Good morning, everyone. So glad to see you, Abby Eliza. Thank you for joining us today. Great to see you. We also have Sana and Karina with us Colleen. So nice to see you. Thank you for joining us, Diane. Really glad you could join us today.We're gonna have a great session starting in just a moment. Great to see all of you here. We'll be getting going in just a moment. Sumitra, nice to see you Nikki. Great, great that you could join us today. We will be doing a lot of interaction. So looking forward to having you use the chat and potentially coming off of mute a few times. Thanks so much for being here today, everybody. All right, we've got more folks coming in, Rachel. So nice to see you. Thanks for joining us today, Sarah, glad that you could make it. We're gonna be starting here in just a moment. We'll give just one more second for folks to join us. All right, excellent. We've got a great group here. So good morning. Everyone. There has never been a more critical time to improvise. Being an improviser is literally the key skill that we need and it's incredibly difficult and changing and exciting world that we live in today. Now, here's the thing. Improvisers are people who are highly creative. We are adaptable, flexible, very positive, very inclusive. We work with a team every single day. Those also happen to be the same skills and the same abilities that we see in the highest performing corporate teams that we work with.

Now, I'm really excited that we're going to be looking at some of the immediately usable tips that we use from the stage that over the last 20 years, we have found also have incredible outcomes in the corporate workplace. You see, improv edge is business training with an improv twist. We have combined the art of improvisation with almost 20 years of research in neuroscience, human behavior and psychology. So we're going to be looking at how do we apply these ideas so that we too can manage critical moments, scary moments even how can we be positive in difficult situations? You're gonna walk out with ideas that you can use today. Now, you are also the experts in what you do. I actually was also a woman in tech for many years in my early career. So I know that there are so many things, so many complexities that we deal with as women in this industry and you're gonna be applying these ideas, how they work for you. I'm really excited to get started today and I also want you to meet my co producer who is a senior facilitator at Improv Ed as well. Um Alex, please give them a quick introduction to yourself.

Absolutely. Good morning, good afternoon. Good evening. Wherever you are joining us from, my name is Alex Lefel. I'm a senior facilitator and producer behind the scenes here supporting everything and anything that you all might need throughout this work. I'd love for everyone to first go to the chat and just say hello, make sure you're typing to everyone. So we know that that chat is working and get ready to improvise a little bit today. Uh Get ready to jump out of your comfort zone a little bit as well. We will be providing opportunities to elevate you to panelists and bring you on stage with us per se because we know as improvisers and there's research that shows from Yale's Doctor Lee in Neuroscience and psychology that challenges and experiences that are outside of one's normal comfort zone are shown shown to accelerate adult learning.

So we have some exercises and challenges today that are very intentional to put you in a state of comfortable discomfort. We like to say for very targeted, meaningful reasons. So get ready to improvise, get ready to learn, get ready to push those comfort zones. Uh And I think we'll start that off since people are in chat, joining from all over the world, we'll start with uh an exercise called connection.

Absolutely. So everyone, my name is Karen Huff. I'm the founder and CEO of Improv Edge and I am proud to say that Improv Edge is the first company in the world to combine improvisation with research. Now, I did this after I had been a professional improviser and actor. I worked with the second city in Chicago. I did movies, TV, and film. And then I had a very strange opportunity to go into technology. I went into a network engineering start up. Now I was taking classes every night and cramming, but I was improvising during the day. You better believe that experience made me realize that these skills, I had made me really able to deal with corporate situations. And so Wharton, the Business School at the University of Pennsylvania was my first research partner. I have now written three books, two of which are Amazon best sellers. I have a wonderful ensemble in five cities and we work on four continents. Uh I'm a Yale grad and we have also won the Stevie Silver International Award for most innovative company of the year. We work on four continents and it's been an incredible ride. I am also on a number of boards in my area and I have three kids, a husband and I live in Ohio in the United States. So this exercise is incredibly special to me because it helps us understand who we are. I just gave you an introduction, you know, a lot about me now I wanna know a little bit more about all of you.

