Fin Kingma - de romantische tester

After understanding how motivation works and how our industry has forced us into responsive mindsets, I started my search for ways to cultivate a healthy mindset. To create motivational environments. One of my first discoveries was Improv.

Improv allows us to develop our soft skills

Improv is an open format that allows us to develop our soft skills, mainly:

• Sharpness
• Communication
• Teamwork
• Listening
• fail-fast attitude

Important to notice is that it allows us. Improv should never be used to force people to train their soft skills. People who are participating decide for themselves if and which soft skills they will train (mostly unconscious). Unconscious because people already have a vague notion of which soft skills are important to them, and which they like. And because people have an innate drive to learn skills which are relevant to their environment, they will want to develop the soft skills that are relevant to themselves and their environment.

Use short Improv sessions to get people actively participating in interactive workshops

Improv doesn’t always have to be organized as a 1-2 hour workshop. You can also organize short sessions of 15-30 minutes before an interactive training or workshop. This way you can use Improv to:

• get people in an active/assertive mindset
• build up energy
• get people to know each other
• get people to make mistakes

During a short Improv Session, you should only do simple Improv exercises and not ask people to perform on stage. In the attached file (see below), those off-limit exercises are called the On-stage exercises.

Organize your own Improv sessions with these exercises

I have created a pdf file with Improv exercises that you can use to organize your own Improv Sessions.

Improv-exercises

One of the most important concepts that I focus on being a romanticist, is meaning. It’s a term that is difficult to describe using words, but nevertheless carries great weight wherever we go. A job with little meaning is demotivating for most of us. A job with meaning can give you the energy to get out of bed with a smile on your face.

If you – like me – want to create a positive work environment, it’s important to create meaning (for yourself and for others).

In my experience, there is one simple way to give meaning to anything: to spend time and energy on something. Because in the end, that’s where meaning comes from:

Meaning = energy (spent) * time (spent)

Things don’t magically gain meaning just by being present. We give meaning to these things, whether they are people, pets or a car. We give them meaning by spending time and energy on them.

Some examples:

• If you talk a lot to your pet and cuddle with it, they will gain meaning to you.
• If you bake and bring cookies to work, work itself will gain more meaning to you (because you spent extra time doing something for work). The great thing is that your colleagues will also add meaning to you if they eat your cookies.
• A task that you finish as swiftly as possible, will have little to no meaning to you.
• If you prepare a grand entrance on your first day on the job, you will gain meaning to everyone present.
• If you spend half an hour chitchatting with colleagues each day, you can create meaningful relationships at work.

Unfortunately adding meaning will take time. That’s why it’s important to decide for yourself what you want to spend time on, and on who. Because based on those decisions, your environment will automatically gain meaning to you.

Kill your darlings

One of my teachers once taught me about the ‘kill your darlings principle’. It’s about what happens if you unintentionally spend a lot of time on anything, and gain an emotional bond (meaning) which makes it difficult to do the right thing. Which is quite often: destroy your old work and start over.

When I was developing my first website, I spend way too much time finetuning all these useless features. I learned a lot from those self-made challenges and it was a lot of fun. However, this website gained a lot of meaning to me. But it wasn’t good (since it was my first). It can be pretty devastating to put your old work aside and start on something new. This is what kill your darlings means. We need to train ourselves to let go of everything we fear to lose. Or else we might get stuck in horrible situations.

Positive meaning

As I explained, it’s pretty easy to add meaning to almost anything. You just spend time and energy on something. But being the romantic I am, I learned the hard way that adding meaning is not good in itself. Meaning will add weight to any kind of relationship you have. If you add meaning to a stressful relationship with someone, this relationship will end up becoming more stressful. If you spend more time and energy on a horrible date, the date will only get more and more horrible.

The trick is to add meaning to the good things in your life. That’s why its important that you decide where you add meaning in your life:

• Do you like baking? From experience, I can say that everyone at work loves pie (or just the time spend with each other)
• Do you like beer and cocktails? Gather a group of colleagues who like to get a drink after working hours.
• Are you into sports? Invite a colleague to go squashing.

The 8 hours you spend working, don’t have to be filled with ‘work’. I advise everyone to spend some time with other colleagues and do fun activities with other colleagues. This is the best way to add positive meaning to your life. For yourself and for your colleagues.

The ‘Mastery Curve’ is a model I picked from game designers. It’s a model to understand the learning curve of players. It’s incredibly important to understand this learning curve in the game industry, or else you might lose an immersed player halfway through the game.

A beginning player requires different stimuli than a player who has spent over 100 hours playing the game. That’s why it’s important for the game industry to have a strong grip on this type of motivation.

We can use this model to understand how our own mastery motivation works. The Mastery Curve teaches us two things:

1. We don’t grow constantly. Occasionally we get an epiphany and everything falls into place. Most of the time we barely grow, sometimes we don’t improve for a period of months. This can be frustrating, but it’s just a part of the process. Time is an essential part of learning.
2. Our learning process is an exponential curve. The better we get, the slower we grow. Eventually, it is impossible to master any skill for 100%.

As you can see in the bottom graph, you can get stuck at a certain skill level for a long period (months), but that’s just a part of growing! As long as you don’t give up, you will eventually pick up the pace and continue growing.

Start learning

Whenever you start something new, expect a lot of frustrating moments in which you won’t learn anything. Epiphanies don’t happen on a weekly basis. And remember: if you endure, you might experience your next epiphany and take a huge leap forward. Especially when you start something new, there is so much more to learn.

Unfortunately, the opposite is also true.

Nobody can truly master anything

I started surfing several years ago. It was fun at the time, I kept learning new techniques and I slowly got to the point that I could surf a wave while standing up. But after a few years, I got bored. It took too much time before I got another epiphany. Especially since I live in Holland and I barely have the time to go to the ocean. And that’s the main thing, mastering any skill takes a lot of time. I slowly realized that I didn’t like surfing in itself, I just liked the growing aspect of it. And I barely grew anymore. Continuing to surf and getting better at it was getting harder and harder over time. I haven’t even surfed in 2017.

There’s a flipside to this. Everyone has these problems and nobody can fully master a skill for 100% (because it’s an exponential curve). As long as you manage to endure and keep training your skills, you could, in fact, get better than anyone else.

Do you have someone that inspires you? Someone who is so incredible that it intimates you? Let me tell you: you could beat him/her!

After all, even if your role model has mastered a skill for 99%, given enough time you could master the same skill for 99,5%.