Improv is the Gym: Exercising Your Awareness and Connection

We all know that listening is important for our success as facilitators, leaders, and community members.

But what does it really mean to listen well? How can we expand our awareness, so we capture not just information but needs, values, emotions? How can we exercise our listening “muscles” so that we notice more, understand more deeply and engage with more curiosity?

Great improvisers know that listening is the key to connection, creativity, problem-solving and teamwork and they have developed a whole set of activities and tools to expand and strengthen the listening skills necessary to listen under pressure in high-stakes contexts.

In this interactive session, participants will:

• Test their current listening skills to identify current habits (strengths and challenges)
• Exercise their the capacity to listen to oneself as well as the speaker and the "room"
• Access broader awareness and multi-dimensional "Deep DIVE" listening

About Kat Koppett, MA

Kat Koppett  is the Eponymous Founder of Koppett. a consultancy specializing in the use of improv and storytelling techniques to enhance individual and group performance. She is the author of Training to Imagine: Improvisational Techniques for Leaders and Educators to Enhance Creativity, Teamwork and Learning, and the co-author of The Facilitation Advantage with Therese Miclot. Her diverse client list includes Apple, Prezi, PwC, NASA, Global Giving, the U.N. In 2019, she received the Capital Region Chamber’s Women @ Work Women of Excellence and NASAGA’s Ifill-Raynolds Lifetime Achievement Award. She is a founding member of the Applied Improvisation Network, the co-director of The Mopco Improv Theatre, and a member of the Albany Mosaic Rotary.