When we try to plan too much, we often over-think and over-analyze, which leads us to hesitate and not take action. For example, if you’re having a conversation with a new girl or boy you like, you may often find yourself thinking in your head, “What should I say?” which takes you out of the moment and usually ends with you not saying much of anything at all.

For some people, it’s really difficult to get “outside of their heads” and into the moment. However, one way we can practice being more spontaneous is by practicing improvisation exercises to make our minds think faster and more freely.

Improvisation is the process of taking information from your immediate environment and then responding to it in a creative way.

Often, we associate improvisation with music, dancing, comedy, or acting, but improvisation is really something that we all do throughout our daily lives – whether it’s making a quick decision at work or sparking up a conversation with a stranger.

If spontaneity is something you need to work on, especially in your daily conversations, consider trying out some of these improvisation exercises to get your mind thinking more creatively.

Easy ways to practice improvisation by yourself:

• Listen to a random TV channel on mute and speak for each character.
• Google an image for a random word and tell a short story for one of the images you find.
• Use one of these random scenario generators (like this or this) and act out a short 5-10 minute scene.
• Choose another random scenario from above, now practicing miming it without using words to practice improvising with gestures and face expressions.
• Choose a random object in your house and see how many different uses you can think of for it.
• Watch other actors and comedians do improvisation (for example, the show Whose Line Is It Anyway? is really good).
• If you play an instrument, practice improvising on it without repeating any pattern more than once.
• Put on one of your favorite songs and practice dancing to it in your own unique way.
• Watch your pet or an animal and practice speaking as its inner voice.

In all of these exercises you’re taking something from your environment and generating something unique and creative out of it. That’s all improvisation really is at the end of the day.

When first practicing improvisation, you’re going to feel a little silly and weird – especially when you’re doing these just by yourself. Try to just have fun with it and think of it as a game. It’s not meant to be taken seriously. This is “mental playtime.”

Often to be creative you need to let go of your critical thinking and let yourself be absorbed in the moment. Try to overcome that discomfort of being silly and make sure you laugh at yourself when you’re becoming too serious or skeptical.

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Making judgements about others is something the human brain likes to do. From an evolutionary standpoint, we had to judge others as “friends” or “foes” to protect ourselves from people who might be a threat to our tribe or community.

Those who were disliked or viewed as a threat were eventually ostracized, punished, or killed. So most of us have a hard-wired response to try and be liked and accepted by others, which explains many fears and anxieties associated with our social interactions.

Despite this tendency, we can find ways to get over the judgments people will make about us on a daily basis. We learn to become less sensitive to them and not let them so easily get under our skin or make us upset. This article will cover these different aspects of how to let go of people always judging us.

Accept that everyone has an opinion

The first step is recognizing that everyone is going to have an opinion about you, for better or worse.

We often think of “judging” as a negative thing, but when someone tells you they like you, or that you’re smart, or a cool person, that’s a type of judging too – it just happens to be a very positive one.

Throughout your life you’re going to meet many different people, and some of those people you’re going to “click” with better than others. You can’t expect to win over everyone, so be willing to accept that some people won’t like you, and some people will.

Anyone who puts themselves out there and let’s their true personality shine through is going to have their fair share of critics. Once you begin to expect it, it doesn’t become as shocking or bothersome when someone says something insulting or cruel.

Become less judging of others

Usually people who fear judgments the most are the ones that are very judgmental themselves.

If we have an excessively judgmental attitude against people, and we’re always trying to compare individuals as “superior” or “inferior,” then we project that attitude onto others, believing that they too are always judging us as “superior” or “inferior.”

Try to be kinder and more understanding toward others, and you won’t have such a hostile and cynical view of the world. You can find the good in anyone if you’re willing to see it – and once you cultivate this attitude, you’ll be more likely to expect others to reciprocate this attitude toward you.

We are all susceptible to what is known as fundamental attribution error. This is when we overestimate the influence of personal factors when someone does something “stupid” or “bad,” and we underestimate the influence of situational factors.

Remember, everyone is capable of making bad decisions in the wrong situation, and even you yourself aren’t always perfect. This will allow you to be gentler in your judgments toward both yourself and others.

Move past bad first impressions

First impressions can have a strong influence over how people view us, but they aren’t set in stone.

If you did something wrong the first time you met someone (insulted, mocked, or offended them), then it may be appropriate to apologize before you can move on. However, most of the time we can move past these first impressions simply by making better second, third, and fourth impressions.

The more time someone spends with you the more they get to know the real you. No one can tell everything about you when they first meet you, it takes multiple interactions to really learn about someone.

As people get to know you more, their first impression of you will become less important. I have friends today who I didn’t always get off with on the right foot, but now we look back on those experiences and just laugh. You just have to be willing to take a longer view in your relationships.

Avoid people who are too negative (if you can)

We all have our limits and some people can be unbearably negative and tiresome to be around.

If you have a choice, sometimes the only thing you can do is to avoid the person more. If you know they’re going to be at a party, then don’t go there. If you work with them, try to limit interactions to just work-related talk. And if it’s a negative friend, you may want to consider finding new people to hang out with.

It’s not the most pleasant solution, but it may be necessary if you can’t find anyway to tolerate a person’s negative and overly judgmental attitude.

