Mary Lemmer Launches How To Handle Anything

Mary Lemmer is the author of How to Handle Anything: Four Improv Principles for Navigating Life’s Curveballs.

Join author, TED speaker, and trained improviser Mary Lemmer for a lively conversation and interactive experience about her new book, How to Handle Anything: Four Improv Principles for Navigating Life’s Curveballs.

What if the skills that help improvisers step onto a stage without knowing what will happen next could also help us navigate the uncertainty of everyday life?

Drawing from improv comedy, neuroscience, entrepreneurship, and her own experiences navigating unexpected turns, Mary shares four practical principles for becoming more adaptable, creative, and confident when things don’t go according to plan. She’ll explore why our instinct to control or predict what happens next can sometimes get in our way, and how we can get better at responding to what’s actually happening instead.

Expect an engaging, interactive conversation with stories, practical takeaways, and some optional practical (and fun) exercises along the way. Whether you’re navigating a career change, a relationship, a big decision, an unexpected curveball, or simply the uncertainty of being human, you’ll leave with new ways to handle whatever comes next.

Mary Lemmer is the author of How to Handle Anything: Four Improv Principles for Navigating Life’s Curveballs and the creator of The Improve Method™, an approach that uses the principles of improvisation supported by research and nervous system science to help people navigate uncertainty, adapt to the unexpected, and move forward when there is no script to follow.

Her work draws on a career spanning improv comedy, entrepreneurship, venture capital, and leadership at a fast-growing startup, as well as more than a decade of helping people and teams become more adaptable, confident, and creative in the face of change. She has brought her work to organizations including Google, Verizon, Square, TED, and Pfizer.

Mary is a graduate of the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan and trained in improvisation at The Second City, the Upright Citizens Brigade, and The Groundlings. She delivered the TED Talk “How Improv Can Improve Your Leadership and Life,” hosts the How to Handle Anything podcast, and writes Life, Improvised on Substack. She has been featured in The New York Times, Forbes, and Fast Company.