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In improv, yes and means accepting what your scene partner gives you and then building upon it. For

example, they might mention that you are their best friend that just showed up at their house with your cat.

So you receive that information about what's happening, you accept it, and you add to it by responding that

you prefer to groom Ruffleblatt at their house because they save Ruffleblatt's fur. And the scene builds

up because

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Neither of you block what each other adds to the scene. Both of those things are now true. And you and your

scene partner get to play with why in the hell your friend saves the fur. So for solo recording, your

episodes, your videos, you are your own scene partner. I do tons of solo improv as well, and I certainly

believe that most solo podcasters don't treat themselves like this. Even improvisers don't.

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because most improvisers don't do solo improv. And I had to teach myself how to approach both of these

things. I had to kind of teach myself these skills on my own. So what I discovered is common human habits in

the space. We really second guess what we say before we finish our own sentence. And because we're on our

own, we abandon these ideas before we really explore that world and explore what works.

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out of our own faces or even our own physicality as well. We really want to start over all the time. And this is

the very first thing that dance fitness instructors are coached and learned. The first thing that I was

told when I started doing it is we are not allowed to ever start over. We have to keep going. And learning that

because I learned that before I did improv was such a huge help for improv.

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You cannot start a scene over. You're with a scene partner. You're in that scene. You have to just go. You

can't stop. So you have to teach yourself this too when you're rolling solo that you can't constantly block

yourself saying things. You can't tell yourself no. And you'll get better results this way if you start

yes-anding yourself. Now what does this look like? You have to finish to the end of a segment or a section at

least before

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you restart. Or even better, finish the episode and then do a second take if you must. And when new thoughts

come out, you start a bit of a tangent or a story. Treat that like a gift or an offer from your scene partner.

You accept it, you build on it, and you see where it goes. Use your episode's notes or your structure to keep

you reined in a bit, but give yourself that space to explore. You can always edit later.

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You can do a second take. You can fix it. You can enhance it. But you can't do those things if whatever it is

that was about to come out never came out. So the interesting stuff is going to kind of exist past the

obvious. It's going to often exist past your notes. And the first thing that you say is quite often the kind

of default expected thing. But if you yes and those first,

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thoughts and you get to those second thoughts or there's tertiary thoughts. Those can be really

interesting and maybe sometimes where your perspective actually is. So be a generous scene partner to

yourself and say a lot more yes than no. I'm Jen DeHaan. This is the Credibility Minute. You can find more

episodes and get in touch with me at stereoforest.com slash minute.