Northeastern University’s Growth and Resilience Improv Team is dedicated to creating controlled-risk environment through improvisational theater games for participants to practice skills of resiliency and grit. We foster these skills by providing workshops in which both our members who host and the participants can nurture their resiliency. Our workshops create an ideal setting for participants to
rehearse resilient reactions in a monitored stress situation. Through repeated practice, participants learn to embrace both a growth mindset and internal locus of control.
- Growth Mindset - the belief that talent can be developed through hard work and dedication
- An internal locus of control – the belief that an individual’s life is made up of controllable factors, especially ones attitude, preparation and effort
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Our first initiative is to encourage our members to enrich their resilience through the practice of hosting improv workshops. Our second goal is to inspire youth of the community to recognize an inner capacity for creative thinking and to build self-efficacy by through engagement in improvisational games and activities. In a standard play, actors are expected to rehearse, memorize, and deliver set lines and actions in a predetermined order. Improv deviates from these preset structures of theater as the nature of the technique is to create those theatrical moments on the spot. This means there are no prewritten lines, characters, settings, or scenarios. Actors are expected to create a theatrical reality on the spot and maintain it as the scene goes on. (Moshavi, 2001, pg.442-444)
Improv was initially a skill practiced by actors to help them recover from unprecedented mistakes during performances so these two aforementioned skills were crucial to continuing a scene. “Letting go” refers to an improviser’s ability to acknowledge the deviating circumstances of their scene. They must be able to accept the situation in order to “make do,” or adapt. A successful improviser exhibits self-confidence and persistence in adapting. These skills can also be classified as resilience and grit. The fundamental definition of resiliency refers to the competency to fend off risk factors and adapt in the face of adversity. (Zimmerman and Arunkumar, 2001 pg. 1) The term grit refers to and individual’s persistence toward long-term goals. (Duckworth & Quinn, 2009, pg. 166) I believe both resiliency and grit are essential to personal development and growth.
