Concentration
Concentration is a category of focus-building exercises that challenge participants to maintain sustained attention amid distractions and competing demands. The exercises train participants to stay with a primary task while the environment introduces interruption, noise, or parallel activity. They are used in improv training to develop presence and in applied settings to explore how individuals and groups manage attention under pressure.
Structure
Setup
The group establishes a primary attention task: counting together in sequence, maintaining a rhythmic pattern, completing a verbal call-and-response sequence, or sustaining a physical activity requiring coordination.
Introducing Distraction
Once the group has established the primary task, the coach or designated players introduce deliberate distractions: ambient sounds, physical movement from players not in the task, coach interruptions, or a secondary instruction running simultaneously with the primary one. Players continue the primary task through all distractions.
Reset Protocol
Players who lose the primary task signal by raising a hand, receive an acknowledgment, reset to the last stable point, and resume. The group does not stop for individual resets.
Advanced Layering
Advanced rounds layer two simultaneous tasks: players maintain the primary sequence while tracking and responding to a secondary one. This dual-channel version stresses the limits of divided attention directly and deliberately.
How to Teach It
Objectives
Concentration exercises target sustained attention, recovery from distraction, and the ability to remain grounded in a task when the environment is noisy or unpredictable. In improv training these skills underlie listening, presence, and the ability to follow a scene's thread when multiple stimuli compete for attention.
How to Explain It
"We're going to do [primary task]. While you're doing it, other things are going to happen in the room. Other people will move around. There will be sounds. Your job is to keep the task going no matter what. If you lose it, signal, reset, and come back."
Scaffolding
Begin with a simple, highly learnable primary task so that participants can get it into body memory before distractions are introduced. With beginners, introduce one distraction type at a time. With advanced groups, introduce multiple simultaneous distractions immediately and vary their nature unpredictably.
Common Pitfalls
Participants who try to ignore distractions entirely often find the effort of ignoring them more disruptive than simply acknowledging and releasing them. Reframe the goal: not to block the distraction but to return attention to the primary task immediately after each distraction lands. This is a different and more transferable skill.
In Applied Settings
Learning Objectives
In organizational training, concentration exercises surface how individuals and groups manage divided attention, interruption, and multitasking pressure. The exercise makes visible something that is otherwise only reported: participants experience firsthand how difficult sustained focus is and how quickly attention degrades under distraction.
Workplace Transfer
The ability to maintain focused attention on one task while managing a stream of interruptions is a core competency in most professional environments. Open-plan offices, message notifications, back-to-back meetings, and multitasking expectations all create the same pressure the exercise simulates. Facilitators use concentration exercises to open conversations about how teams protect focus time, what their actual norms around interruption are, and whether those norms serve their work.
Facilitation Context
Concentration exercises appear in productivity training, attention management workshops, leadership development programs, and team effectiveness work. They work with individual contributors, managers, and leadership cohorts.
Debrief Framing
Facilitators ask: "What strategies did you use to stay on task? Which distractions were hardest to manage and why? Where in your workday do you face the same kind of distraction pressure? What would it take to protect sustained attention in your actual work environment?"
Skills Developed
Worth Reading
See all books →
Business Improv
Experiential Learning Exercises to Train Employees
Val Gee
The Actor's Book of Improvisation
Sandra Caruso; Paul Clemens
Comedy and Distinction
The Cultural Currency of a 'Good' Sense of Humour
Sam Friedman
Legislative Theatre
Using Performance to Make Politics
Augusto Boal
Theatrical Improvisation
Short Form, Long Form, and Sketch-Based Improv
Jeanne Leep
Devising Performance
A Critical History
Deirdre Heddon; Jane Milling
Related Exercises
Maintain Focus
Maintain Focus is an applied improv exercise that trains the ability to sustain attention on a single task, conversation, or partner over an extended period despite the presence of distractions -- internal or external -- that would normally pull attention away. The exercise develops the deliberate practice of returning attention to a chosen focus point whenever it drifts, building the cognitive discipline of sustained concentration in group and collaborative settings.
Drop Inhibitions
Drop Inhibitions is a category of applied improvisation exercises designed to reduce self-consciousness and free participants for more authentic expression. The exercises use physical activity, group play, absurdity, and supportive social norms to displace the internal critical voice that typically moderates spontaneous expression. They are used to prepare groups for creative, collaborative, or personally vulnerable work by lowering the threshold for authentic participation.
Listening Exercise (Eyes Closed)
Listening Exercise, Eyes Closed is an applied improv exercise in which participants close their eyes and attend to the full auditory environment -- ambient sounds, partner voices, silence -- without the organizing and filtering influence of visual input. By removing vision, the exercise isolates the auditory channel and trains a more complete, unmediated form of listening that can be difficult to access when visual processing is active.
Jump
Jump is a focus and commitment exercise in which one player initiates an action and the rest of the group simultaneously joins in. The exercise trains the ability to recognize and support a group choice instantly without waiting for confirmation. It builds the reflex of jumping in that drives ensemble improv.
Be in the Moment
Activities focused on developing present-moment awareness and full engagement in current interactions without mental multitasking.
Give and Take
Give and Take is a foundational scene technique and exercise in which performers practice transferring and sharing focus within a scene. Only one action, conversation, or event holds the audience's attention at a time, and performers must silently negotiate who has focus and who yields it. The exercise trains the essential ensemble skill of knowing when to step forward and when to step back, making it one of the most important exercises for developing group awareness. Give and Take is used in both theatrical improv and applied improvisation settings, where it teaches collaborative turn-taking and active listening.
The Lineage
Explore the schools and structures that influenced or evolved from Concentration.
Business Improv (Gee & Gee)
How to Reference This Page
The Improv Archive. (2026). Concentration. Retrieved September 28, 2026, from https://improvarchive.org/exercises/concentration
The Improv Archive. "Concentration." The Improv Archive, 2026. https://improvarchive.org/exercises/concentration.
The Improv Archive. "Concentration." The Improv Archive, 2026, https://improvarchive.org/exercises/concentration. Accessed September 28, 2026.
The Improv Archive is a systemically maintained repository. The archive itself acts as the corporate author.