Learn all the tools for building healthy relationships and navigating your social world in A Roadmap to Relationships

However, we often take these daily activities for granted. They become a routine that we repeat over and over again without even thinking, and we rarely take the time to reflect on these daily patterns and how they might be influencing us.

In this article, you’ll write out a complete list of your daily routine, categorize them based on different aspects of your life, and then use this list to become more aware of your “positive” and “negative” habits.

This sounds like a really simple and obvious exercise – but I want you to actually do it, and I want you to be as honest about your routine as possible.

Here are guidelines to follow while creating an outline of your daily routine:

• Start from the very beginning of your day. The first item on your list should be “Wake up.”
• Write out every activity, however small or insignificant it may seem. For example, the next items in your routine may be “Make my bed,” “Go to the bathroom,” “Take a shower,” “Get dressed,” etc.
• Finish at the very end of your day. The last item on your list should be “Go to sleep.”
• The order doesn’t have to be perfect – we all have a little variation from day to day – but try your best to come up with a rough outline of your “average day” from start to finish.
• Repeat activities that you do more than once per day. It’s repetitive but it makes your outline more accurate.
• Also include activities that you may not do every single day, but at least 2-4 times a week.
• Once you’re done, go back to each activity and categorize it based on what area of your life that activity influences:

  • Health
  • Work
  • Leisure
  • Relationships
  • Personal

  (List two categories if you think an activity fulfills multiple areas.)

• Next, go back to each activity and choose the type of influence you think it has on your life:

  • Positive
  • Negative
  • Neutral

• Now, go back to each activity and decide if it’s something you want to do more, less, or the same.

  • Make a “+” next to activities you want to do more.
  • Make a “-” next to activities you want to do less.
  • Make a “=” next to activities you want to keep the same.

• Review your complete routine and think of 2-3 activities that aren’t listed which you would like to do more of. List them below your routine with “+” next to them.

This exercise isn’t going to change your life, but it will give you a clearer idea on how you spend your time each and everyday. This awareness will at least be a good first step in making some positive changes in your life.

My personal findings

After making a list of my own daily routine, I discovered a couple ways I can really improve:

• There is one negative activity under “Health” that I do multiple times a day that I really want to do less of.
• My routine also needs more positive activities under the “Health” and “Social” categories.

Doing this exercise helped me pinpoint the areas in my life which I need to work on more. Try it out for yourself and see what you learn.

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Often this is a recipe for frustration and disappointment. You spend time with someone, you share good times, you grow more and more fond of them, but you never come forward about your true feelings until it’s too late.

What happens is the other person begins to think of you as just a friend, and then when you finally do express your romantic interest (weeks, months, or years later), the other person isn’t capable of thinking of you in the same way.

For any relationship to work, you have to be honest about your intentions. And the sooner the better.

There’s no reason to wait to tell someone that you like them in a romantic way – unless they are already in a steady relationship, in which case you should probably let go and find someone new.

But if a person is available, and you are available, then expressing romantic interest right away gives you an answer on whether or not the other person has similar feelings – or if they don’t.

Either way, you get an answer and don’t have to spend time in limbo staying up all night trying to figure out if the relationship has any possibility or not.

You might express romantic interest and get rejected. And that’s going to hurt. But it won’t hurt as much as wasting all that time dreaming about someone who you have no chance with.

Be forward with other people and they will be forward with you. Don’t leave unsaid feelings up in the air, hoping that they will erupt at the perfect time. They won’t. You need to be honest with yourself and others to the best of your ability. Only then can you live a romantic life of no regrets.

Learn all the tools for building healthy relationships and navigating your social world in A Roadmap to Relationships

These things aren’t something you can see, hear, touch, taste, or smell, they aren’t something you can buy at a store, and they aren’t something you can carry around with you in your pocket wherever you go.

So what do we mean when we talk about “happiness,” “confidence,” “motivation,” or other aspects of our mind? What are we really referring to?

These concepts are what is known as a nominalization. They are nouns, but they describe an ongoing process of thoughts, feelings, behaviors, and outcomes in our lives that we associate with the idea of “happiness,” “confidence,” or “motivation.”

Often we treat these attributes of our mind as nouns – things that we either “have” or “don’t have” – but they are really verbs, which means they need to be exercised and practiced, and they can’t be owned or possessed in the same way you own a car, or house, or TV.

Nominalizations makes it easier to talk about complex processes by fitting them neatly into a single concept – but often they can mislead us or hide important information, especially if we don’t understand the complicated nature of the thing we are nominalizing.

You can learn to better understand these nominalizations by asking yourself important question about the actual processes that lie underneath “happiness,” “confidence,” or “motivation.”

For example, if you want to find out more about the nominalization of “happiness,” you should ask yourself questions like:

• “To be happy, what kind of thoughts would I need to think?”
• “To be happy, what kind of feelings would I need to feel?”
• “To be happy, what kind of actions would I need to do?”
• “To be happy, what kind of relationships would I need to build?”
• “To be happy, what kind of outcomes would I need to experience?”

Your answers to these questions will give you a clearer idea of what “happiness” is, and what kind of things you need to do to actually practice happiness in your life.

The whole point is that these concepts like “happiness,” “confidence” and “motivation” need to be thought of as ongoing processes. You don’t do just one thing to “get” them and then you “have” them forever, you have to continuously work at them on a daily basis. They are actions, not objects.

Learn tools to daily growth in The Science of Self Improvement