It's a simple, simple exercise and what we're gonna do is I'm gonna make some statements and if that statement happens to also be true for you, you are going to go into the chat and tell me something about it. So for example, if I say I love coffee, OK, then let's go in and I like my coffee black and very hot. OK? So I like, I like my coffee to be just out of the machine just brewed. Let us know how you like coffee. If you happen to like coffee, go to the chat and give us a little bit information, Alex. You like yours with a little bit of sugar and cream. That's really good. Um So if you connect with that idea, I like coffee. Let's see what you've got to make. Um Oh, and Rebecca loves that convenience out of an automatic coffee maker. I hear you where it's just one cup at a time. I absolutely love that. All right, let's go on to some other statements. My next statement is I have a pet. So I am gonna run to the chat and I'm going to put in that. I have, I have pets. Two Labradors. All right, two Labradors. Ah and so my hosts also say that they have dog 05 pugs and a cat. A tripod. Wow, Colleen. Thank you for sharing that. That's so cool. A dog named Sunny All and one lovely cat. A toothless cat named Cricket. Wow, these are fantastic. And somebody has got, well, a husky lab, two cats, a beta fish. All right. So, um, and Amy has a lot of pets.

Fantastic. We learned a lot about each other there. Thank you for sharing that. Um, next one is I can play a musical instrument. Ok. Now, you don't have to play it well, but I'm gonna put in a few. Um Now, if you called on me to play any of these except my voice, it might be a little scratchy and screechy, but I could maybe play chopsticks. Uh the recorder, harmonica voice. Excellent. That totally counts. Absolutely counts. Uh All right. So Rachel, the singer and she plays piano. Fantastic. I wish you were here voice, especially in the kitchen. All right. Yes. Uh I like to sing in the shower. I wake up my family sometimes in the morning, but that's what happens. Uh and drumming on your knees. Excellent. Thank you for that. All right. And finally, this is our last question. Uh I am having an amazing time at the women in tech conference. So if you connect with that, all you have to put into the chat is connection. All right. Say that you connect with that and that you're also having a really good time being able to access this wonderful information, connection, connection. All right. Thank you, Diane Nikki, Eliza Sumitra. Everybody's connecting with that. Awesome experience. Fantastic. I'm so glad to hear that.

Now, I would so appreciate if one of you might come off mute and just tell me a little bit about why you think we started our time together with a game called connection, right? We're gonna be looking at improv, why would connection help us? Um And Sumitra, you were so kind to say that would you be able to unmute and just share with me why you think I started this way?

Can you hear me? Yes. Yeah. Uh So yes. So basically humans are supposed to be connected then? Yeah, all of us love connections, right? So uh it's a good experience because it's uh people from varied backgrounds that come in. Uh uh There's a lot of uh sharing of real life experiences as well. So, yeah, learn from each other.

I love it. Yes. Thank you because you talked about that sharing of your life experiences and you're getting to connect with people from all over the world. Yes. Awesome. Thank you so much. Um Yeah, this is the American sign language sign for applause. And as we've been in this virtual world, we use it a lot at improv ed. Thank you so much for sharing that. That is, that is absolutely correct. And I think that at the beginning, you also said human beings need to connect. Thank you for saying that. Now there's a reason that I chose this and Sumitra really hit the nail on the head. She's absolutely true. There are some other key things that we want you to understand about human connection. Doctor Barbara Fredrickson at the University of Chapel Hill found that people who are more socially connected get over the common cold, almost 50% faster than people who are more socially isolated. So we really wanted to dig into this research. We looked a lot more deeply and found a really amazing meta analysis above our 148 different research projects and what they found was astonishing and sobering. They found that people who have very strong and very connected networks and, and we've all met those people. We are some of those, right? Maybe you have great connections with your family, with your colleagues, maybe with your place of worship. Those people happen to be 45% less likely to die early in their lives. And that is because we are literally wired and need that connection.

I wanted to read something verbatim from this study to you. And it said that while stress and loneliness can cause negative changes in our biological systems, taking time to connect with others like we're doing today can help activate more beneficial processes such as the release of Oxytocin.

