Alison Jean Lester is a British-based writer and coach—but that statement doesn’t really give any idea of the breadth of her experience and range. She has lived in various countries around the world, including Japan, Singapore, the USA and the UK. She attended college in the US, studying Mandarin and French, and spending her junior year in Beijing. Alison even toyed for a while with the idea of going into the US Foreign Service, but life, marriage and children intervened. Instead, she started concentrating on writing, and particularly storytelling. In the years since then, she has spent time performing improvised comedy and also developed a coaching and training business.
Storytelling and improvisation
This in itself is a great story, but Alison has taken things further by bringing all her experiences together. She now coaches storytelling, creativity, and confidence through the use of improvisation. She believes that improvisation is an essential tool in helping you to trust your brain. She also stresses that this trust is essential for writers, thought leaders and subject matter experts.
Why? Because you get stuck when you stop trusting yourself. If you start to worry about what your brain is suggesting, you enter the realm of self-censorship. Ironically, most people get stuck because they feel the need to be original, rather than being themselves. Alison suggests that improvisation allows individuals to get back in touch with their authentic self, and understand what they can bring to the situation.
Improvisation also has other advantages. For example, it is a really good way to develop your listening skills. You need to be able to listen to others, react, and then develop a response that builds on their ideas, all at speed. Whether you’re listening to someone talk in person, or responding to comments online, the same skills matter. In other words, the skills developed through improvisation are directly applicable to professional settings and interactions.
Practical workshops
Alison now runs practical workshops to help subject matter experts, marketers and others to develop these skills. She is keen to share and encourage the use of exercises that will help individuals to increase their mental agility, and reduce the pressure to be perfect. She speaks from real experience of blockage, and how improvisation helped her to overcome it.
The practical exercises included in Alison’s workshops build collaboration and flexibility. She asks participants to build stories together without preparation time. This encourages collaborative creativity and active listening. It helps participants to stay present, listen carefully and respond constructively. Alison sees mistakes as part of the learning process, which encourages participants not to worry about perfection or performance quality. This in turn builds confidence.
Alison emphasises the importance of trusting your own instincts and embracing the first thoughts that come into your head. She says that this principle is crucial in improv, where spontaneity and authenticity are essential. However, it has another effect: by encouraging participants to trust their initial ideas, it helps them overcome self-censorship and the fear of making mistakes, leading to more genuine and effective communication.
Our partnership with Alison
Alison Jean Lester’s rich background in writing, coaching, and improvisation makes her an ideal leader for workshops aimed at improving listening and communication skills. Her emphasis on trusting your instincts, overcoming mental barriers, and building confidence through practical exercises can help subject matter experts significantly improve their professional interactions. She describes her work as providing a “storytelling coaching studio” and says that participants can expect to become more effective communicators, capable of listening deeply and responding with greater authenticity and impact.
Alison’s interest and expertise in using improvisation to build better storytelling and communication skills clearly chimes with our coaching practice. It is easy to see how much she could contribute to subject matter experts wanting to hone their skills in both listening and communicating more generally. Indeed, this is where our partnership comes into play.
Alison will be running improvisation workshops for our students, both marketers and subject matter experts, . The plan is that by participating in improvisation workshops, subject matter experts and marketers alike so that they can develop better storytelling techniques, learn to convey complex ideas more clearly, and enhance their ability to engage and persuade their audiences. We also hope that they will have fun along the way, and that the workshops will open their minds to new ideas about how to learn. As Alison herself says, it’s important for writers to keep learning new things and keep their minds elastic.