How Improv Makes You More Confident

Most confidence advice gets it wrong. It tells you to “fake it till you make it,” to adopt power poses, to project an image of certainty even when you’re unsure. But that kind of performed confidence is fragile. It cracks under pressure because it’s built on a pretense rather than a foundation. Real confidence — the kind that holds up in high-stakes presentations, tough conversations, and unexpected challenges — comes from a different place entirely. It comes from the lived experience of navigating uncertainty and discovering that you can handle it.

That’s exactly what improv training provides. Every improv exercise is a small experiment in uncertainty. You don’t know what’s coming. You can’t prepare a script. And yet, over and over, you find your way through. Not perfectly — that’s not the point. But capably. Creatively. Sometimes even brilliantly. And each of those small successes rewires your relationship with the unknown. Instead of dreading it, you start to trust your ability to respond to it. That trust is the foundation of genuine confidence.

We see this transformation most vividly in our presentation skills work. People arrive convinced that good presenting requires a perfect script, flawless delivery, and total control of every moment. They’re white-knuckling their way through every talk, and it shows. After working through improv-based exercises — where they practice recovering from mistakes, responding to unexpected audience reactions, and staying present instead of reciting — something shifts. Their presentations become more natural, more engaging, and paradoxically more polished, because they’re no longer fighting against the spontaneous human moments that make communication compelling.

The same dynamic applies beyond presentations. In meetings, confident people listen more freely because they’re not anxiously rehearsing their next point. In negotiations, they adapt to new information instead of clinging to a predetermined position. In leadership conversations, they can sit with difficult emotions — their own and others’ — without rushing to fix or deflect. All of these are capacities that grow through practice, and improv provides an unusually efficient practice environment.

The participants who benefit most are often the ones who are most nervous at the start. They’re not the naturally gregarious performers. They’re the thoughtful professionals who have something valuable to say but struggle with the vulnerability of saying it. Watching them discover that they can be spontaneous, that they can recover from a stumble, that their authentic presence is more compelling than any polished performance — that’s one of the most rewarding parts of this work.