Improv and Job Hunting w/ Emily Zinkin
“It turned out charity, live events, and tourism was the wrong Venn diagram to be in bang in the middle of a global pandemic.”
Guest blogger Emily Zinkin is a writer who also does community outreach, and programmes and facilitates a Jewish community centre in South London. She loves improv and is very proud of her tea-making skills.
I did my first Free Association course in late 2018, armed for the first time in my life with both the time and the money, and recklessly determined to spend both on something purely for me. I’d wanted to do improv for years but a less than stellar experience with a boy in my university’s improv society had put me off. This time, I was determined nearly a decade later to reclaim improv for myself. The level one course was brilliant; so much more difficult and fun than I was expecting, as we all had to come to grips with re-learning both how to play and how to allow ourselves to fail.
Until then I hadn’t realised how alien both these things had become to me; both the ability to do something purely for the joy of it and with no intention of achieving anything and also (more scarily) the ability to publically and boldly fail. The sense of cringe I felt knowing everyone in the class had seen me fail, and also acknowledging others’ public failure was intense at first, but it soon became natural to clap and laugh about it together. Little did I know that would have such an impact in other areas of my life as well. I hadn’t realised I’d become so scared to fail I wasn’t even willing to try anymore, that I’d lost a sense of play or adventure that had once come so naturally to me.
In March, like so many others this year, I lost my job. It turned out charity, live events, and tourism was the wrong Venn diagram to be in bang in the middle of a global pandemic. Scared to leave my house and needing to pay my bills, I quickly got on with job hunting, only to fail, time and time again. Jobs I was easily qualified or overqualified for didn’t even reply to tell me it was a no. Staring down the void, aware there was nothing I could do except keep throwing myself against the wall of unemployment, I realised I needed to remember my most basic improv lessons. I started to celebrate rejection - because I had tried and they’d replied. And then I remembered there is no failure without play. I widened my job search; if I was going to fail I was at least going to play whilst I did it. I applied for jobs in completely different fields, for roles that sounded fun, for jobs that were out of my league… I took a leap of faith.
I started getting interviews, and not just for the ‘safe’ jobs. I had new failures to celebrate when they didn’t go my way. I started to add elements of play to those interviews, bored of sticking to the same safe answers. And then something amazing happened. After months of trying and getting nothing I was offered three jobs in a row. After receiving a ‘yes’ before I knew it I was receiving a better offer and suddenly I was sending a rejection email. I went from jobless to job floozy! When the third offer came in I didn’t reply until the next day, convinced it was a mistake and the retraction email was imminent; it was a dream job, something that seemed so far out of my league I would never have gone for it without that sense of play and willingness to fail. My application had been a bold offering I never expected anyone to accept.
That job began at the end of November and I’m still in shock to be here. And whilst imposter syndrome still has me feeling like I’m role-playing, I’m still virtually coming in every day ready to work and ready to play. I guess when I’m allowed I’ll have to come back to the FA and do Level 4!
If you have an interesting story on how improv has helped or is helping you in the real world, please complete the form at www.thefreeassociation.co.uk/improv-in-real-life
