I recently went to a retreat for a group of us who are engaging in classes about the yoga and healing businesses with Cate Stillman of yogahealer.com

Cate organized an improv session for us with Mel Paradis. I was apprehensive, having no acting experience and generally finding the whole comedian-up-on-stage terribly awkward. Mel quickly dispelled my fears when she gave us ground rules for our session, pointing out that these rules can be applied to more than just improv.

These rules are:
1. Yes, and – don’t worry about mistakes, just keep going
2. Avoid questions, make statements – commit to the moment and move forward
3. Focus on the here and now – don’t worry about what you did or didn’t do, or what’s going to happen next
4. Don’t try to be funny, witty, sarcastic – be authentic
5. Take chances

One of our group said that this list would be great ground rules for meetings at work. Mel said she thinks these rules could be applied as rules for life. As a mother of young kids, I thought this would be a great list for my family – a “how-to” have positively focused interactions in the home.

We attempted to create a list of family rules once before, after I read the fascinating, research-based book Emotionally Intelligent Parenting: How to Raise a Self-Disciplined, Responsible, Socially Skilled Child. In this book, the authors Elias, Tobias & Friedlander translate Daniel Goleman’s Emotional Intelligence work into parent-friendly tips essentially encouraging us parents in the art of how to teach our children to understand, label and control their emotions. However, the list was too long and somehow we failed to internalize all the rules. Hearing and acting with these improv rules has inspired me to start again, using the rules of improv as a starting point, perhaps with one addition, the Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. But first, I have to get my kids buy-in!

What are your family rules, explicit or implicit?

Tamsin Astor-Jack writes at www.tamsinastor.com
©Tamsin Astor-Jack, Yoga Brained LLC

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