Now, Oxytocin is an, is an incredible natural hormone that appear that appears in everyone. Oxytocin has been found to lower cortisol, reduce pain change the way our brain responds to potential stressors and even promote the growth of new brain cells. So what we have found is that human connection is incredibly important. And after going through the last few three years that we have with so much isolation, it is even more important. Now, improvisers connect every day. And as you think about your work, we ask that you consider, how can I walk out of this, this experience today and think about different ways to connect with my family, my colleagues, um people outside. How do I make that time for that connection for my own health and for the health of people around me? Um Alex, I'd love for you to comment a bit on how this relates to human resiliency, which by the way, resiliency is our ability to, to keep coming back and it really relates to how strong our network is. Alex.

Absolutely. We've seen this prevalent, especially over the last few years as Karen said, and it, this is a quote that Karen had had quoted uh in an article posted in mashable.com around resiliency years ago and it still rings true today. Resiliency makes people less afraid of mistakes, resilient.

People continue to try fall down, stand up and try again. So by simply creating these wonderful connections with your colleagues with new people that you make, uh you create trust amongst them, you build that resiliency up and that gives you all the ability to stand up after you've fallen down. And give that a try once again. So you are already building resiliency amongst this small group here. We're building the resiliency amongst our teams by building further connections. I want to give you a little bit of an overview of what we're going to cover very quickly. Today, we'll learn and apply the four principles of improvisation that we here have with the Wharton Business School trademarked. We're going to explore different ways that you can apply the behaviors of improv to be more flexible, to be adaptable and influential in your role as a leader, whether you're leading from where you are or you're a leader of a team and you're going to learn and practice these techniques for effective management of yourself because we need to certainly take care of ourselves and our teams during times of stress.

So let's continue to this conversation around improv and talk more about what is improvisation.

All right. So why improv, why are we so obsessed? Why has it changed my life? Improv is a very different art form. It originated in the United States and it is an art form where about five or six actors come on stage and guess what? We don't have a script. Seriously, we don't have costumes, we don't have props, we have none of the normal tools of theater, but we do have an entire audience and about two hours to fill sounds a little scary to some people. To me, it was some of the best theater I ever did. We make up a show literally on our feet and we work together and we take ideas from the audience. It was a way to collaborate on a very, very high level. And here's the thing, all of you are actually already impro advisors because uh you know, I, I would love it if you just put an X or say me in the chat. If some of you, you know, really like to have a schedule, you know, if you, if you like to sort of know what your day is gonna look like. However, I bet that as soon as you wake up, that schedule starts to go a little crazy. And Rachel is saying, yeah, trust not me. Ok? So you like to improvise, don't you Rachel? That's fantastic. It's perfect. And when things go wrong, you pull on your expertise, you pull on your ability to be adaptable and you change in the moment.

So what we're gonna do today is look at four ideas that come from improv that we can apply immediately to be better professionals in tech. Now these ideas are yes, space, building blocks, team equity and oops to eureka, we're going to focus on yes, space and oops to Eureka today most specifically, but in order to really understand how this works, I would so appreciate a volunteer to come on stage with me. Come off mute, turn on the camera. If you can and we are going to do an improv scene. I promise it will be super easy, super fun. Sumitra was really helpful the first time Alex, do you see some folks that have been active that might be willing to come out and help me out? I

see some great people that have been active in Chad. I also gave one last check there and Rachel is gonna volunteer. I said, raise your hand if you'd like to volunteer. So Rachel, I'm about to elevate you to a Panelist as well. So you should have the ability to jump on camera here shortly and come off mute if you can.

Sure,

Rachel. Hi. And there she is Rachel. Oh, and there's your pants. Fantastic. Oh She's gonna fix, she's gonna fix the, the uh there we go. Oh, even better. I can't hear you right now, Rachel. Sorry. The other one was working better, I think. No, can't hear you. No.

Zoom may be pulling a different microphone device.

It might be zoom. She is looking. Oh, aren't those pets? Cute.

That's the extra tech support in tech. All of our pets.

Exactly. That's her producers. We still can't hear you Rachel. Now, Alex, we're gonna be talking about these four concepts while Rachel is working on her sound. Could you get some things from the audience?

