When you’re presented with an opportunity, is your first response usually a “no”?

Maybe you’ll change your mind later, but is your typical knee-jerk a negatory?

Or maybe you know someone like this, and think, “sure glad that’s not me.” But that mindset is very common, and most of us have at least a little “nuh uh” in us, if we’re honest.

So maybe we all could use a lesson in improvisation, where a “Yes, and…” answer to an offer moves scenes forward, and “No but…” takes the possibility out. Clunk.

In the same way, “offers” in life come in many shapes and sizes: proposals, suggestions, ideas and even casual remarks. They aren’t always obvious, so you have to pay attention and notice when an “offer” is being made.

But it’s worth thinking about what might be possible if we paid more attention to how we respond to the offers we get daily in life, and how life might be different if we framed our interactions in a “yes and….” vs. an automatic “No but…”

NOTES:

*Improv description: I have had this writer’s description of improv for years in my files. Unfortunately, I don’t have the writer’s name. If these are your words, please come forward and take credit, and accept my thanks for your thoughts!

Niequist, Shauna. I Guess I Haven’t Learned That Yet: Discovering New Ways of Living When the Old Ways Stop Working. Zondervan, 2022.

Rhimes, Shonda. Year of Yes: How to Dance It Out, Stand in the Sun and Be Your Own Person. Simon and Schuster, 2015.