The Day After Your Dance Event

Imagine, if you will, you’re a part of a team that makes a scientific breakthrough. Everyone celebrates, you throw a big party – and go on vacation.

Is there a danger in that?

Now imagine, if you will, you’re a part of a team that makes a dance breakthrough. You work hard, you attend a big dance event – and go on vacation.

Why?

We have all allowed ourselves to celebrate, only to mentally approve of a post-event drop in momentum. Whether it’s that cheat day in your diet that turns into 3, the physical vacation that turns into a mental sabbatical even when you’re back at work, or finishing your first dance competition and celebrating by canceling your dance lessons for the next week.

Apparently, us humans like to celebrate stuff, and quit doing other stuff – even if that stuff is good for you. The trick is what to do about it.

Here are 5 ideas that can preserve your dance progress after your Dance Event.

1. Building Instead Of Rebuilding

Do you know that it takes more work to recover your dance material than to build on what you’ve already started?

It’s the dance equivalent of the expression “strike while the iron is hot”, or why you would always prefer freshly brewed coffee over something you need to reheat in the microwave. Fresh momentum is different than reheated momentum.

When you stay in build mode, even when your event has finished, it prevents you from having to rebuild much of what got you there. In fact, rebuilding often takes twice as long as the original construction – because you’re fighting against muscle memory that’s already starting to fade.

The Trick: As tough as this may seem, keep the same schedule you set the week before your event. Don’t reward yourself by taking time off. Reward yourself by maintaining what you earned.

The Perks: Your progress continues to trend upwards. You can make the Natural Use Stage in your dance development part of your muscle memory, but only if you build. If not, the progress tapers off, and can begin to revert back to your pre-event behavior.

For more on this, read: Dance Progress Explained – The Arthur Murray Curve of Learning

2. Finish The Transitions

There may have been something that was nearly there, say 75%, at the showcase. For some reason or another, it was developed enough to perform, but not completely to how you would have liked. This is part of the growth process – and this is the week to let your teacher finish the job.

The Trick: Your “dance brain” can sometimes get stuck in “Pass/Fail” mode. The trick here is to let your teachers elaborate on what was nearly there, so you don’t get caught labeling it as “not there.”

The Perks: Attempting the dance maneuver in public was the hard part. The refining of that maneuver, while it is fresh, is the easy part. You’ve already done the heavy lifting. Now it’s just polish.

3. Schedule Your Consultation

Somewhere in the 100 year history someone with a lot of potential took a vacation and never came back. So someone came up with the post-event critique, and we still have them today.

This happens when you meet with an Arthur Murray consultant for a special 15-20 minute appointment. They will give you feedback about how things went, and a strategy for what to do next in your dance program. Call it a Consultation, a Critique, Feedback, or the greatest idea for keeping your dance progress going even when you come back from a showcase, graduation, or competition. Learn more about Avoid These 5 Dance Performance Pitfalls

For more on this, we recommend reading “16 Ways To Utilize A Dance Coach”.

The Trick: Everyone that participates in an Arthur Murray dance event will have an appointment with an Arthur Murray consultant. The trick is to show up to it. That sounds obvious, but you’d be surprised how many people skip this critical step.

The Perks: Does your “dance-brain” ever go evil on you? A dance consultation with an Arthur Murray consultant can eliminate the tired monologue of an evil dance brain. External perspective resets internal spiraling.

4. Focal Points

There is nothing wrong with making a checklist of things you wish you could have done at the event. This is healthy. It means you’re not complacent and you want to be better. What could make this negative, however, is to go to any extremes:

• Negative Self Talk/Critiquing yourself without mercy
• Bottling things up and pretending everything was fine
• Passing the blame on your teacher, music, dance floor, or barometric pressure

The Trick: Communication is key. Talking to your teacher, an Arthur Murray consultant, or the management can really help. You must talk to someone who can help you through this, or you may end up talking yourself right out of a life-changing activity.

The Perks: Often times, we don’t realize the priority of what we should be worrying about. Talking to an Arthur Murray professional will make sense of that, and eliminate unnecessary worrying. They can tell you what actually matters and what doesn’t.

For more on this, read: “31 Things Dance Judges Want To See You Do”

5. Capitalize on Momentum

In the “medical breakthrough” scenario, this is the most critical step.

Capitalizing on momentum is so easy when we are doing things we love – whether that’s reading a great book, or binge-watching an entire season of Game of Thrones – we wouldn’t dare break that momentum when it’s going so well.

So why stop in your dancing?

The Trick: For your dance progress, it is the same thing.

The event built up your confidence, dance ability, and ability to retain dance skills to a level that you’ve never been to before. When you see your event like it’s the mountain you’ve just climbed, you may want to celebrate and postpone dance learning.

When you see your event as the first stage in a larger plan, you act on the momentum, you see the event success as proof of progress, and you allow momentum to take you right into your next objective.

The Perks: Progress is great, but building on that progress, accelerating into the next stage in your development, and discovering a new version of yourself is a whole lot better.

The Momentum Trap

Here’s something nobody tells you: The urge to take a break after an event is your comfort zone voice trying to reclaim territory.

Think about it. Before the event, you were nervous. Your comfort zone voice was screaming that you weren’t ready, that you’d embarrass yourself, that you should postpone. You didn’t listen. You pushed through. You survived – maybe even thrived.

Now that same voice is back, but with a different strategy. Instead of “don’t do it,” it’s saying “you earned a break.” It sounds reasonable. It sounds like self-care. But it’s the same voice, just wearing different clothes.

The dancers who make the fastest progress are the ones who recognize this pattern. They know that the post-event “break” is really just their comfort zone trying to pull them back to baseline.

Final Thought

The Old you, before showcase, doesn’t like all this momentum. The old you wants to take a break, go on vacation, and hope the pieces fall back into place when you return.

It’s so much easier to build your dancing, than to rebuild it.

So let’s send your old you on vacation, heck, put that version of yourself on an indefinite leave of absence.

The new you wants to build, go beyond, and make the most of this dance breakthrough.

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