Our Story

I was 24 the first time I delivered a presentation without shaking — and improv let me do it.

It never made much sense to me - I was outgoing and lively in my day-to-day life, but the second I got on a stage or stood in front of a crowd, the world would close in. All the work I had done would fly out the window, replaced by one resounding thought: “What if I got this wrong?”

“What’s ‘this’?” you ask. “What do you mean, ‘wrong’?” you might follow up. 

Couldn’t tell you. All I knew is that everyone in the audience was about to discover all of my personal flaws, and, had become experts on my topic of presentation - and developed a very harsh rubric to score me against. Things were about to get ugly…. 

Cue shaking….

The idea of a script, lines to get right or wrong, and pressure to compile the perfect answer (for me to know and others to interrogate) - this approach to presentations (and life) genuinely stalled my development for years. 

And for years, I related to it as an immutable part of who I was.

But then, improv. 

I took a class on a whim, and discovered the foil to my limiting thought patterns. 

For a young man paralyzed by the question “What if I got this wrong?”, improv offered a simple answer — here, there is no wrong. There is no script. There is listening, noticing, reacting, and responding.

For a young man sure the audience was equal parts enemy/adjudicator/’bully who had somehow broken into his diary and learned his secrets’, improv asked ‘what if you built something with your audience?’ What if you listened for what got a reaction from them, and followed that impulse. What if you literally used a suggestion they gave you to form the entirety of your performance?

And finally, for a young man weighed down by the burden of going it alone, achieving confidence and success through demonstration of remarkable individual achievement alone, improv gave me a simple adage - ‘the answer is in your scene partner’s eyes’. 

Improv gave me the posture that perfect is a fallacy. It gave me freedom to create, to explore, to not know, to discover. And the comfort to rely on those around me, because for the most part, we all want each other to succeed.

I founded Riff because it’s no overstatement to say improv changed my life. I find it thrilling to share my love for this tool and artform with individuals and teams, and to see what it might unlock in them. 

All the while, staying true to the aspect of improv that I find most compelling: the most important part of doing improv is doing improv. There is no right, there is no wrong. There is exploration, there is discovery.