I’ve said to myself so many times that I want to work more on my dancing. My wife/dance partner and I tried setting aside times for practice, but they rarely took place. Why? Because during most of the practice sessions we had a fight. As a result, we found excuses not to practice.
Practicing dancing with a partner can be emotionally hard. Why? It takes two to tango! She can’t follow it right unless I lead it right… well, the tendency is to think I can’t lead it right because she is not following it right – so we blame each other.
However, we recently had a breakthrough. I turned to successful dancers, and learned techniques from them. We changed our system, by structuring each training session to help us focus and filming the session in order to get a neutral viewpoint. This led to one of the most successful training sessions we ever had.
Once you have it, don’t lose it
My friend Carl Nelson’s post “How To Succeed – A Simple Story” motivates you to work hard. If we can get ourselves to work really hard, we can achieve amazing things. When we’re motivated to do the work we should do whatever we can to keep that motivation strong. It’s therefore important to learn what motivates us and what discourages us from hard work. In simple terms, motivation comes when your reward matches your effort.
There are two areas you can look into in order to make this happen. First, learn how you can use your situation to your advantage. Second, know your strengths and use outside expertise.
Self help
Creating new habits that build on top of old ones.
Carl mentioned in his article that he is working hard on his writing by reading at least one book every week. I always wanted to read more books, but never found the time. Since I discovered audible.com, I easily read a book a week by listening to audiobooks while commuting, walking my dogs or cleaning my house.
Preventing procrastination.
We naturally avoid stress. If stress is part of a bigger activity, we might avoid the entire activity to avoid the stress. However, if we realize where stress comes from, we can find ways to remove it from the activity. Just like my wife and I focused and recorded our dance training to avoid fights. To read a full article on the topic, please visit my blog: http://www.danceopensdoors.com/?p=100
Get help
Learn from the best.
After a couple of serious relationship crashes, I decided I wanted to get that part of my life handled. So, I learned from dating gurus such as David DeAngelo, and after some months I started to see improvements in my relationships. Not too long after that I got married. Something as hard as finding your partner for life becomes easier once you learn how to search better ; )
Work to your strengths – delegate the rest
Every one of us is wired differently. I recently read a book by Tom Rath – Strengths Finder 2.0 – that helped me discover my strongest talents. I could use my talents to make any hard task an easy one, simply by changing my approach to the work a bit. One of the biggest changes my wife and I made in the way we run our dance business is to understand what we do best. It takes me about 5-10 minutes to type up a first draft of just about anything, but it takes me about 3 hours to make it “perfect”. My wife has the exact opposite talent: it takes her 3 hours to get the first draft up, and only 5-10 minutes to get it “perfect”. If we collaborate on all the writing, we have a win-win situation.
By turning your situation to your advantage, and getting outside help when you need it, you can
make “Hard” easy, then do a lot of it!
Yours,
Ali
