Let’s do an experiment you and I. I’m going to share with you some people that I personally admire and then encourage you to watch a video and read a bit about them. You will receive their name, their qualities, a video about them, and the introduction to their Wikipedia article. Then I will encourage you to think about these people and ask yourself “What qualities do I need in order to admire someone? Who are those that I admire most?” Sound good? Ok, let’s begin.

But first, what are some of the qualities I admire in other people?

1. Courage – both the ability to do something that frightens one as well as having strength in the face of pain or grief.
2. Humanity – humaneness, and benevolence.
3. Clarity – transparency, certainty, purity, and intelligence
4. Kindness – the quality of being friendly, generous, and considerate.
5. Humor -the quality of being amusing or comic, especially as expressed in literature or speech.

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Daryl Davis

For his COURAGE, HUMANITY, CLARITY, AND KINDNESS

I first heard about Daryl with his connection to befriending and affecting the hearts of white supremacists. Then I learned he played with Chuck Berry and is an amazing musician. 

From Wikipedia: Daryl Davis is an American R&B and blues musician, author, actor and bandleader.^[1] Known for his energetic style of Boogie-woogie piano,^[1] Davis has played with such musicians as Chuck Berry,^[1][2] Jerry Lee Lewis, B. B. King,^[2] Bruce Hornsby, and Bill Clinton.^[3][4] His efforts to improve race relations, in which as an African-American he engaged with members of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), have been reported on by media such as CNN and The Washington Post.^[5][6][7]Davis summed up his advice as: “Establish dialogue. When two enemies are talking, they’re not fighting.”^[8]

Davis is a Christian and he has used his religious beliefs to convince Klansmen to leave and denounce the KKK

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Lin-Manuel Miranda

For his HUMANITY, CLARITY, KINDNESS, AND HUMOR

Lin-Manuel captured my heart first with his Broadway musical “Hamilton” and then by watching numerous interviews and documentaries about him. It also doesn’t hurt that Emma Watson is in this video as she would fit into my “admire” top twenty list if there were such a thing. 

From Wikipedia: Lin-Manuel Miranda (/lɪn mænˈwɛl məˈrændə/; born January 16, 1980) is an American composer, lyricist, playwright, and actor best known for creating and starring in the Broadway musicals Hamilton and In the Heights. He co-wrote the songs for Disney‘s Moana soundtrack (2016) and is set to star in their upcoming film Mary Poppins Returns. Miranda’s awards include a Pulitzer Prize, two Grammy Awards, an Emmy Award, a MacArthur Fellowship, and three Tony Awards.

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Ellen DeGeneres

For her COURAGE, CLARITY, KINDNESS, HUMANITY, AND HUMOR

You don’t need me to say anything about Ellen. You know her already. Give the video a watch. 

From Wikipedia: Ellen Lee DeGeneres (/dɪˈdʒɛnərɪs/; born January 26, 1958)^[2] is an American comedian, television host, actress, writer, and producer.^[3] DeGeneres starred in the popular sitcom Ellen from 1994 to 1998 and has hosted her syndicated TV talk show, The Ellen DeGeneres Show, since 2003.

Her stand-up career started in the early 1980s, and included a 1986 appearance on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. As a film actress, DeGeneres starred in Mr. Wrong (1996), appeared in EDtv (1999), and The Love Letter (1999), and provided the voice of Dory in the Pixar animated films Finding Nemo (2003) and Finding Dory (2016); for Nemo, she was awarded the Saturn Award for Best Supporting Actress, the first time an actress won a Saturn Award for a voice performance. In 2010, she was a judge on American Idol for its ninth season.

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Brian Cox

For his CLARITY, HUMANITY, AND HUMOR

If you watch this quick video you may find yourself spending hours having science explained to you in a way that makes perfect sense. 

From Wikipedia: Brian Edward Cox OBE FRS (born 3 March 1968) is an English physicist who serves as professor of particle physics at the School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Manchester.^[8][9] He is best known to the public as the presenter of science programmes, especially the Wonders of… series^[10][11][12] and for popular science books, such as Why Does E=mc²? and The Quantum Universe. He has been the author or co-author of over 950 scientific publications.^[13]

Cox has been described as the natural successor for BBC‘s scientific programming by both David Attenborough and Patrick Moore.^[14][15] Before his academic career, Cox was a keyboard player for the bands D:Ream and Dare. He earns £250,000 – £299,999 as a BBC presenter^[16]

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Andy Stanley

For his CLARITY, KINDNESS, COURAGE, HUMANITY, AND HUMOR

I attended one of Andy Stanley’s churches for a while and have watched and listened to many hours of his programming. Give this video a go.

