My daughters dance. They both dance well – very well. (As an aside, for any parents reading this, there’s little better than professional dance training for instilling self-respect and self-discipline in your children as a habit!)
On one occasion some time ago, my eldest daughter came back from a short tour, telling a story of a rehearsal they’d had a couple of weeks earlier, right at the start of the tour.
There wasn’t much unison dancing in the dance piece in question but what there was included a complicated sequence of jumps. Jumping in unison is tricky – landing in unison is even more so. Apparently, as my daughter tells it, she was landing fractionally before the rest of the company for the very last jump of the sequence – to the annoyance of the choreographer.
Choreographers aren’t like real people. They don’t understand about gravity. They don’t think it apples when they tell their dancers to jump. As a result, this one got annoyed – and made no bones about giving my daughter a hard time about this in front of everyone.
This piece is a work of art, of genius, and you, you… you are ruining it!
She replied.. “Honestly, I’m jumping as far, as hard, as fast and as high as I can.’ I can’t do it any further. Tell me… what do I have to do to land with the others?”
It is simple. Any good dancer should be able to do this. You simply need to learn to spend more time in the air!
You may laugh, but he was serious. Without saying how to do this all we got was hot air.
I don’t have much time for the ‘traditional’ motivational speaker. It’s all well and good telling people to spend more time in the air but unless you tell the dancers how to do that, it’s just so many words.
It’s all well and good telling people they can achieve this, that or the other if only they stick at it but unless you tell them how to stick at it, it’s just hot air.
Telling people they can be successful and getting them fired up in the room is great but unless you give them the tools to actually do it, all you’ve done is set people up for a disappointment. If they try and fail, try and fail, try and fail again, how many times do you think people can try and fail before they begin to think it’s a problem with them?
Five? Six? Twenty? One hundred and thirteen?
Whatever the number, just urging people to aspire without equipping them with the knowledge of how to do that is not a respectable way to earn a living.
Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying it’s not important to be motivated or to be inspired. It is. We can all use a healthy dose of clean and simple motivation every now and again. It helps us get up after we’ve been knocked down but not everyone can do it by simple will-power alone. Some people need tools to help them.
In fact I’d go so far as to suggest that almost everyone can benefit from knowing (and using!) these tools. What you’ll find here is, I sincerely hope, useful: not just as motivation (sometimes) but as tools (often).
To rehash Martina Navratilova: you’re not a great speaker or presenter because of how well you do it when things are going your way but because of how well you do it when you’re having an off day and everything is conspiring against you.
… and to rehash that old adage, genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration. Tools and techniques are often more important that just ‘inspiring’ people.
No?
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