It’s the New Year. Congratulations! You made it through last year! And moving from 2021 to 2022, that’s actually saying a lot.

Let’s check in. Have you made new resolutions and goals for your acting career? If so,  that’s awesome! If not, I highly recommend setting some realistic goals that will stretch you and help you to accomplish more this year than last.

And if you haven’t set any goals, or are new to the acting life, let me suggest what I believe is one of the most important goals you can make for your acting career: Train at improvisation.

If you’re reading this during Covid-19 time, you may be thinking “everyone keeps telling me I need to have more improv training and experience… but how?! Everything’s still shut down!” Well I’ve got great news. You can learn and train improv on your own. That’s right, all by yourself.

First I’m going to show you WHY you should be taking advantage of your time right now to learn improv, and then I’ll show you HOW.

So let’s go over 5 ways Improvisation Training will make your Year Exponentially Better!

Today we’ll talk about #1 on my list, and over the next few posts, I’ll go into greater detail on each one.

1) Improvisation is a Vital Skill for Auditions

We all need to audition to get acting roles. Until you’re at the level of A-list actors like Will Smith, or Emilia Clark, you’ll probably need to audition to get cast in roles that will forward your career.

Chances are, if you live in Los Angeles , New York, or Chicago (or any major acting city) you’ve heard this time and time again – how important improv skills are for your auditions.

Improv training lets you focus on a number of skills that directly help improve auditioning:

• Being present in the moment
• Being able to take quick direction, in the audition or on set
• Making quick changes to your scene, line or character
• Being able to go with anything that happens with confidence

These are just a few indispensable skills that improv training helps you develop.

Self-Tape Auditions

Even for self-tape auditions (auditions you film from home), improv skills can raise your performance from dry and flat to dynamic living and breathing scenes.

Not to mention self-tape auditions where they actually ask you to improvise a scene! (it happens! My first self-tape audition for the series and then movie Stargate Origins was completely improvised, as requested!)

So improv training can really boost your auditions to where they need to be to get cast in bigger and better projects.

This brings us to # 2, which we’ll discuss in depth in the next post.

2. Many Agents and Casting Directors won’t see actors for certain roles unless they have improv training and experience.

>> Click here to read Part 2 of this post

"Become an Improv Wizard" is a PROVEN STEP-BY-STEP ONLINE IMPROV COURSE to Build CONFIDENCE, UNLEASH CREATIVITY, and BECOME FEARLESS through Improvisation

Lincoln Hoppe is an actor, writer, director, and father of 5. He is the the Co-Founder of Improv Wizards training school and Online Courses and Co-Director of the Society Comedy Troupe.