Being sufficiently articulate can greatly help you on the path of life. By being able to articulate your thoughts and feelings on any given situation, you are able to live your life to its fullest potential and have more meaningful experiences. You are also better able to understand and absorb the world around you, through the method of processing your experiences into cohesive words and phrases. Improv teaches articulation by propelling you to come up with tangible and significant scenarios in seconds in front of a room full of other people. Coming up with creative and interesting stories is a difficult task on its own, and improv is unique in the way it forces you to do that strenuous task in the blink of an eye. One must already possess a certain amount of articulation to create stories like this in the first place. Improv pushes you that extra mile and assists you in becoming even more articulate than most people will ever be.

Being sufficiently articulate can aid in your general life happiness in many ways, one of which is when trying to talk to others about your problems. There are things in life that can leave you speechless. Some in a good way, and some… not so good. It is important to be able to talk about these things with others, especially the bad things. There are times when, in therapy, a patient will become tongue-tied, unsure how to proceed, or unwilling to proceed because they don’t think they will be able to fully explain the problem, or make their therapist “get it.” This is especially problematic because “getting” your problems and helping you sort through them is exactly what therapists are for, and if you aren’t allowing them to do that then they really can’t do their job. Or, sometimes you may need to vent to a friend but can’t quite find the right words to make it seem like something they should care about, or something that won’t offend them. Being able to articulate these very things will allow you to get the help you need from others when faced with a problem you can’t face alone.

Being more articulate can also be useful in getting your point across. It can be fun to have healthy debates with people, but it isn’t fun for either party when one of them can’t fully wrap their words around their argument. Or even when you’re trying to convince your significant other that the two of you should watch your movie pick and not theirs, it is useful to be able to explain why your movie is clearly the best option. Perhaps most importantly, being articulate in this sense can help in a dispute, in which you have come into conflict with another party, and you want to work it out like adults in a civil way. Decent articulation can allow you to have a calm discussion about the things that might be bothering you and/or the other person, and work out the issue and settle your differences.

Of course, there are many more ways that good articulation can help in your everyday life, but these are two that I think are specifically important. Practicing improv can assist you in building these skills, and hopefully then assist you in actual life problems.