Are You Listening to Damaging Dance Advice?
Your dance journey will always have three things: Peaks, Valleys, and Advice.
There are times when advice is sound, well-informed, and occurs at just the right time – and then there are all those other times when it just confuses things. Take a close look at these people, deliveries, and situations so you don’t act on something that could be damaging to your dance hobby.
Avoiding the Damage of Dance Advice
Dance Advice from Family
The Positives
This type of advice is very positive. After all, they have seen your transformation firsthand. Those days before you were a dancer, through your first dance lesson, all leading up to the magnificent dancer practicing moves in their kitchen. Due to this, you can expect plenty of support, encouragement, and – most importantly – perspective when you need it most.
Potential Damage
There can be fans of dancing, and fans of you, that deliver feedback you should not be a fan of.
- “You should spin more.”
- “You need to tell your teacher to spin you more.”
- “When are you going to do the splits?”
- “Why can’t you do this move from Dancing with the Stars?”
They mean well, but they don’t know what their advice really means in regards to the process of learning. Fans of Dancing with the Stars only see a 3-minute summary of 30-60 hours of rehearsal time on a single routine. For some people, that could be three months to a year’s worth of lessons.
In fact, the gap between watching dance and understanding dance is enormous. Your cousin who watched three seasons of DWTS is not qualified to restructure your lesson plan. (Sorry, cousin.)
Solution
They are your family. They love you. You love them, even if you don’t love their feedback. Understanding that, you should smile, thank them, and avoid trying to reeducate them on the Curve of Learning or the difference between Social and Competitive dancing.
Dance Advice from Dance Students
The Positives
This is a great source of feedback. After all, a fellow dance student doesn’t really have a vested interest in your progress. Even to skeptics, this can seem like the purest form of feedback.
The Potential Danger
Unfortunately, unsolicited encouragement is the gateway to unsolicited advice. Dance students understand the process of learning how to dance, but there’s only one limitation: It’s their process. It’s a classic example of having the best intentions (“I want to help you get better”), but the wrong delivery (“here’s what works for me”).
The tools and tips that work for one student may not be the designed path for another. After all, Arthur Murray dance programs are custom tailored to fit each student’s goals, learning, and abilities.
Here’s the thing – when another student tells you to “just relax your arms,” they’re giving you a solution that worked for their body. Your body might need something completely different. What if your arms are tense because of something happening in your legs? Only your teacher has the full picture.
Solution
Thank them. Give them a hug. Consider them an ally, friend, and someone who genuinely cares about you. Even if you don’t take their advice, try to implement it, and augment your current trajectory – you should find favor with their intentions. After all, they could have said something far worse, or nothing at all.
Dance Advice from a Dance Judge
The Positives
Yes, we are going here. Please read for full context before hiring any ninjas. We absolutely believe in dance consultants, we interview them, put them on a pedestal, and share their many talents with our own students on a regular basis. Advice from consultants is some of the best there is. It’s tested and proven in their travels around the globe.
What you are learning isn’t some spontaneous Eureka moment of a dance tip – it’s a composite of every student they’ve worked with who struggled with the same problem.
Potential Damage
Process is everything. Unlike your family, your teacher, or your friends – a consultant will work with you based on the present tense and create a future goal. What they’re missing is the past.
If they are watching you dance a Foxtrot, they may have no idea that it’s your first Foxtrot, that you absolutely hated the dance, and that the fact you are on the floor doing it with a smile on your face is making your entire studio shed tears of joy.
On a coaching lesson, a consultant will deliver a yard of information, and it’s up to you and your teacher to fill in the inches. If you lose sight of that, try to consume or hold yourself accountable to the “yard,” then you’ve abandoned your process, skewed your trajectory, and the advice intended for good is working against you.
Solution
A consultant is like a relative that you see on birthdays and holidays. They bring you sugar, tell you to clean your room, fix your posture, and then leave for 6 months. This interaction is incredibly valuable, and every student should try working with the world-class Arthur Murray consultants, but their feedback in the present could be designed for your future.
- Some feedback will make sense to your brain and your body immediately. Score!
- Some feedback will make sense to your brain, but your body needs time to download it.
- Some feedback will make sense to your body, but your brain is sounding the alarm.
- Some feedback will only make sense to your teacher.
No matter what, the advice will be uploaded to your dance program when the time is right.
The Danger of Anonymous Internet Advice
We haven’t even touched on the wild west of dance advice – the internet. YouTube comment sections. Reddit threads. Dance forums where anonymous strangers debate the “correct” way to do a Cuban motion.
Should you listen to them? Here’s a simple test: Would you let that person teach your private lesson? Probably not.
The internet can inspire you. It can show you what’s possible. But when it comes to fixing your dancing, you need someone who can see you, feel you dance, and understand your journey.
Final Thought
At some point, your dance instructor may start to sound like your mother. Not in the nagging sense (OK, maybe that too), but in the tuning-out sense. Perhaps they have encouraged you, paid compliments, told you that you were doing the right thing, and then you became numb to it. Like your mother telling you how handsome, beautiful, or intelligent you are. The common answer is: “You’re supposed to say that, you’re my mom.”
Yet, your dance teacher is on to something. Out of everyone listed, they have:
- The backstory of your first steps into your dance school
- The keys to how your dance program is personalized
- The process thinking to put any long-range ideas into regular use
So if there’s one bit of dance advice we encourage you to follow, it’s this: Tune into your teacher. You are the product of their profession, and how you dance says plenty about their ability. They can make sense of the feedback confusion, put it into a hierarchy of dance needs, and give you the antidote to damaging advice:
Personalized, professional, perspective.
Related Reading: 31 Things Your Dance Teacher Wants to See You Do
