The Dance of Mastery

Fulfilling a long held dream to learn to dance, I started the process about five months ago. My experience can be summed up as frustratingly enjoyable. I have reflected on the lessons learned in dance as they apply to mastering any new skill whether in business or otherwise.

1. The importance of a Dream. Entertaining a dream is important, even if we don’t initially set a deadline converting it to a goal.
2. Mastery. Starting something new begins at the bottom, requires patience and is achieved with continual practice. Research from various sources would suggest that mastery takes place after ten thousand hours.
3. Stress. Frustration and stress from our lack of progress, combined with trying too hard actually hinders growth. My dance teacher tells me I’m an overachiever. In a recent lesson after failing to recall a particular step I had practiced for months, I stopped midway frustrated with myself. She forthrightly asked “how long did it take you to walk?”. I responded “I ran straight away”. (I’m sure she gave me a new name at that moment!!!).
4. Perfectionism. Tightly tied to point 3 above, perfectionism massively hinders the learning process. My teacher said I would learn twice as fast if I’d only let go and stop trying to be perfect. Only had to tell me once.
5. Practice Practice Practice. In various business start ups and new learnings I’ve initiated, I’ve always given much time to practice, even if the exercise did not yield results at the start. With the mix of success and failure in the learning process, often there comes a break through point that yields increases of more than double our current results.
6. Mentors and Coaches. Having exceptional objective input into the learning process is essential. It speeds up the learning and assists in maintaining focus on the two or three main priorities at the time.
7. Have fun. Life with all its variety, is to be embraced. Learning a new skill, starting a new business, embarking down a different path all create degrees of fear, excitement and wondering whether you should have ever started in the first place. Give yourself to the task. Practice, get up after you fall down and keep your eye on the goal. No one ever achieved anything worthwhile without challenge in the process. Laugh at yourself often and have fun... I think this is the way life was meant to be lived.

Happy dancing! PS. oh and, I think my next blog will be to dance teachers to help them cope with students like me. My teacher definitely deserves a reward – thanks Judit!