From Wikipedia: Charles Andrew “Andy” Stanley (born May 16, 1958) is the senior pastor of North Point Community Church, Buckhead Church, Browns Bridge Church, Gwinnett Church, Woodstock City Church, and Decatur City Church. He also founded North Point Ministries, which is a worldwide Christian organization.

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Tawakkol Karman

For her COURAGE, HUMANITY, CLARITY, AND KINDNESS

I discovered Tawakkol Karaman while researching for this blog entry. She is amazing. 

From Wikipedia: Tawakkol Karman is a Yemeni journalist, politician, and human rights activist. She leads the group “Women Journalists Without Chains,” which she co-founded in 2005.^[3] She became the international public face of the 2011 Yemeni uprising that is part of the Arab Spring uprisings. She has been called the “Iron Woman” and “Mother of the Revolution” by Yemenis. Karman, along with Ellen Johnson Sirleaf and Leymah Gbowee, were the co-recipients of the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize “for their non-violent struggle for the safety of women and for women’s rights to full participation in peace-building work.”^[63] Of Karman, the Nobel Committee said: “In the most trying circumstances, both before and during the ‘Arab spring’, Tawakkul Karman has played a leading part in the struggle for women’s rights and for democracy and peace in Yemen.”^[63][64] The Nobel Committee cited the United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325, adopted in 2000, which states that women and children suffer great harm from war and political instability and that women must have a larger influence and role in peacemaking activities; it also “[c]alls on all actors involved, when negotiating and implementing peace agreements, to adopt a gender perspective.”

 Photo by Nina Strehl on Unsplash

Over the past 20 years, I have worked my way in and out of believing in my dreams. Sacrificing and working hard for what I want is something that was instilled in me by my parents, but sometimes, even with hard work, our goals can stay just out of reach. Below are five things in life that  I wanted, thought had become unattainable, and then achieved:

Find someone who gets me and whom I can support

I’m sure everyone has had that experience of “the one who got away.” By the time I moved to Atlanta in 2001, I was fairly certain that the right person for me was someone I had already dated and was already out of my life. What I was looking for was someone who could deal with my peculiar personality, my eccentricities, as well as my anxiety. As I started to date in Atlanta, the belief that the one for me had escaped grew stronger and stronger. Even though I was still asking for dates, I couldn’t shake that I wasn’t going to find someone who could understand me and be able to put up with me on a daily basis.

The main criteria I had for finding someone to marry was that I needed to be able to “back their play.” This meant that I would be able to support how they treated and spoke to others in their lives. Knowing that I had created an unattainable set of criteria, I all but gave up looking.

I finally met the woman of my dreams in the office I worked in at SunTrust Bank. She always walked by my desk staring straight ahead of her and never noticed me. This, of course, made me crazy and I went about looking for some way to both get her attention and keep it. We have been happily married since 2004.

Find my way back to improvisation

From 1996 until 2011 I was after one thing, Improvisation as Theatre. I wanted to make a type of improv that inspired others to think of improv as art in addition to being comedy. As the years went on I invested myself more and more until, around 2009, I started to burn out. I was stretching myself too thin and nothing I was touching was working well. Finally, in 2011 I was done. I closed the doors to my improv theatre and walked away to find another life.

Anytime I thought about improv it made my stomach hurt and my bones ache. I decided I was done. That chapter of my life was over. I was pretty sure I would never return to it.

Then, in 2013, a part of me woke up again. I started to think about improv in a way that seemed healthy and productive. In 2014 I was given the opportunity to use all my years of improv training and experience in a new way at DuMore Improv. Now it is clear to me that improv never left me. It was in my bones and in how I treated others. What left was what place it held in my life and what priority it took.

Leave a nine to five job and work for me

When I was hired by DuMore Improv in 2014, it was a few months after I had made the leap into entrepreneurship. When I left the safe confines of my nine to five job, it was one of the greatest feelings of my life. True, it was scary, but it was also exhilarating and freeing.

Over the years I had seen multiple opportunities come and go that would have allowed me to leave my day job. Each time one of those opportunities came, something else happened that kept me in the safe zone. The epitome of these opportunities was in 2007 when I was just about to step out on my own and was confronted by the Sub Prime Mortage crisis.

Finally, in 2014, I was handed a severance package along with the rest of my team. When I saw the amount of severance I would get, I realized that this was the opportunity I needed to get out there and make this happen.

