Now What?? 12 Centering Practices When Life Goes Off Script

This new series is built on the improv principles I learned training and performing at The Second City—lessons that became my survival kit when life went off script.

Now What?

12 Centering Practices When Life Goes Off Script

“Improvisation, it is a mystery. You can write a book about it, but by the end no one still knows what it is. When I improvise and I'm in good form, I'm like somebody half sleeping. I even forget that there are people in front of me. Great improvisers are like priests, they are thinking only of their God.”
— Stéphane Grappelli, French Jazz Violinist

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I didn’t know it then, but I was clinically depressed.
It would take another decade before I’d have the language for it.

At the time, all I knew was I felt trapped, hopeless, and—at the ripe old age of 28—like my best chapters had already been written. On paper, my life looked good: amazing wife, two beautiful boys, a new house, a steady job. I should have been happy. I wasn’t.

And then came the night my life plan was yanked out from under me.

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The night I asked “Now what?” for the first time

My wife and I were sitting in the Flamingo Hilton showroom in Las Vegas, watching The Second City perform sketch and improv comedy.
The show was electric. Smart. Hilarious.

And it broke me.

Not because it was bad. Because it was brilliant—and I wasn’t in it.

From childhood, everyone (including me) assumed I’d be a preacher. My dad likes to tell the story that when I was eight years old, just out of the baptistry, the pastor turned to him and said, “He’s got one foot in the baptistry and one foot in the pulpit.”

And that’s the life I lived. By 28, I was a pastor in Las Vegas with a growing church. But inside, I was lost. Isolated. Wrestling with beliefs that no longer fit my tradition. Feeling unprepared to care for the hurting people in my city. Pretending to be a guide when I needed one myself.

And under all of that, I was hiding a lifelong obsession.

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My secret

It wasn’t a scandalous vice. It was comedy—specifically, improv comedy.

As a kid, I discovered Whose Line is it Anyway? on PBS (the British version, before Drew Carey made it a household name). Colin Mochrie, Ryan Stiles—these were my heroes.

I wore out VHS tapes of SCTV from Blockbuster. I watched SNL religiously for 20 years. I devoured anything Second City. And yet I never told anyone. Because my “calling” was ministry, not comedy. In my world, chasing laughs seemed like a distraction at best, sinful at worst.

So I buried it. Until that night at the Flamingo Hilton.

I knew the life everyone—including me—had planned for me wasn’t working. I knew something had to change. And I thought I knew the improv opportunity had passed me by.

All I was left with was a single, gnawing question that followed me out of that showroom and into every day that came after:

Now what?

Walking out of the theater, I mumbled to my wife, “I wish I could do that.”
She heard me. She didn’t forget.

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The gift that changed everything

On Christmas morning, she handed me a gift certificate for a beginner’s improv class at The Second City training center in Las Vegas.

Turns out, the improv opportunity had not passed me by.

Eighteen months later, I had left the pulpit for the stage.

I was performing nightly in two Las Vegas Strip improv shows—including in the very room where I’d first said, “I want to do that.” That led to small acting roles in film and TV, national tours, directing an award-winning improvised movie, and starting my own creative agency.

But none of that is why I’m telling you this story.

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Why it matters for this series

I wasn’t just learning how to be funny.

I was learning how to operate when my personal operating system had been thrown out the window.

Improv became my survival kit for the moments in life when the script disappears. When “Now what?” is the only question you can ask.

This series—Now What?—is about those moments. It’s about 12 centering practices I learned from improv that have helped me navigate uncertainty, risk, and change—not just on stage, but in every chapter of life since.

Over the next posts, I’ll walk you through them.
Not as theory, but as lived experience.

Because whether you’re on a stage or just standing in the middle of a life you didn’t expect, we’re all improvisers. And the scene you’re playing keeps going, ready or not.

So, here’s what I’m asking of you: just show up.
Like I did for my first-level classes at The Second City 23 years ago.

I can’t give you the full experience of actually taking an improv class here online, but I can walk you through the lessons learned and the life practices you can implement the moment you realize that your life is off script.

Tomorrow, we start with the biggest word in improv—and the most significant word in all of life.

The word that changes everything when you say it:

“Yes.”

This month I am offering a “pay what you can afford” deal for my one-on-one coaching to help you define your life calling. Email me below for details.