because I stand up there and play category die. It's a weird world that we live in. So you want to give information. That would be a frame game. Okay, it's by the way, all of this comes from a chapter of Kat Coppett's book and except for the part about Ricky Gervais and my college years. That's just my ego that I needed to start with but the rest of this is Kat. You can find it in her book training to imagine in better form than this. Yeah. So in a frame game imagine for example, everybody knows category die, right? It's like an old war horse. So in a group you can use that to hold information. You can make the categories be stuff that's sort of in the curriculum and play the game. You can also put the twist on it that I know many of us are familiar with where it's not just die but it's also like double click and go into that. Say more about that so then somebody comes forward with an interesting piece of information and kind of goes into it more. It's a game, it's fun and it's really getting the information known among the group and getting it into their bodies. Make sense? Yeah, I got about one. So good. Two, well I may give you a minute back, I'm not sure but I won't because I have an ego of the size of Minnesota. So I just want to, if I've been speaking stuff that you've known for many years and you're really bored with that I apologize but I really do think this field is as incredible potential, amazing potential but it's important that we help each other by raising our status and saying, look we are, the applied improv field is not something that you do instead of the magician at the company picnic before everybody gets drunk. That's not what we're about. We are a powerful tool for change and I would love to work with you to attack problems in your organization and transform people's attitudes and mindsets with jolts. I'd love to help you build your people's skills with exercises. I'd love to help you transmit information and build information back and forth with frame games but if you want, by the way, if anybody wants to book my improv company we do bar mitzvahs, we do birthday parties. We're much cheaper than those same people a couple of whom are sitting here when we're facilitating using the same games. Thank you very much.