“I got arrested,” the broad shouldered young man says to an older woman he met fifteen minutes ago. Then he smiles, spreads his arms up in to the air and proclaims, “I failed!”

The older woman in the cardigan applauds him, takes a beat and says “Me too!” These strangers, with seemingly little in common except this confession, laugh together. They are twenty minutes in to their first Free Intro to Improv Class at Merlin Works.

I’ve done this activity with thousands of people from all walks of life. It sounds downright awful: go up to a stranger, admit a personal or professional failure, smile, bow, and let them applaud you. Then return the favor. But it’s surprisingly delightful. It changes the energy in the room and bonds people who initially feel defensive and self conscious when the class begins.

Although I’ve been doing this exercise for years, it wasn’t until I read To Sell Is Humanby Daniel Pink, this year’s bestselling (and also really good) business book, that I got some new insight in to why this exercise is so powerful. Pink outlines the three qualities that make a person great at sales in today’s market. He calls them “the new ABC’s of moving others”: Attunement, Buoyancy, and Clarity. Each of these qualities is something I’ve been teaching in my improv classes, whether I knew it or not. And Pink actually dedicates and entire chapter of his book to improv training, so the guy’s got to be on to something, right?

Attunement is the Yes And piece, something I’ve talked about extensively in this newsletter. How to see what the other person is presenting, accept it, and add on to it with something connected. That could be someone’s emotion, concern, body language or more. So when a prospect shows up in a hurry, you match their pacing and energy to get them the information they need in the time that they have. Clarity is something I’ve added more and more of in my curriculum in recent years. We have two classes dedicated to specificity, so that the offers you are making are clear, concise, and easy to catch. It’s the difference between “the man flew” and “The man in the red cape soared through the skies of Metropolis, looking for the burglar.”  Buoyancy, however, was a newer concept to me in interpersonal skills.

Buoyancy is the ability to bounce back. It’s the positivity. The future looking. The resiliency. And it’s something that’s been all over my improv curriculum in different ways, but I didn’t have a cohesive name for it until now. I realized that was what this very first failure bow activity was all about: admitting mistakes, celebrating them, and moving on. That’s how we improvisers start practicing buoyancy. It’s why one of the first group games we play in class are intended to make us mess up, acknowledge it, and get back in the game. It’s what makes long-time salesmen able to get out of bed in the morning and keep plugging away, knowing they will have many unsuccessful sales calls that day and every day. They have a specific way they talk to themselves about these routine failures.

Pink sites Martin Seligman and his work in “positive psychology” to get in to the specifics of buoyancy. Seligman observed how people with learned helplessness explain negative events to themselves.  In their “explanatory style” there are three main ways people who give up easily perceive failure. People who lack buoyancy see their mistakes as:

I’m excited to incorporate this idea of buoyancy more explicitly in to the classes because the benefits are clearly huge. In Seligman’s Research, Buoyancy was the number one predictor of sales success. It allowed people to get back in there and try again with a positive attitude, giving them the numbers they need to achieve the success they desire.

People often want to avoid or minimize failure. But failure is going to happen. It’s part of life. So the question is more about training yourself to handle it. My advice: make like a balloon and get buoyant.