ROCKLAND — The theme of this past weekend’s Juice Conference 4.0, serving the creative economy, was all about inspiring trust. Trusting your gut instinct, trusting the process, trusting your collaborators—all of the ingredients necessary to propel your creative vision forward.

One Juice presenter, in particular, manages to push people very far out of their comfort zone every day. Rachel Flehinger, founder of InnerAction in Portland, is an improvisational comedy instructor. Having performed for the past 30 years, she is an award winning improv comedian and former radio morning show personality. She led a presentation earlier on Friday morning, discussing the 10 things people do to engage in negative self-talk and how it self-sabotages our confidence and potential. Later in the day, she led an improv workshop titled “If You Can’t Trust The Voice In Your Head, Who Can You Trust?,” which employed improvisational acting techniques to identify what might be holding participants back in business and life. We asked her to elaborate.

As an improvisational comedy instructor, how do you get people to shed all of their inhibition in front of a group?

That’s the whole thing, from the beginning I acknowledge how weird it’s going to be. I’m going to ask you to come way out of your comfort zone and when that happens, they go, ‘Oh she told me, here it comes.’ I don’t ask them to do anything I wouldn’t do myself. And I also try to anticipate in certain people if it gets to be too much.

Sometimes people just can’t go from zero to 60 and behave completely the opposite of their personalities in an exercise, right?

Yes, sometimes you have to go into the kiddie pool.

Is there something you’ve learned from the group of JUICE participants you just led in your workshop

It always surprises me just how scared people are to communicate from an honest place. People usually protect themselves. I’m always in awe when someone lets that guard down for a second. One of the reasons I love working with adults is that we go through our lives putting up layer upon layer of protection so that we don’t feel discomfort, and when I can break it down and get someone to shed one of those layers, it is a huge level of trust. And it’s a gift.

Is it particularly difficult for introverts to shed those layers?

It is and when I work with clients I often say, ‘If you were a party, what kind of party would you be?’ So, often introverts or shy people think they have to be a kegger (i.e. keg party). When really, if you just want to be a small tea party, just be who you are on that scale. Don’t try to force yourself so out of a comfort level, that it’s not really ‘you’ anymore.

To see more highlights on the Juice conference visit: facebook.com/JuiceConference

To learn more about Flehinger visit: yourinneraction.com

Kay Stephens can be reached at news@penbaypilot.com