Back when I was coaching a lot of improv, I’d encourage my improvisors to do their defaults on purpose. For me, it was not a problem if you started most scenes pretending to pet a cat. It was a problem if you could only ever start scenes petting a cat. That’s not improv.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently, because I have started doing new activities that have showed me how engrained certain defaults are for me.

I’ve started doing Contact Improvisation, which is revealing a lot of defaults about how I interact with another body from years of Tai Chi Push Hands. In Contact, you want to share as much information with your dance partner as possible. That often means sharing your weight with your partner.

In Push Hands, you want to share as little information with your opponent as possible. Even if they have their hands on you, there’s nothing that they can use to push you over.

The result of this default? I don’t share weight in Contact and my partner has no idea where I am. Only by slowly changing this default am I becoming an interesting dance partner.

I’ve also started dating someone (for the first time in a long time), which is revealing a lot about how I interact with another person from years of Improv Theater. In Improv, everything is “yes, and,” accepting offers and realities from your scene partner. In a relationship, only accepting your partner’s reality makes you disappear.

I don’t want to stop being a go with the flow guy who can beat you at push hands. I do want to do it on purpose though.