On a dance strategy call recently, a client brought up a common sentiment.
“I want to feel confident and dance with passion, but I can’t do that when I am thinking things like: I don’t want to mess up, What is coming up next?”
This is a fundamental problem. How are you supposed to dance freely, with passion and confidence while also maintaining technique and thinking about all the things you are supposed to be executing?
The short answer is you’re not.
You can’t think about a lot of things and details and also express ease and freedom.
You have part of your brain that is the conscious part that has to think through things on purpose, with intention and requires your energy and attention.
And there is part of your brain that does things automatically and you don’t have to do the hard work of thinking about it. This is your subconscious which experts now call your nonconscious. For things to be done automatically, you have to repeat them a lot. It’s that simple.
When you are asking this question about how to be able to do all the things, you are telling me there is still a lot you have not done enough to delegate it to the automatic part of your brain. You are trying to do it all from the pre-frontal cortex or the conscious part of your brain. And that is just plain limited.
The brain loves it when you repeat things enough times that it can delegate activities to the nonconscious because doing those things doesn’t take mental energy. It’s called automaticity.
Automaticity is the ability to do things without occupying the mind with the low level details required, allowing it to become an automatic response pattern or habit. In athletics sometimes we will call this the zone. When we are in the zone, there isn’t a lot of thinking. Just doing.
How much conscious, intentional thought energy do you have to put into walking? Riding a bike? Driving? How are you able to drive somewhere and carry on a conversation with someone while applying lipstick? You don’t have to THINK about how to do those things. You just do them now. You’ve done them so much that they aren’t hard. They don’t take concentration.
The good news is that with dancing, you get to take advantage of muscle memory. Muscle memory is what we call it, but it’s just that we have repeated physical movements so many times, that we don’t have to think so hard about it and it has been delegated to the nonconscious. The body is actually quite good at delegating physical movements to this part of the brain. That’s why we have the term muscle memory. It feels like the body is doing it on it’s own, without me thinking about it at all. How do we develop muscle memory? How do we develop that automaticity of the body?
I’m going to call this the 4 stages of mastery.
Stage one is when you acquire knowledge. This is the very beginning of introducing a skill. You see a video of it, or someone teaches it to you. It is when information is brand new. At this stage, we might not do anything with it yet. We might have an intellectual understanding of it. It’s entered our brain, but we are just beginning to apply it.
This stage feels terrible. It feels stiff, foreign and uncomfortable. Your movements will feel slow, and when you are distracted, will be easily disrupted. If someone were to talk to you as you are trying it, you couldn’t do both things at once. You are working hard in your pre-frontal cortex, and it takes a lot of attention and mental and physical work to do what you are trying to do. This stage doesn’t feel fun or easy. A lot people never begin things because of the discomfort of this stage.
Stage two is when you are applying that knowledge inconsistently. This is a stage of a lot of transition. Your movements are becoming a little smoother, a little less stiff, and certain parts might be able to be executed without as much concentration. This can be a tricky stage because there will be times that you feel that you are “getting it” but it isn’t consistent yet. This stage still has a lot of conscious thinking happening. As you continue to practice, the percentage will shift. You will have more and more unconscious thinking as muscle memory strengthens, and less and less conscious thinking. It feels a little easier, bit by bit. This stage can take a long time, but we will likely experience a lot of impatience.
Stage three is when you are applying knowledge consistently. This feels more automatic. It feels easier and smoother and is less exhausting mentally. You don’t have to think to point your feet, you just do. You don’t have to think about keeping your shoulders down, you just do. You once had to think through every part of a 3 step turn, or how to shape a C-curve, but now you just do it. Pretty consistently. This is the part of your lessons where you are executing your choreo and both you and your coach can see that you have it. You have the ability and capability and it has gotten so much easier to perform. This stage can be deceiving because you have learned it and are applying it consistently, so it can lull you into a certain sense of security. It isn’t a false sense of security, because you are in this stage, but there is one more stage that will take you to the next level.
Stage 4 is when you can apply knowledge consistently under pressure. If you can do it in practice, but not in a lesson with your teacher watching you, you are still in stage 3. If you can do it in lessons with your teacher, but not the same in a competition or performance setting, you are still in stage 3.
STage 3 is not bad. IT is not a problem at all. But stage 4 is when you have done this so much that you can do it like driving…could you carry on a conversation and put on lipstick while going through your choreo? Just kidding, but you get the idea.
To get to stage 4, you have to engage in something called overlearning. I don’t love the term because it seems negative, but overlearning happens when you have learned something to the point that you can do it well. And then you keep learning it. You keep doing it. You don’t just do it until you can do it well, you do it until you can’t get it wrong. This is mastery. Most of us don’t go here. Most of us hang out in stage 3. Again, this isn’t bad. But those pros you watch, that you might compare yourself to at times, they are in stage 4. They are overlearning all the time. They are able to execute what they want to, consistently, under pressure because they have repeated it so many times that the likelihood of “getting it wrong” is vastly reduced. It’s not like they never make mistakes or are unhappy with performances, but they have minimized that concern.
