Six hard conversations from class, rehearsal and backstage. Choose your words, listen for the need underneath, and turn tension into connection with Dr. Marshall Rosenberg's Nonviolent Communication.
Start over from chapter 1? Your hearts reset to zero. Your face is kept, and you can change it next.
Each chapter is a hard conversation from life at Improv U: in class, at rehearsal, backstage and in the coach's office. Choose what you say. Giraffe answers speak from the heart and lower the tension. Jackal answers judge, blame, or demand, and the tension climbs. Bring it to zero and you find a way forward together.
Earn all six hearts for your curtain call.
Every scene partner you met was saying please, in the only words they had.
Improv taught you to listen fully, accept the offer, and make your partner look good. Today you did the same thing offstage. You listened past the words to the need, and you said what was true for you without making anyone wrong.
"Observing without evaluating is the highest form of human intelligence."— J. Krishnamurti, a line Dr. Rosenberg loved to share
Dr. Marshall B. Rosenberg (1934–2015) was a psychologist, mediator and peacemaker who began developing Nonviolent Communication in the early 1960s. What drove him was the violence he saw during the 1943 Detroit race riot and the antisemitism he faced as a boy. He earned his Ph.D. in clinical psychology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where he studied under Carl Rogers, and in 1984 he founded the Center for Nonviolent Communication. He spent the rest of his life teaching people all over the world to hear the needs beneath each other's words.
If this game moved you, the real thing is better. Read his book Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life (the audiobook is read in his own warm voice), or learn NVC with a certified trainer.
Made for the students, performers and coaches of Improv U.
Dr. Rosenberg taught with two puppets. The giraffe has the largest heart of any land animal and a long neck to see far, so it speaks from feelings and needs. The jackal speaks in judgments, labels, blame and demands. In NVC circles people like to say that a jackal is just a giraffe with a language problem.
Listening with your whole attention is empathy. Accepting an offer without judging it is how you receive someone's feelings. Making your scene partner look good means caring about their needs as much as your own. Blocking ("No, that's not what happened") is jackal language. "Yes, and" is the giraffe's move: I hear you, and here's what's true for me.
"You're so unprofessional" is a diagnosis. "Call time was 7:00 and you got here at 7:52" is an observation: anyone with a clock would agree. Watch for the sneaky ones.
"'I observed you being a jerk' is still a diagnosis. It has to be something you can observe."— s7nloop
"The act you observed is theirs, the emotion you feel is yours."— s7nloop
Their action is the trigger. Your feeling comes from your own need. That's why "you made me look stupid" starts a fight and "I felt lost because I want us to build the scene together" doesn't.
Quick test: if you can swap "I feel" for "I think," it's a thought.
Rest, safety, connection, trust, respect, autonomy, recognition, belonging, play, meaning, contribution. A need never names a specific person doing a specific thing. "I need you to show up" is a strategy. "I need trust in my ensemble" is a need.
A note nobody asked for can land like a demand, even when it's kindly meant. Ask first ("Want a note?") and be glad to hear "not right now." Coaches can do the same: start with what worked, then offer one specific thing to try.
When someone comes at you, you can blame yourself, blame them, sense your own feelings and needs, or sense theirs. The last two are giraffe ears. Empathy comes before explaining, advising, consoling, or telling your own story.
Read Dr. Rosenberg's book or find NVC training at the Center for Nonviolent Communication, which he founded in 1984.