Attitude

Attitude Attitude Attitude. Probably the most important thing to your dancing (ok, life) is your attitude. I’m going to talk about one specific area of that. What is your answer to the question, are people fundamentally changeable or are people fundamentally fixed?

In dancing this comes up as “you needed to have started when you were kid” or “natural talent” or “he/she is a natural”. So where do you stand, do you think you needed to start young, or could you start at any age? Is it all learnable?

I believe everything is learnable. There is great change that you can make if you have the right knowledge and dedicate the time. You need to have both. There are plenty of students that I’ve seen spend hours and hours and hours practicing the wrong thing. I feel even I was stuck in a rut like that for a few years. I also see that at the gym – plenty of people working out but not in a way that will get them any progress. The opposite it also possible – the student that can quote twenty things the last coach they had told them, but hasn’t practiced a single one.

I think it’s easy to fall back into the idea that you need to be “gifted”. In our society we have an epidemic of parents teaching their kids that they are all “special”. Kind of grown out of a misconception of studies in the 70’s that found there was a correlation between students that got good grades and confidence. Out of that correlation somehow we got to, “oh we need to worry about our kids confidence and that will improve their grades!” Well, guess what, it doesn’t work. Just cause A correlates with B doesn’t mean A causes B (in Latin, the logic fallacy: cum hoc ergo propter hoc – with this therefore follows this). But perhaps instead some other thing C (like HARD WORK) causes both A (confidence) and B (good grades).

The book Mindset:The New Psychology of Success by Carol Dweck is just about this topic. She describes Fixed Mindset as those people who believe you have natural or born talent and Growth Mindset as those people who believe change is possible and things are more a matter of hard work and effort.

It’s possible to have a fixed mindset in one area (say physical ability) and an growth mindset in another area (math). It’s possible to believe only a certain amount is changeable or everything or nothing.

I used to be 6ft tall and 135 pounds (scrawny!), but I studied. I read all about weight lifting and how to do it, what to do, what is most effective for different types of results. And then I just followed the advice. It was easy, I gained 40 pounds of muscle in less than a year! (Ok, there was a tough part – it was the eating – I had to stuff myself till I felt like was going to burst for a lot of meals).

And yet after that there were still some body things that I still felt weren’t changeable. Not until I was dating a girl and I started training her. Tons of body changes, and all within a few months. Broader wider shoulders, the shoulders more relaxed onto the back, straighter, cleaner looking legs (oh yeah bow leggedness and knocked-knees are pretty fixable in most people), better posture, big and little toes that don’t curve inward but have a nice straight alignment out from the heel.

But after seeing that and many other radical body transformations since then. I am a total believer that great change is possible.

I used to not think about bringing this up with students. That perhaps I should just stick to the physical, the facts, the steps. But now I know you have to bring it up, and bring it up early. It’s important. As one book on coaching I read put it: To make radical changes you must ask deeper and deeper questions. It can make a huge difference between a student that is easy to teach and one that is difficult to teach.

Books to Read

Generation Me: Why Today's Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled--and More Miserable Than Ever Before

Mindset: The New Psychology of Success