My friend Christian used to do a lot of improv comedy.

He told me that one of the golden rules in improv is to always accept whatever another speaker has said (“yes”) and then expand from that point (“and”). Even if it runs counter to where you had been hoping the scene would go.

The alternative—trying to force your originally intended path—falls apart quickly. It feels forced. Rigid. The comedy falls out.

We can extrapolate this to living life, not just participating in improv comedy.

When you resist what’s happened in the past or what’s happening right now because it runs counter to what you had hoped would happen, things fall apart. Your whole world becomes stressed, rigid, tense. You feel like nothing’s going your way.

Of course, you can’t change the past or the present. That’s picking a fight with reality, which definitely won’t end well for you.

Instead, we could all do well to be improv comedians. Practice total acceptance (“yes”) followed by an action plan for what we can do next to make good things happen for us (“and”).