“I’ve Got Your Back” Matters Now More Than Ever
This week was the longest month of 2020 so far. With head-spinning changes in our daily “normal” as the guidelines for how to protect against the highly contagious COVID-19 shift in response to evolving information and losses starting to deeply register in our personal and public consciousness, the emotions and tension can be exhausting. There is grief for the world as it used to be and unanswered questions about how we will shape things going forward. While we are navigating this abiding sense of threat, we are doing our jobs — or dealing with the loss of one — home-schooling kids, and trying to stay afloat psychologically.
In this moment, we are all improvisers. We are cast into uncertainty, with no script, and a high degree of unpredictability. Improvisation can be described as a controlled sense of crisis. In the artificial crisis of an improv situation, when players step into the creative space together they commit to show up 100% for everybody else. This mindset is a way to overcome anxiety AND to help other players overcome theirs in order to make “something from nothing” under great pressure. The “I have your back” principle makes all the other improv principles work. Improvisers agree to make their fellow players feel safe and radically supported. There is an outward-facing responsibility for others learned through improv training that translates into being good team members, strong partners and more humane humans.
The “I’ve got your back’ principle is the number one prescription for reducing the spread of this virus. All the precautions we have to take right now — staying 6 feet away from others, wearing a mask in public, limiting time out of the house to only necessary trips and treating absolutely everyone as if we could infect them — are expressions of the “I’ve got your back” philosophy writ large on the landscape of our lives. We do not know how long this crisis will be at the level it is now, but the more committed we are, the more we are “all in” for each other now, the better chance we have of turning the tide in this pandemic.
Improvisers create something that can seem like magic. But that illusion of magic is achieved through great effort, commitment to active caring and collaboration. We are all improvisers now, and we have a chance to contribute to a societal generosity of spirit that slows the rate of infection. We are all the builders of the new. Let’s improv our world together.
Jude Treder-Wolff, LCSW, CGP, CPAI is President of Lifestage, Inc, a training and consulting company, creative arts therapist, improviser, and writer/performer. She is host/creator of (mostly) TRUE THINGS, a game wrapped in a storytelling show.
