2026 AIN Global Conference
- Rimini, Italy
Theme: The Art of Being Human
As Learning Journey Session Host
LJ #4 Beyond Performed Identity: Returning to Human Connection Through Improvisation
Presenter: Xuan Zhao
Date: Wednesday, October 21st
Time: 1pm - 5pm
Room: Giada
Description:
Many of us have learned to communicate by becoming legible: professional, polite, competent, efficient, agreeable, clear. These skills help us function. But they can also leave us speaking through roles, expectations, and protective habits rather than from a fully human place. We become good at performing communication while feeling less and less free inside it.
This Learning Journey is an invitation to slow down and notice what has been layered onto the self: identity scripts, social habits, and protective patterns that often speak before we do. Through applied improvisation, embodied experiments, miscommunication, and creative repair, we will explore what happens when the pressure to perform the “right” self begins to soften. What becomes possible when we stop trying to communicate correctly and start responding as people?
Participants will leave not with a polished script, but with something more vital: a felt sense of greater freedom, responsiveness, and trust in their own human capacity to connect; even in uncertainty, imperfection, and not knowing.