Who's line is it anyway?

I used to love watching "Who's Line is it Anyway?". It was the show that could perk me up no matter what--I always ended up rolling on the floor laughing. For those of you who may not be familiar, it's a comedy "game"show that has one basic premise: improv. Four actors and comedians would get up on stage and spend half an hour making fools of themselves by thinking skits up on the spot. I'm not going to lie, I always envied their ability to make it up as they went along.

Thinking on my feet has never really been a strong point for me. I am a PLANNER. There needs to be a thought out plan, as far as I'm concerned. Not surprisingly, I was never the student who could write a speech last minute for class and then get up and make it sound like I had spent days on it. Though I do pride myself in being able to participate in spurts of witty banter, I've never really been able to seriously improvise.

That is, until I became a behavioral therapist.

My job requires me to pull things out of a hat constantly. I need to be able to turn on a dime and change what I do based on Monkey's moods and responses. As a creature of routine and habit, Monkey often gets stuck in a rut if we do too many similar things in the same order too often. It's my job to prevent that from happening.

It was really hard at first to keep a good flow in a therapy session. I would be so focused on the individual activities, that once we finished one, I wouldn't be ready for the next and would be left sputtering "I...um...uh...let's...uh...do.........THIS!". And somewhere around the second "uh", I would have lost Monkey's attention completely.

I guess with time and practice, I've learned how to be improvisational. Because sometimes, no matter how much I plan, the session never turns out the way I expect it to. And those are the sessions that tend to be the best.