Absolutely. And Lashana is saying she's demonstrating the importance of flexibility already. So what's going to happen in just a moment? Uh is Karen and Rachel will be just performing a short improv scene. It's impro improvised because you haven't had this conversation before.

Now, as improvisers, we need some foundation to work off of to make our jobs easier. So what I need everyone to go to the chat. I want you to type in a non romantic relationship for these two people to portray in this scene. Anything in the world that you want, uh that's a non romantic relationship. And the more specific you are the better. I see sisters, sisterhood, friends, a boss and an intern buyer and a seller teacher and a student here, Rachel now. So that's good. Uh Neighbors. Let's go with neighbors. Amy has neighbors. I think we all can connect with neighbors in some way. I wanna add some physical organization to this as well. I need an object that Rachel could hold in one hand. She does not have to have it in her room. Don't make it one of her pets either. So she doesn't have to carry this pet around. This is something that she will pretend to hold in one hand. So what is an object? Anything specific in the world that she can have? I see a hairbrush, I see a broom. Oh a watermelon. It's starting to turn to be summertime here in America. So I'm gonna say watermelon and your neighbors. OK, Rachel. So again, this is going to be a fully improvised scene. What makes it improvisational is you don't have a script and we don't, we've never done this before. All you need to do to start this scene, we'll figure everything out. All you need to do is say, hey, Karen here is a watermelon. OK. Got it.

Do you have any questions before we start? No. OK. I'm just gonna spotlight both of you to put you on stage and begin whenever you're ready. Rachel.

Hey Karen, here's a watermelon.

That's soda watermelon.

It's not,

no. What is it? I don't know, but it's not a watermelon.

Well, it's green. No. What color is it?

I don't know. And

I was gonna say an great pause there, Rachel. Everyone do that. The American sign language again. Well, we can't see you but give applause in the chat. Uh say yes and chat for Rachel for a great job. Well done. Karen. I think we're missing the mark there. What's going on?

Totally missing the Mark. Rachel. First of all, I have to apologize to you. I was not being a good scene member. Um I wanna ask you, how did it feel to be stuck in that scene with me? And I promised it was for a good reason. Of

course. Um uh uh I of course, was nervous. I wasn't sure what to say next. Uh I felt that you were being purposely um difficult and so I was trying to at the same time, think of things that I could ask that would elicit a response,

right? I mean, you were even in the midst of all that you were so creative, you were trying so hard, right? You, you were describing it, you were asking me what to do. Uh How did all of you feel about me? Huh? Go, go to the chat. How, how did I seem to you? Not very

much. Someone said you're non interactive and you were actually obstructive with the way you're communicating

and the word we kept hearing was no. Now, Rachel, the reason that I did this is because, um, there is a research paper that shows that people tend to respond to new ideas negatively first. Unfortunately, it's unconscious. We don't even realize we're doing it sometimes. And that is anathema to improv. We're in a really risky situation like you are. And, and we have to say yes. And so, so this time I'm gonna promise to be a good scene partner we're gonna use. Yes. And where we accept each other's contributions and let's try it one more time. Sound good.

Yes.

All the same line. Just say Karen, here's your watermelon and we'll see what happens now using. Yes. And

Karen, here's your watermelon.

Oh, and just in time, the barbecue is about to start

and everybody's arriving.

I know. I know and I know that those two are hungry. I have saved several of the bones for them.

Ah, and they're going to enjoy them immensely.

I am sure. Now we've got to cut this up. All right, it's gotta be enough for all 40 people. Thank goodness, it's huge. Hang on. Let me sit over here. Wow. Where did you find that watermelon Rachel?

I grew it in my backyard.

What? Amazing. The woman with the green thumb. It's gorgeous. It's delicious. I'm sure it will be. Why is it so big? How did you get it to grow so well?

Uh The secret is lots of fertilizer and love

and do you hug them?

I try to every day. Uh

Amazing and see. All right. All right. Another. Give yourself a round of applause. Give yourself a round of applause. So, Rachel, how was it to be in the scene that time?

