Feeling Stuck? Freeze!

Tonight, my improv team, Team X, has a show. Last week, we got together for our weekly rehearsal. One of the exercises from our rehearsal involved playing a form of Freeze. Two of us got up to play a scene, but first our teammates posed our bodies into whatever form & configuration they wanted - heads, arms, legs, faces. In a regular game of Freeze, the players justify the pose. But this game of Freeze had a twist: rather than justify the pose, become the character who would stand in this manner. The idea was to get us out of our heads, and into the heads & bodies of these characters.



How liberating! As a VO actor, I use my face and hands to give energy to my words, but my feet stay planted. I am a talking head. There's a technical reason for this: the mics in a professional studio are so sensitive it will even pick up the slightest extra sounds - paper shuffling, clothing rustling. Because of this, I sometimes forget on stage that I am free to "move about the cabin" - so to speak. And I have to remind myself not to be a "talking head" - just standing on stage with nothing to do but yammer on. The game allowed me to be a completely different character, one I had never given voice to before. It's a bolder, scarier, more liberating thing to embody a different character with both voice and physicality - there is fear, trust, discovery, commitment, freedom, play. And I loved it.



I think the idea here is to walk a mile not only in someone else's shoes, but in their whole person. In the corporate world (especially Marketing) we have an activity something like this: job rotation, a regular pattern of changing brands over the course of one's career. In my relatively short corporate life, I have switched careers once (from consulting to marketing) and managed over a dozen different brands across several companies.

Because the days of 30+year tenure followed by gold Rolex retirements is long gone, we don't expect to stay in the same job or function for our entire careers. We expect to do this throughout our lives - job rotation, internships, cross-training with other functions, and plain old career switching. There's a reason for this: switching gears into a new brand, or a new function gets you out of your head, and opens up new ways of thinking.

While the process of both creating characters and changing jobs can be scary or the learning curve daunting, it's also a great opportunity for renewal and rediscovery: You are able to create something new that adds to your professional character. You are able to connect new ideas to old ways, or to question the status quo and create new solutions that benefit the entire enterprise. It keeps you from thinking that "it is what it is" and that you can't change the process or the system. It puts you into a new frame of reference. And it becomes a part of you, something you can file away and pull out for future reference. I suppose, that if you feel stuck in what you're doing, maybe it's time to play a game of Freeze.