It is 2017 and I am still out here making it happen.

Have a child

I have had a rocky relationship with the idea of having children. When I was young I had a constant worry that if I were to have a child that something in me would cause me to leave my family the same way that my biological father left me. When I got past this fear I was met with another.

For many years I feared that my anxiety would make me incapable of doing right by a child or being a good father. When I got past this fear I was met with a reality.

In 2004 my wife and I got married. We began trying for a child. Years went by. We weren’t getting pregnant despite all of our reading and studies and it was constantly on our minds. We decided to try paying to have the sun and the moon align for us in a turkey baster, but still… no child. We decided to stop trying and just try to accept that we wouldn’t have kids. When I got past this, we were hit with a tragedy.

In 2009 my wife and I finally got pregnant. We made it all the way to finding out her gender. The very next day, we lost her. It was horrible. Here is what I wrote to our friends and family:
To all of our Friends and Family,
Mary and I wanted to let you all know that sadly, we lost our little baby girl last night due to an unforeseeable and likewise unpreventable issue with her cervix. We are still at the hospital but will be going home today. We are both making it through and, though we are grieving, our faith is seeing us through this hard time.
Her name was Sarah Katherine. We named her that just Tuesday, in fact, when we did the ultrasound that shared the good news that she was a she! That name is hers and we will love her always as our first child.
If you are asking the question “what can we do to help” the answer is to please pray for us and for the first day or so please do not call as we will be trying to enter back into our lives and catch up on some sleep.
Thank you all so much for being so amazing in our lives! – Jim and Mary Karwisch

This was the hardest place I think I have ever been as a human. Mary and I clung to each other and healed with each other. We continued to heal but we were sure at this point that whatever had allowed us to get pregnant was too much of a fluke to count on happening again. When we got past this, we believed it was not ever going to happen for us. The door was closed. Then it happened…
In 2013 we got pregnant with our son, Elijah. Mary immediately went on bed rest and stayed there for five solid months. He made it through with flying colors and at the time of this writing, he is a happy and healthy five-year-old boy.

Find a place where I feel safe letting my son play in the yard

This week my wife and I signed a lease on a house here in Rome, Georgia. We are an hour and a half from Atlanta and most of it is for the simple reason that we want Elijah to experience being able to play outside with his friends and not have something horrible happen to him. Mary and I both grew up in the 80’s when you were sent outside for the day and called home for dinner. In today’s world living near a major city just doesn’t allow that to be possible. I read a story not too long ago about a mother who allowed her child to cross the street and play in a patch of manicured grass. Someone called DFCS on her. She had to defend why her child was across the street from her house.

Now I live in a house I never thought we would have, where a child I never thought we would meet can play, while I work from my home office I never thought I would sit in, to book improv training I never thought I would be doing, supported by a wife I never thought I would find.

So what about you? What is still possible for you in life that you have given up on?

Shoulders of Giants (what does this mean?)

 Photo by LifeLike Creations on Unsplash

Allison Gilmore at DuMore Improv

While watching my son play in the yard with the neighborhood kids, I received a call from an old friend whom I had not spoken with in a very long time. He described his life now and what he had been through the past couple of years. Being the kind hearted listener that I am, I reminded him that I will always listen without judgement anytime he is willing to talk. He paused and then, in kindness, said, “I know you understand me, James,  and you may have been ready to listen, but I wasn’t in a place to tell.”

This was a fantastic reminder to me that timing involves both parties. Being someone who can offer a safe, judgement free space and an ear to listen, with a focus on understanding, is only one part of the equation. The other person has to be ready. What someone needs in order to be ready to tell you what is happening on their side can be varied and even tenuous.

When we offer a patient ear, we may need to practice a level of patience that transcends our normal conversational expectations. We may need to give time. Real time. More than we think is appropriate based on our own limited understanding of the situation.

 Photo by Milos Simic on Unsplash

My experiment for today was to improvise a story based on ten random words from TextFixer’s Random Word Generator.  With no preconception of the story I would tell, I decided that I would use one generated word, in order, per sentence, and loop them until the story had some sort of ending. I gave myself the limitation of not using the delete key and only editing for grammar afterward and not for content.

Here are the words: westwork, eight, brightly, elsewhere, elephants, wartime, already, ideal, headquarters, freakish.

Results are below!

