Realistic expectations vs. limiting oneself

OTOH, I met someone several years ago who claimed he couldn't dance Smooth Bronze b/c his studio only taught Silver. The thought was something like Bronze is a waste of time.

I was a newb, so I never questioned it.
 
I'd considered commenting on that as well, although my comment would have been more along the lines of "be aware that quantized levels like that say remarkably little about a person's actual dance ability, so don't stress out too much about the labels."

I've certainly known people who have started taking silver classes on that timeframe, but on that scale, it's generally going to say more about what steps a person knows rather than how well they can execute them. And if that's what makes them happy, well, whatever.
 
Loki said:
OTOH, I met someone several years ago who claimed he couldn't dance Smooth Bronze b/c his studio only taught Silver. The thought was something like Bronze is a waste of time.

I was a newb, so I never questioned it.
Click to expand...

For social dancing, there might be some merit to that. The single thing I see newbies screw up the most is failing to change weight when they close their feet. Mostly passing avoids that problem, because their spine and foot placements together force them to be on the correct feet.

Similarly, from a competitive perspective, my coach will often place students in open immediately rather than work them up through syllabus because it allows less total time to be spent on choreography and more time to be spent on learning the fundamentals that eventually make them successful in open latin. He did that for me when I started working with him, even though I had previously competed no higher than silver, and I believe it was massively beneficial to my dancing.
 
Ok, not a slam on your abilities, but did you get slaughtered in open your first few comps?

I'm intrigued by the "skip the syllabus" philosophy.
 
To the OP, I'd like to offer a slightly different suggestion from most. It sounds like you're viewing goals mainly through an achievement mindset, which isn't bad necessarily but does leave the achievement of those goals up to a lot of factors outside your control. Instead I'd recommend focusing on a growth mindset or on things that are completely within your control (commanding a particular set of movements or particular degree of difficulty for choreography) rather than levels, comp placements, etc. that are more or less fully outside your control. An example based on your responses for a short-term goal would be commanding your American rumba walks, full-speed, with all the technique currently on your plate in some time period, maybe two weeks. And then you could add another layer or tweak of technique onto the plate and start the process over again.
 
Loki said:
Ok, not a slam on your abilities, but did you get slaughtered in open your first few comps?

I'm intrigued by the "skip the syllabus" philosophy.
Click to expand...

A little bit, but placing well out of the gate in open wasn't the point of the decision to skip syllabus. The key question was, 2-3 years down the line, will you do better if you had to learn 5 silver routines, 5 gold routines, and then 5 open routines or if you just learned 5 open routines and had the other ten routines' choreography time to develop movement quality, evolve the choreography to better suit your strengths, and clean / add additional layers of quality into the open program? Once you agree to a long-term time frame with a partnership, the decisions you make don't need to over-index to the short-term so much and the answer that's better for the long-term seems more obvious. And really, we'd have been just as nervous taking the floor for open the first time even if there were 1-2 years of good syllabus results built up, so we may as well get it out of the way sooner.
 
And even more thanks to everyone.

The origin of the question was a conversation with one of the teachers in which I commented that I knew I would never dance like a couple of the top pro-am students in the studio--and I will not. Not only are they both extremely good dancers, one of them has been dancing pretty much her whole life and the other has a phenomenal presence that I don't think I will ever match. The teacher's response was that thinking like that is self-limiting. We are both correct, but I'm beginning to see how to have a mind-set that is more positive without being delusional.
 
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