Um It definitely felt less nervous. Um I was able to add on to things you were saying a lot easier. I wasn't worried about um you being obstructive as I said before and it felt like I could be creative.

Wow. Wow. Thank you so much. All that from you. S now I'm gonna ask you to extrapolate a little bit, right? We had a first scene that felt very negative. We had a second scene where your partner was positive with you. Um Can you relate that to situations at work where this maybe could make a difference for you or your colleagues?

I can, I can absolutely relate to that. I think that one of the things I try to do is say things like I wonder to try to get people to communicate a little bit more. But I'm wondering how yes and will also work.

Yeah. There's a whole chapter in my first book around just saying yes and to people, um, it, it's the foundational principle of improv that. Have you heard of it before? You seem familiar? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. A lot of people had never heard about it when I first started this work. And now so many people have written about improv that's really understood, which is exciting. Um Rachel, thank you so much for playing with me today for, for offering your, your feedback and your help. So let's give her another round of applause. Well done. Thank you so much and, and let's talk a little bit about that idea of yes. And that Rachel so beautifully just talked about how it applies to work into our lives, right? So, yes, sand is the concept on the improv stage that we have to say yes first. So as you saw in the first scene, if I said, that's not a watermelon. Well, all of you as an audience, you got bored, you got confused. Nothing was working. It wasn't working for me and Rachel either. So the first thing we have to say is not only yes, it's a watermelon, but then we have to give something to our partners, we have to say and, and build on it. That's the building blocks piece. And so it, it's a beautiful combination of how this all works. Now, team equity is the idea on the improv stage that everybody brings a different strength.

You know, I, I had people in my improv improv group that were great singers, some could dance, some were great at one lighters. And we brought all of our different talents together to make a great show. And then finally, oops to Eureka was the concept that stuff goes wrong or the unexpected happens, things we didn't see coming show up. And then how do we deal with that in the moment? How do we make that? Oops, that unexpected, scary moment of the, of the uncertain into something great. These are the concepts that drive improv and they also drive great business. Now, the yes idea is what I want to delve into a little bit with you now, yes, space is again, as I said, the idea that we say yes. First, it's actually revolutionary for many of the CEO S that I have coached, we've worked with executives on four continents, as I mentioned. Now, my improv team is in five different cities and simply the idea of being positive in the moment. Now, you don't have to say yes, like we'll do whatever you say, you can't do that in business, but you can say yes, you're heard, yes, you're valued.

I, I'd like to hear more about your idea and maybe consider it that goes so far in increasing engagement and contribution. Let's also talk about the effect of our words. This is an intentional choice that we can make as leaders or leaders where we are. So the journal of Multilingual and multicultural development did a wonderful research project. And what they found is that across nations, across countries and languages, we have access to about 50% emotion words that are negative. So take English, for example, we have many more negative emotion words than positive.

Uh 50% are words like mad or angry or upset. About 30% of the emotion words that we have access to are very positive, like excited and happy. And then about 20% of those are neutral like fine and it depends on how you say it if it's fine or fine. So we have to actually work hard to access language that is positive. We have to be intentional about it. So what I'm gonna do now is I'm gonna say something as if I'm your colleague. Let's say I just popped up on the screen if you work mostly virtual or let's say I walked over to your desk if you're in person and I'm gonna say something. I want all of you to go to the chat immediately and tell me how that made you feel. OK? You ready? So remember go to the chat as soon as I say this and tell us how you feel here, we go. All right. Don't get mad. We got a big problem and you better fix it by the end of the day, Alex. What are you seeing in the chat?

I see people saying they're intimidated, nervous, attacked, even stressed. Some are instantly annoyed and I'm seeing a lot of anxiety. People are responding in more of a frantic way. Yeah.

Yeah. Wow. And that's all because those words when they are used actually make the brain go into defensive mode, believe it or not, it starts to protect and when that happens, it enters a fight flight or freeze mode which starts to shut down its ability to reason. Now in order to keep the brains of ourselves and our colleagues functioning, we have to keep it out of defensive mode and that is done by using more positive language. So I'm gonna do this again. I'm gonna be that colleague who pops up on screen or walks to your desk and I'm gonna say the same thing, choosing different language and tone. And I want you to tell me how you feel this time ready? Oh Something has come up and I really need your help. Uh I have to figure this out by the end of the day and I know you always have good solutions. Can you help me, Alex? What are you saying this time?

