The Energy and Freedom of Yes!

There is an Energy and a Freedom created by the word Yes.

“Yes” Is a very powerful word.  

It allows possibility, it creates opportunity, and it signifies agreement.

I remember reading an improvisational artist saying that the first rule of improv is to agree – to agree with whatever your partner has created.

The second rule of improve is to agree and then add something of your own to the mix.

If a scene starts with me saying:  ‘Wow! Isn’t it cold in here?’ and you just say ‘Yes’, we are at a standstill, the exchange is over and there is no way forward. 

If you had replied, ‘yes, and it can’t be good for all these old people sitting around in here’ then we are going to get somewhere with it.

Our patterns of conversation, the way we listen and speak and our first responses, are often defaulted around ‘no’ or ‘but’.  If we throw some reasons to underpin our response into the mix we limit the future in front of us.

For something, anything, creative to happen or appear in our lives, it shows up in our stand for possibility, in our ‘yes’.  I am not talking about manipulated events, not accidental or figured out but creating a context that allows for ‘yes’ to make things possible.

Standing up for possibility comes from nothing and when we create the field, the context, for ‘yes, and…’ it extends everything and broadens the horizon of possibility for us.

Creating ‘nothing’ is the foundation.  From ‘nothing’ we have the ability to create anything.  If we try to create from ‘something’ we will fail, because if we start with something we are merely changing something.