PAGE 6
PAGE 6. Rise to the occasion
A big part of optimizing your behavior so everybody in the team can shine is trust. Trusting ourselves and trusting others and being trusted by others. When there is trust, there is also room for mistakes and mistakes are key learning moments. Mistakes give us invaluable information that we wouldn’t have had without these mistakes.
Yes, mistakes may hurt, they may make you hugely uncomfortable and trigger all sorts of negative emotions. Like not being good enough, not being ready, not being… you fill in the blanks. But what mistakes really do is that if we learn from them, they make us better. And not a tiny bit better, no, they make us way better. And because we all learn and get better, we will shine.
Last weekend, I was watching the semi finals of BBC’s Strictly Come Dancing and those couples out there were shining. The concept of this tv dance show (it runs in many countries) is to team up professional dancers with celebrities. These celebrities have no (formal) dance experience. It’s up to the pro’s to teach and coach the celebrities, it’s up to the celebrities to go all in and do everything in their power to learn the dances and perform the routines the best they can.
The level of all the four semi-finalist performances this week was so high, never in the history of this program did the judges give so many perfect scores. And when you think you have seen it all, there is that one couple that takes the floor and out dances everyone who danced before.
Rose Ayling-Ellis and her professional dance partner Giovanni Pernice triggered my emotions of exhilaration. Their performance touched my heart at such a deep level, I’m still enjoying the sensation of it. All their hard work, their mistakes, their learnings and their build on trust paid off and Rose and Giovanni absolutely ‘Rose’ to the occasion.
If you read this you would probably think Rose must be a dancer too. Well, no she is an actress. One with great body awareness and a loving personality. But what makes it really special is that Rose is deaf. Take that in for a moment. She can’t hear the music like we can but still she manages to perform like her disability is not present.
When we talk about trust, dancing is a perfect metafoor. Trust yourself that what you have learned is good enough for today and what you learn tomorrow is good enough for that moment. Trust that when you follow your partner you will know what to do. And trust that your partner will do their part to be the best they can and lead you where needed.
