Although already some time ago, I'd like to say a few words about this wonderful pilot event which I co-hosted in March 2016: Levelling Up 2016!

In short, coordinated by James Brooks (Developing Cognition), five of us got together and created a day of workshop sessions all centred around the idea of personal development: making learning easy, taking small steps, creating habits, and having fun while doing so.

My main take-away from the day was the importance of approaching personal development from lots of different angles and letting different approaches complement each other. 

On April 28th, 29th, I joined the LSE Language Centre at the PETALL (Pan European Tasks for Language Learning) conference on New Trends in Foreign Language Teaching in Granada, Spain. 

We presented a workshop on Improvisation for Language Learning and for 60 minutes, the teachers became students...

Welcome to the new website! I hope you will find it interesting and useful, perhaps it might even spark a conversation. A few words about myself and this page:

Yes And Venture is about making conversations and interactions simple, accessible, useful and fun. Through applied improvisation as well as other techniques, I wish to share my passion and experience with you, and hopefully it will have as positive an effect on you as it continues to have on me.

"Yes and" is the basis of all theatre improvisation and like Keith Johnstone famously said, those who say "yes", are rewarded with adventure.

On this website you'll find my three main offers for workshops:

• Communication: Sessions based on enhancing style and content of conversations.
• Improve your English: Language classes for non-native English speakers.
• Pitch and Present: Training for public speaking.

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All three have in common that they use techniques from applied improvisation which are based on interaction and fun. Learning and practice doesn't have to be difficult and tedious!

In this blog I present my ideas, experiences and thoughts about improvisation, communication skills, and other topics which are related to personal and professional development. Occasionally, I will post fun games which you can try for yourself and success stories about the application of activities or life in general. 

Below are blogs selected form my archive of the previous website. They include the date on which they were published but not comments or reactions to them. 

Happy reading!

This is my first post and I feel very much like I did in my first Improvisation class: Not entirely sure what's supposed to happen and incredibly pressured by myself to come up with something original and exciting to impress my audience and show you how witty and funny I am.

Unfortunately, this has, for some while now, prevented me from getting this blog started in the first place. Why? Because I get writer's block.
Fortunately, I've now been to enough improvisation classes to know that the more I think about this and the more attention I pay to my inner monologue, the less I get onto paper.
Unfortunately, this is not an improvisation class.
Fortunately, the skill, practices and games we play on stage are transferable to every-day life.

So I'll use two lessons I've learned from improv:

1. Sometimes saying anything is better than saying nothing at all.
2. Often what seems mundane and normal to us is very interesting to the audience because it can sympathise, empathise, or be the start of a conversation.

Therefore, I won't aim for being funny or witty. My aim is to share what I learn on my journey of self-employment and self-discovery. This blog will show you my thought processes and will be full of games and exercises that can enrich life.

I hope you find some useful tidbits and do feel free to share and comment and have a conversation with me.