The Permission to Be Intentional

The permission to step forward with intention

Will Hines is an improv performer and teacher you might know from the UCB Theatre in New York or from his book How to Be the Greatest Improviser on Earth and his newsletter Will Hines Improv Nonsense which has become a kind of water cooler for improvisers who think seriously about what they do. He recently wrote something that stopped me cold.

The Toronto problem is too much agreement and not enough direction.

He was teaching in Toronto and noticed that players would agree beautifully at the top of scenes, accepting every offer with genuine warmth, building these happy strange worlds together, and then the scene would just sort of peter out because nobody was willing to make anything specific. Nobody wanted to impose a philosophy or challenge a weird thing that happened. Nobody wanted to steer. The result was a perfectly agreeable stage full of people who forgot to have a point of view.

Too much agreement, not enough direction

The Los Angeles problem is too much steering and not enough trust.

But when Will compared that to what he sees in Los Angeles, the problem flipped entirely. LA players have no trouble steering but they doubt first and agree later, treating every offer like something that has to earn its way into the scene. Things are unimportant until proven otherwise. You get grounded intelligent scenes where the dad buying jeans somehow becomes a marriage counseling session about cancer medication and broken promises because nobody trusts anyone yet. Two cities, two different problems, and they share the same root cause.

The missing ingredient is intentionality.

Too much steering, not enough trust

Intentionality sounds like it might kill spontaneity but it does the opposite. Spontaneity without intentionality is noise, motion without direction. Intentionality without spontaneity is stiffness, a script you wrote before you knew what the scene was about. The real magic happens when you say yes first and then steer with purpose, when you accept what your partner gives you and immediately start asking what it means and why it matters and where it wants to go. That is the difference between a scene that feels alive and one that feels like two people waiting for something to happen.

Now here is where this leaves the stage and walks into your life.

I see the Toronto problem in meetings all the time. A team agrees on everything because nobody wants to be the person who slows things down. Everyone nods, everyone says sounds good, and then the project drifts for three weeks because there was never a real decision about what the work was supposed to mean. The team was too polite to ask what Jeansville actually stands for and the project died the slow death of too much agreement.

I see the LA problem in client relationships just as often.

A freelancer walks into a call already braced for a fight, ready to defend every choice before the client has even said anything. The conversation becomes a negotiation instead of a collaboration because nobody extended the basic trust of a genuine yes before pushing back. The client feels unheard and the freelancer feels attacked and the work suffers on both sides because agreement was treated as something to be earned rather than something to start from.

The permission to be intentional changes both scenarios.

In the meeting you can say yes to the direction and then immediately ask what success looks like for this project and who owns each piece and when we will know if it is working. You are not breaking the agreement. You are building a specific world out of it. In the client call you can say yes to their feedback and then ask what feeling they are trying to create instead of what change they want you to make. You are not fighting. You are finding out what the scene is actually about.

This applies everywhere, not just on stage.

In writing this means writing the sentence that scares you instead of the sentence that fits neatly into your outline. In business it means having a real point of view about your product instead of waiting for the market to tell you what to build. In teaching it means deciding what your students actually need to hear today instead of running the lesson plan you wrote last year. In a relationship it means knowing what you want out of a conversation instead of letting it drift into the comfortable silence of two people who did not want to impose.

Intentionality is a muscle you build over time.

The Jeansville players who never asked what the jeans meant and the LA players who never trusted each other long enough to find out are both missing the same thing. It is a skill you practice. You do it badly at first. You overshoot and steer too hard or you undershoot and disappear into agreement. But over time you learn to feel the difference between a choice that serves the scene and a choice that closes it down.

The cost of intentionality is being willing to be wrong.

Will Hines talks about giving yourself permission to be a fool on purpose and that is exactly what intentionality requires. You have to be willing to be wrong. You have to be willing to ask the question that might make the scene weird or the meeting uncomfortable or the conversation real. That is the cost of having a point of view. But the reward is a scene that goes somewhere a project that has teeth a relationship that actually communicates and a life that feels like you are steering it instead of just agreeing to be in it.

The answer is not to pick a side but to commit fully.

So if you have ever found yourself in a scene that felt nice but empty or smart but hostile the answer is not to pick a side. The answer is to decide what you are actually doing here and commit to it fully. That is the permission to be intentional. You already had it. You just needed someone to tell you it was okay to use it.