The truth is that most of us are expecting to be in stage 4 when we have not done the work. I am not even saying you have to do that work or should. What I am saying is your expectation that you should be able to have that level of mastery, comfort and ease without doing the repetitions necessary to get there is the problem. You are asking yourself to perform at a level you haven’t prepared for, and your brain knows it. You try to think and instruct yourself into a physical result that you haven’t physically created yet.
Your brain knows exactly how much you have prepared, and when you are expecting a performance that exceeds your preparation, it creates insecurity, uncertainty, anxiety and pressure. These emotions don’t inspire confidence which is ultimately what you want.
When this client brought this to me, she was wanting to feel more confident. When you believe you are lacking something, that you aren’t ready or don’t know what is next, when you have room in your mind that you might mess up, you can’t think those things and also feel confident.
But here’s a secret.
You don’t have wait to be in stage 4 to feel more confident. There are two things you can do to feel more confident no matter where you are in your journey. Because, again, it’s not what stage you are in or even how much you haven’t prepared that generates that self doubt. It’s the incongruence between what you have done and what you expect of yourself.
You can feel confident with what you do have. I’ll tell you how.
The first part isn’t a mystery. You just have to prepare yourself. The physical part is simple. It’s just reps. Repetitions. You just have to practice. You have to physically do it. Again and again. If you are working at it and doing reps, you will see improvement. You will feel it get easier. Knowing that you are on the right track will inspire more confidence. When you do more reps, you have the confidence from knowing you are working at it, you are preparing, you are getting better all the time, and you see yourself as the type of person that puts the work in.
The more you prepare, the more reps you do, the more you can let go of thoughts that you don’t know what comes next or you don’t want to mess up. Your brain will relax because you know if you have prepared. When you have done so many reps that you don’t have to think so much about what the body does, you can give your conscious attention to what you want to express. You can play, be free and expressive because you aren’t having to think so much about the details. You can have that, but you have to earn it with your time. You don’t have to even worry what stage you are in. Just repeat, repeat, repeat, and the stages take care of themselves.
The second thing you can do to manage how you think about where you are. Part of that has to do with honesty. There is a certain amount of peace that comes with honesty. But not in a judgey, condemning, shaming way. It’s about coming into alignment about where you are and where you think you should be. Where you are is where you should be.
As dancers, in your overall dance journey, there is no end to progress. No matter how much you prepare, you will always believe you could have done more. This is because your horizon for accomplishment is always moving. But don’t get caught in the trap of never good enough.
Because when it comes time to perform or compete, a mindset of not good enough, not ready isn’t going to help you. In those moments, you need to shift into what you have is enough, that you will do your absolute best with all you have gained up until that moment. You have to believe that what you have is enough to do what you need to do…but not more than that.
Be honest about your level of preparation. Be honest about what stage of mastery you are in. Check yourself to see if you are expecting to be in level 4 when you have not done the reps to be there. If you haven’t done the reps, but expect mastery anyway, and then judge yourself for the shortfall, you are undermining yourself.
Added stress, pressure, expectation, judgment won’t make you dance better. It just won’t. I’m not giving you these stages of mastery for you to use against yourself. It’s not to give you a level of perfection to shoot for. It’s meant to help you understand where you are and have compassion and understanding for yourself. It’s to help you release your expectations that you should be anywhere other than where you are.
The good news is that you don’t need to be in stage 4 mastery to accomplish what you want to accomplish. We are all at varying levels of mastery at any given time. We are in and out of levels. You might be in level 4 as a Bronze student and then shift to Silver and now we are back to 1. Some styles and even figures, you will be in varying levels of mastery. I feel like I am in stage 4, only in moments. But that’s okay and it isn’t a problem because I don’t expect that I should be there all the time. I expect that I should be right where I am. That creates peace for me and removes shame and judgement. It’s way easier and effective to work on dancing when I am not weighed down by those emotions. It keeps it enjoyable. And as we have talked about, if you like it, you will want to do it. If you keep doing it, you will get better. Full stop.
Keep it enjoyable. Keep working at it. Keep trying to get better. But don’t do it from a place of not good enough. You don’t have to prove anything to anyone. Don’t wait to arrive at some magical place before you allow yourself to be happy with your performance. Don’t expect perfection, though it’s nice to imagine that could exist. But it can’t. So let what you have done be enough. Remove the expectation that you should be more than you are or do more than you have prepared for. You are enough. You are okay. When you dance from there, even with all your potential imperfections, you will dance better. You will express yourself better. You will perform better and score better.
Isn’t that what you really want? An experience you enjoy? An experience where you feel good? If you attend to making sure you are feeling good about where you are and what you are doing, the improvement you seek will come. The dancing you are trying to create will come. Attend to how you feel, stop working against yourself, Do what you can do to prepare and then let it be enough. Try not to overthink or over instruct. Trust yourself a little more. You’ve got this.
