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If you’d like to dive right into discovering your inner stories, consider the path I took that landed me in a room full of strangers for a rollicking fun time in Improv Comedy.

While empathy and self-exploration are not stated goals, they are the basis of high-speed exchanges between two or more students based on varied scenes the instructor throws out to you.

At the end of my last improv class at The Second City, a photographer told us to gather for a shot that took us a mere four seconds to move into position as per these two photos. That’s how quickly collaborative we were.

And many people take improv not only for the fun of it. But for professional growth. My instructor (top row, center), for example, also teaches the course, Improv for Lawyers.

And improv classes can be found throughout the world by Googling “Improv Classes + where you live, be it a major city or small town.

And if you can’t work classes into your schedule, Amy Proehler to the rescue with her online MasterClass in improv “to deal with the everyday humanness of life” as she puts it, that you can take at home, during your lunch break, any time.

Not your comfort zone? Then read all about it, as inner stories are the subjects of countless articles like Christina Wong’s The Transformative Power of Rewriting Our Inner Stories, Psychology Today magazine’s The two kinds of stories we tell about ourselves, How Inner Monologues Work, and Who Has them and The 3 Stories of You: The Personal, Hidden, and Unknown Self. Then there is Counseling Today magazine’s Yes, and … improv can be therapeutic. The “Yes, and” is incidentally the mainstay of  Improv comedy classes.

And if your bookish, check out the Elton John-endorsed book, “Inner Story” by award-winning psychologist Dr Tim O’Brien, and David Brooks’s How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing a Person Deeply and Being Deeply Seen, which delves into one’s inner voice (on pages 79-80 and 118-122), Choose Your Story, Change Your Life: Silence Your Inner Critic and Rewrite Your Life from the Inside, What are the inner stories that you tell yourself when you are faced with a difficult decision?, and REWRITE YOUR INNER STORY: Using Narrative to Reimagine Your Life.

Like to just observe for now? Inner stories have long been the subject of movies, from the 1946 classic The Best Years of Our Lives to the Inside Out and Inside Out 2 blockbusters that inspect the emotional “inner workings of the mind” (say Harvard Brain Science Researchers) to Silver Linings Playbook, The Perks of Being a Wallflower, A Beautiful Mind, Girl, Interrupted. The list is infinite. Inner stories are the driving forces of songs like Taylor Swift’s Mirror Ball, Dashboard Confessional’s Again I Go Unnoticed, Sir Paul McCartney’s Black Bird; and are the mainstays of Blues, Country, Opera. Their popularity is borne of their touching our inner stories, bringing them to the surface so that we may inspect them. That we may strengthen them