Oh, a big change. I see it now. I'm being enabled. I'm feeling collaborative and there's urgency and even with that urgency. There's willingness now rather than just urgency for the sake of urgency, people are feeling valued as well as willing to help and step in.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I it's amazing just to see that difference in how we reacted to those situations. So as we consider this small idea, we, we want you to take away from this moment, how can you create more collaborative environments? It's actually around choosing your words and choosing a place where ideas are heard by simply saying yes, Alex, tell us a little bit about that. So we can head into the next

section. Certainly. So as you think about how you can apply these different tenants to your work, we can think about using these positive words, creating environments where ideas are heard using questions. And this goes back to what Rachel said with, oh I wonder being inquisitive, asking some great questions to dig deeper into what they're looking for and more specifically some open ended questions to create a conversation. And in improv, we always focus on making the other person look good.

So please have some great focus on the other person. How can I give them the gift uh with a yes and uh to continue a conversation and create a space where we can truly have collaboration like an improviser.

Excellent. So we've covered yes space. And I love this picture of a woman who is relaxed. She's in a place that looks like it must be beautiful. She has her eyes closed and is envisioning something and this is the moment, believe it or not where we want to talk about. Oops, to eureka. It's that fourth concept that we introduced and oops T eureka is always interesting because I feel like it has defined my entire life. I learned all of my lessons the hard way I made a mistake, something went wrong. I had to learn from it. It also is how I stumbled upon the idea for my business. How I came up with the idea for some of my books, it's the idea of coming across something that you didn't expect. And often we become defensive or scared or worried. And if we enter the mindset of a scientist, if we say, wow, this isn't what I expected. So interesting. So interesting, you start to have a different hormonal and physical response. Now this is really tough. We are in a really, really difficult time. Now in our professional lives, we've come through COVID, there are global changes happening everywhere and we are constantly under siege by Cortisol, which is the stress hormone.

We have stress from our family, stress from our work and being able to take care of your own body is more critical than it has ever been before. Oxygen is the great leveler when it comes to stress. And what we have learned this began years ago. In my initial research, we found that people don't breathe. Now, actors are taught to breathe from the time we first start to study. If you've seen really funny scenes in movies where actors are going, oh, you know, they're doing all these silly things. I mean, it looks ridiculous.

Right. But what we learned is it allows us to take a ton of oxygen into our body. It relaxes our body so we can walk onto a stage, which is terrifying. It also allows us to sing or to speak with a, a great amount of, of resonance or, or to change our voice, right? We have to have oxygen to do that. Now, in our workplace, we often wake up. We may think about the first stressful things can happen to that day and we start going and we're breathing from here the whole day long. That increases our cortisol. It does not allow oxygen to relax us. So I'm gonna teach you a breathing technique right now. It comes from Doctor Andrew Weil at the Center for Integrated Medicine at the University of Arizona. It is something that you can do in the tiniest amount of time and we're gonna do it together right now. It's called 478. So wherever you are, I would love you to just square your feet, uncross your legs. Everybody relax, relax your shoulders, put your hands on your knees. There you go. Good. You can see Alex. If you can close your eyes, that would be great. And what we're gonna do is we're gonna breathe through our nose for four. You're gonna hold it for seven and you're gonna breathe out slowly for eight. I'm gonna count for you and we're gonna do this a few times. So remember breathe through your nose for four 1234.

Hold for 7234567. Breathe out with a whoosh 2345678. Here we go and n 234. Hold 234567 0345678. Breathe deep 234. Hold 234567 out 2345678. Really big in two four. Hold 234567 out 5678. Now open your eyes if they were closed, uh go to the chat and let us know how that made you feel. Let me know what that did for your physical and mental state. Alex. Do you see any responses?

