My acting coach has said it to me more times than I care to count: Pick a lane.
It’s what he says when I’m in a scene and my reaction isn’t clear — when the audience can’t tell how I feel about what just happened. No visible response. No emotional tell. Just Robin, being sensible and completely unreadable.
It stopped me cold the first time.
Then I went home and started wondering: have I actually trained myself to flat-line my emotions? Have I built such a tidy fence around them that even I can’t get to them quickly anymore?
Here’s the scene that broke it open. My scene partner, playing my husband, announces he just lost his job. My response? I take the news completely in stride and immediately start brainstorming how he can find a new one. Practical. Efficient. Helpful.
Wrong on every count.
I had violated two cardinal rules of improv. First: show a reaction. Was this news a shock or had I seen it coming? Either way, wouldn’t I feel something? Second: don’t try to fix it. Never, ever in improv. This is not the place for sensible. It is a world of endless possibility — heighten it, complicate it, say something nobody saw coming.
The exercise of doing the opposite of what’s logical works muscles that get used less and less as we get older: creativity, imagination, and what my coach calls micro-listening — paying close attention to every word, every detail, every nuance of what the person in front of you is actually saying and feeling.
We get efficient with age. We’ve heard versions of most stories before. We know how things tend to go. And so we jump — to the solution, to the reassurance, to the next thing — before the person across from us has even finished telling us where they are. I do this. I suspect I’m not alone.
What improv is teaching me isn’t to heighten drama in real life. But it is teaching me to stay in the moment longer. To let something land before I respond. To actually feel what I feel instead of moving straight to composed and competent.
Most of us have spent decades being the one who holds things together. We are good at it. But somewhere in all that steadiness, some of us have muffled the more spontaneous parts of ourselves — the parts that react, that wonder, that are genuinely surprised or moved or caught off guard.
Those parts are still there. They just need a little permission.
Pick a lane. Feel the thing. Let it show. You might find the people around you have been waiting for exactly that.