Ethan stepped to the edge of Westwork Inc’s rooftop, his polished wing tip shoes peeking over the street forty floors below. It was three minutes till eight which meant he had three minutes to make a very difficult decision. He glanced at the Westwork illuminated logo three floors below him, its soulless neon shining brightly on the windows of condominiums one street over. Ethan wanted to be elsewhere, anywhere, even home, if it meant escaping his entangled fate. Footsteps sounded like elephants on the metal stairs leading upward to the roof exit. He turned around and faced the door, his adrenaline causing his heart to percuss upon his rib cage as though in wartime. The seconds were stretching as he breathed-in the end he knew was already upon him. He held out a small pistol he had taken from David’s desk drawer, though not ideal, it would speak to his intent. The door opened revealing a stream of armed FBI agents, two of whom he recognized from his last visit to headquarters. As they lined up around him, he made his decision and raised the pistol toward the nearest agent, his face broadening to a freakish grin.

“Ethan, you don’t need to do this” Said one of the more familiar agents “Westwork doesn’t deserve your loyalty.” From his pocket, a chime played on his cell phone indicating it was eight o’clock. Two of the closest gunmen switched on their flashlights brightly illuminating the rain soaked roof. Elsewhere, sounds of a helicopter grew louder though not in sight. He remembered a story about elephants who learned to be helpless when, as babies, their tails were tied to a stake in the ground. Ethan let the gun go limp in his hand as he stepped backward off the ledge, his final contribution to the wartime project, to Westwork inc, and to David. An agent rushed forward to catch him, but it was already too late, and Ethan was already free.

Shoulders of Giants (what does this mean?)

 Photo by Ryan Young on Unsplash

 TextFixer Random Generator

 

About a month ago, I went out to my car to drive downtown for a talk I was giving. My car was parked on the street and as it came into view I noticed that a large portion of my front bumper was missing. The passenger door was caved in and there were long red streaks down the rest of the side toward the trunk. On the ground beside my rear wheel was a chunk of someone’s else’s front bumper. There were no other cars around. I never heard a crash and no one came to our door to let us know this had happened. The police came out and filed a report. The insurance agent did an estimate. A tow truck took the car to the shop. All of these things happened while I retained a good mood and did not experience a wash of anxiety.

Was this because I hated that car and wanted it gone? Nope. In fact I was really hoping I could get another five years out of it.

Was it because I am an improv evangelist and I “yes, anded” my way into a blissful state? Nope. Though yes anding things definitely helps in certain situations, it was not even necessary this go round.

The answer to my mood and acceptance of the situation is that I was primed for it. Just a few weeks prior to this experience with my car, our other car also had a problem. This time however there were lots of different emotions running amuck.

We were all in the car driving my wife and my mother in law to the airport on the south side of Atlanta. About an hour and a half drive with moderate traffic. We had given ourselves plenty of time and decided to stop and get something to snack on. As we were about to drive away from the drive thru window the engine cut out. The line for the drive thru was so long that it wrapped around the entire building. I tried to start it again but to no avail. My five year old started to scream about something from the back seat. I tried the ignition again but it wouldn’t crank. I decided to put it into neutral and push it. It wouldn’t go into neutral.

People behind me were starting to get upset. Everyone’s food was getting cold. The drive thru workers were attempting to run food and debit cards back and forth past my window. We finally figured out how to get someone near enough to our car to jump it off. We thanked them and headed off down the street looking for an auto parts store. Unfortunately, a mile down the road,  it happened again. This time we were on the side of the road and fast cars were flying by. The clock was ticking. Our window of opportunity to get my family to the airport was closing. If they didn’t make the flight then they wouldn’t get to the start of their tour in Scotland. I felt a wash of anxiety and started to work on calming myself down. The next step was easy. We picked up the phone and called for both a tow truck and our relatives who live nearby.

An hour and forty five minutes later, everything was back in balance. My wife and mother in law were nearing the airport and would make it on time. I was back at home with my son getting our other car ready for our day of adventure. It was all ok. Everything worked out.

This was when I started to process my reactions to the situation. Why had I gotten so upset about dealing with our broken down vehicle? My first thought was “Well I would be fine if it were just an inconvenience, but there was so much pressure to get out of the way at the drive thru and to get everyone to their flight on time.” This didn’t hold up long under scrutiny however when my brain returned “All of those things are inconveniences. No one was in real danger. No one was in pain. Everyone was healthy. This was just one big inconvenience.”

So primed with this experience and the following mental processing I was able to look at my wrecked front end and think “well this is inconvenient. Glad no one was hurt here. I hope the driver of the other car was ok.”

I now hope that this  new way of thinking will last.  When things are going wrong I would like to be able to find perspective and think “Well this is inconvenient, but everyone is safe. It will all work out.”