Trash the Trophies: How to Win Without Losing Your Soul by Chasta Hamilton

Author:Chasta Hamilton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: BookBaby
Published: 2020-07-06T17:18:26+00:00

13 Lizzie Feidelson, “Inside the High Drama World of Youth Competition Dance,” New York Times, December 21, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/21/magazine/inside-the-high-drama-world-of-youth-competition-dance.html.

Chapter 4

4. Make the Moves

Life is busy, and adulting is hard. We all have lists of things we hope to accomplish. I fear that so many people leave their lists of hopes and dreams collecting cobwebs in a deserted corner.

Don’t let this happen to you!

With passion as the foundation and the pros/cons as the launch point, hold yourself accountable for making some major moves. Grab an accountability buddy, find sources of inspiration, and get to work. Change is usually inconvenient, but it is so worth it to elevate your offerings to this world and to your life.

For me, once the “ick factor” of something is identified, everything wrong is exacerbated. It happened with our run in the competitive dance industry, and it has happened in other areas of my life. Going down the rabbit hole is tough, but in that darkness is enlightenment.

With the looming shift out of the competitive dance industry, there were months where I felt so stressed about the knowledge I had versus the action I was delaying. My therapist tells me now that avoidance is simply rescheduling conflict, and boy, was I a master of rescheduling it. I’d break out in hives in Target. I’d feel anxious opening the studio email. I’d sit in the parking lot and shed a few tears. When the phone would ring, I’d feel a jolt of stress shoot through my body. I’d try to busy myself with as many things as possible to distract myself from the continued chaos. I would bend over backward to please everyone but myself.

One of the most frustrating parts of this journey was how easy it was to lose sight of rational perspective. The issues created as a by-product of the competitive dance industry can feel so big. Yet, they’re solvable problems very much within our control. Within the isolated bubble of the dance competition industry, routine adjudication and placement and other trivial things feels so grandiose. In the real world and on a scale of major, impacting life events, it just doesn’t matter. It’s crazy how we can be pulled into these trivial conflicts.

While attending one competitive event, I found out one of our five-year-old students passed away. That’s a real-life issue, and my heart sank to the depths of my stomach. I felt nauseous as I drove home that day.

The child joined our programming when he was three years old. He was so joyful and loved to dance. When his cancer recurred, his mother requested private lessons since they likely would not have a mother/son first dance together at a wedding. They chose “Tomorrow” from the musical Annie as their song, and even though we never finished the routine, we captured rehearsal footage that is the penultimate representation of the power of the performing arts.

As I attended the child’s funeral, I was also fielding emails questioning adjudications and why certain routines were not scoring higher than they were at the weekend’s competition.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.