I think we're all waking up still a little bit. I see, I see a lot of people coming in saying we're relaxed. It was a little bit of a reset. I'm calm or I'm calmer than I was before. I know for me, I get some yawns afterwards which is natural just getting that oxygen in your body. Uh and, and some people feel more energized, I feel more energized after doing that rather than call because my body is full of oxygen now. So I see a lot of people saying calm and relaxed,

good, good. So if you're calm and relaxed or maybe you're sleepy, this is probably the first time that you breathe deeply today. And this little trick I often do it maybe 10 times and, and I wanna remind you, please do it seated or at least where you're near something, holding on to something I used to do it in my car before I walked into very difficult negotiations. It hit the reset button. It took out the white noise. It gave me control, it gave me relaxation, which are all the things you want when walking into a stressful situation. Now, here's the thing. It took us barely 30 seconds, maybe a minute to do that exercise together. If you were able to integrate this, maybe in between meetings or a couple of times a day, you will find that you are so much more calm, so much more focused, so much more able to deal with all the surprises that come our way during the day we wanted today during our short time together to give you just a few tips that would allow you to think differently about how we move through our day.

We do that all the time at improv edge. Even when we're working with leaders for 10 months, we often work with companies for years on end, doing both coaching and leadership development. We find that these tips are the ones that get us through the days so that we can focus on the larger ideas that we think about in adapting our enterprises and our teams to the future of our world. So please do think about how you can integrate this simple breathing exercise as well as a lot of positivity. And I would love to know what skill or behavior do you think you can apply? Today? We talked about connecting with others. We talked about using positive language. We also talked about relaxing and using that breathing technique. Go to the chat now and share what can you use today from this time together? That could make a better day for you at work. Let's hear about that. Let us know what you could use and apply today. And we ask that you please take away the fact that you can increase better outcomes you can feel and be an improviser every single day, Alex. What are some of our responses there?

Yeah, I'm seeing some people are already doing some sort of breathing techniques after work and they might start integrating that between meetings, especially if you have one or two minutes because that's all that exercise took, see some other conversations. I definitely trying to yes and in conversations and maybe encouraging others to help find a resolution uh and then building connections between uh or beginning of retrospectives and adding some of those other breathing techniques because some people are already using that positive language.

So that's great to see

uh a appreciation for others. Oh, thank you Sumitra. Absolutely. Appreciation for others telling them that they matter. It's such a positive thing to do for others. Absolutely. So I want to thank all of you for being here with us today and I have a gift for you. Um Improv Edge has just launched the Conservatory. We've always done live in person and also virtual work where you're working with us live as we are right now. And there was such demand for, for elearning that we have created the managing tough conversations elearning. I wanted to give it to all of you for 40% off. You are welcome to go and this code, if you want to use the QR code, Alex is also putting a link into the chat, use that women tech 90 to get 90 days of access to a great, great piece of elearning. It is a simple three step improvisational process to deal with the toughest conversations that you run into. Have you ever had those conversations where you've got to tell somebody that they're not gonna get a raise or maybe tell a colleague that their performance is not as good as it needs to be for a for a project. Oh My gosh, gut wrenching, horrible. You sweat.

This little 70 minute training will give you a process to get through that with confidence preparation and also the ability to hear the other person with great outcomes. So please use this for 40% off coupon code, share it with all of your friends. Happy to have you use that. And we would love to hear what you think about it in the future. Just go ahead and snap a picture of that QR code or use the link that Alex is putting into the chat and be sure to put in women tech 90 to get your 40% off. We would love to see you more at improv edge. We do everything from keynotes to long term leadership development programs and it has been such an honor to be here with women in tech. We are a 100% women owned business. We have offices in five cities and we work all over the world. And one of the ways that we like to finish is we like to give people a couple of extra minutes. You need to grab a cup of coffee or maybe go use the restroom. So we're gonna put our fists air altogether. I know wherever you are in the world and we're going to shout yes. And because it gets that blood pumping, it gets that oxygen into the body. You are improvisers. So we're going to shout yes and three times ready. 123, yes and yes and yes.

And you go have a fabulous day. We believe in you and be an improviser. Thank you.

Thanks everyone. Take care. Have a great rest of your conference. Thanks, Rebecca.