Imagine a beautiful ballerina gracefully taking the stage in her white tutu while the spotlight follows every step, turn, and jump she makes.
Little does she know that once the lights dim and the music ends, the lessons she learned both on stage and off serve her well beyond the dance studio.
I was the type of kid that, once my parents put me in dance at three years old, I stuck with it for the next 14. There was no need to try soccer, softball, and gymnastics. For me, dancing was it.
The lessons I learned during my 14 years as a dancer have built the foundation of who I am today.
The lessons I learned went beyond the pointe shoes, props, and spotlights- lessons learned as a dancer are lessons lived as an adult.
Here’s what you can learn from my years as a dancer.
#1 The Tiniest Changes Can Have the Biggest Impact
In dance, it’s all about the details.
How is your arm angled? Is your thumb tucked behind your fingers? How is your head tilted? Are your shoulders pushed back?
With every step you take and every jump you make, you’re looking for minor changes that can improve your skill.
You’d be surprised how much one simple adjustment of the arm or foot greatly improves your ability.
Similarly, making small adjustments in your life can make a world of difference in your skills, experiences, and the overall direction of your life.
Sometimes, we think that it’s necessary we make dramatic changes in our life in order to get back on track or to start living the life we want to.
But there is a hidden treasure in the ability to recognize the small changes needed in life and then make those changes.
Small changes reap big rewards when done consistently over time.
#2 Keep Your Chin Up and Shoulders Back
There’s a very specific posture you hold as a dancer. There’s even a particular way you walk as a ballerina.
The posture you hold as a dancer is one of confidence. You push your shoulders down and back and hold your chin up, lengthening your neck.
It signifies integrity, strength, and grace.
I strive to take this same posture in my everyday life, from walking down the street to leading a meeting. I want to convey those same characteristics through the posture I learned from being a dancer.
The best part is that no matter how you were feeling internally, you always had to assume this posture when you danced.
If you had a bad day or weren’t feeling confident in yourself, simply assuming this posture changed your mood.
Even if you weren’t feeling strong, graceful, or confident when you took this posture, you became strong, graceful, and confident.
Even if you don’t take the ‘dancer posture’ note, it is important to know how you carry yourself in your everyday life.
It’s often the visible difference between a leader and a follower.
#3 Fight Until You Fall
Dance is a game of balance, and sometimes gravity wins.
Whether you’re trying to do more consecutive turns or a complex jump sequence, there’s a risk of failure, resulting in an ungraceful tumble to the ground.
During ballet class, we would often have balance competitions, standing on your toes on one leg. After a while, the only thing keeping you upward was your pure will to fight and not fall.
Sometimes in life, it’s easy to give up once things get hard. But dance taught me to fight until the very last second, until I fell over.
Sometimes, all the strategies you’ve learned to stay upward, like tightening your core, tucking your bum, aligning your hips, lifting your elbows, and starting at one spot in front of you, fail.
But even if all you have left is your will, you can push yourself to continue to fight right up until the end.
I also learned that falling isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It’s not a sign that you lack the skills necessary to stay upward.
It doesn’t mean you didn’t fight with all your will until gravity finally won.
Falling gives you the opportunity to get back up and try again, this time better than before.
#4 Go With the Flow
I was a competitive dancer, which meant that we performed each dance multiple times throughout the competition season.
We often danced with props or had costume changes in the middle of a routine, which led to an element of unpredictability with each performance.
There were many performances where things didn’t go quite as planned. I vividly remember a giant wooden picture frame prop getting knocked down on stage once while we were dancing.
Among that, there were props that fell out of people's hands that you then had to dance around or a black flip that landed on the face rather than the feet. Then there’s the classic technology mishap where the wrong song has been queued, or the song just randomly stops playing in the middle.
When mishaps like this happened on stage, you had to keep dancing. There were no re-dos. No starting from the top. You had one chance, so you had to learn to go with the flow of whatever happened on stage, good or bad.
The ability to adapt to situations and go with the flow is incredibly useful in the real world. Having the ability to push forward despite things not going as planned breeds flexibility.
It allows you to be more at ease as you jump each hurdle that life throws at you.
#5 You Can Succeed Without Your Safety Net
When dancers train, they use a barre to hold on to in practicing and learning new skills.
At the start of each ballet class, you do some ‘combinations’ at the barre and then often move to the center of the dance studio to do those same combinations without the barre.
You have to learn how to successfully do each combination without the safety net of the barre to help you.
In life, you aren’t always guaranteed a safety net. Sometimes, you have to ride with no training wheels.
But that’s exactly where greatness is born.
Although more challenging, when you do things without your ‘barre,’ you’re challenged to push yourself beyond what you thought possible.
It’s easy to get comfortable standing at the barre, holding on to it for dear life. But it’s vital that you challenge yourself to do things without your safety net.
Then, you can prove to yourself that you have the ability to succeed without your training wheels.
Real Talk
I loved dancing and found it to be a great sport that taught me many lessons that I still carry with me today.
The lessons I learned are highly applicable to everyone, whether or not they were once a ballerina too.
To gain insight into an experience you’ve never had is an honor. Further, to gain value from an experience you’ve never had is a blessing.
A dancer’s lessons are your lessons. Take them and show the world.