This month with my Improviser’s Year groups we’ve been looking at where we want to be in 10 years time.
If I’m completely honest I’ve never really been much of a goal setter or spent a huge amount of time thinking where I want to be in the future. I’ve had rough ideas but I’ve never spent anytime really thinking about it.
But lately I’ve been thinking more about looking ahead and thinking about what I might want.
I kind of fell into teaching. At 15 I did a sports award where we had to do volunteer hours so I asked my drama teacher if I could volunteer at drama club. She said I could teach the drama club so I did for 5 years! I helped with school plays, wrote little scripts that we performed at the local theatre, taught classes of sometimes 30-40 kids. I loved it.
Bizarrely I went on to do 3 sciences for A-level and a biomedical science degree. I had a miserable time at university (that’s another story!) but I always kept improvising.
Then in 2011 I started We Are Improv and began running lessons in my local area. Again not because I made the conscious choice that I wanted to teach but because I needed people to improvise with that I didn’t have to travel an hour on a train to get to!
But now I’m intentionally teaching. I love teaching improv and I love teaching improv online. I adore having people from all over the world in my classes, it’s absolutely magical.
And now that I’m intentionally teaching it’s leading me to think about where I want to go with my teaching and what I want to achieve.
I think so many of us float along with our improv without thinking what we want to achieve. Sure we get frustrated and annoyed and complain. We get jealous and compare ourselves to others. But we don’t take the time to think where we want to go and how we’re going to do it.
So where do you want to be in 10 years?
Do you want to be an improv group? Do you want to be performing? Do you want to teach? Travel to improv festivals in other countries? Write a book?
And how are you going to achieve those goals? How can you break it down into tiny steps to help you achieve this? Any goal is easier to achieve when you break it down into tiny steps!
I’m still thinking about where I want to be (terrifyingly my little boys will be 14 and 12…) but I know I still want to be consciously teaching and improvising with people from all over the globe!