Book a Dance Strategy Call HERE How do you dance freely and expressively and also think about all the things you are supposed to be doing with your body? The short answer is you really can't. The part of your brain that has to think through things and concentrate to make them happen is minimal. We want to delegate as much as we can to the part of our brain that does actions automatically without much thought. The more we can delegate there, the better. That's what you call muscle memory or automaticity. You engage in automaticity when you are driving and can carry on a conversation while also putting on lipstick. You have driven so much, that you don't have to think about it. You OVERLEARNED it. Overlearning is when you learn how to do something and can do it well and then keep doing it. You keep repeating it. I just call that reps, or repetitions. Reps are the way to overlearn and develop strong muscle memory so you can reach automaticity in your dancing. How do you do that? Well there are 4 stages you go through. Stage one--Acquire Knowledge--This is where you first are introduced to something. You have the intellectual knowledge, but are only beginning to apply it. You haven't translated it into your body yet. It feels clunky and stiff. It feels like you can't make your body do what you want it to do. Your brain is working hard to try to connect to your body and make it do what it wants. Stage two--Apply Knowledge Inconsistently-- In this stage, you are applying knowledge but it isn't consistently in your body yet. There is a lot of transition happenign here and this stage can take a long time. It will take a lot of thinking hard at first and concentrating to get your body to perform the actions. But over time, some of them become automatic. After a while, the percentage shifts and more and more is automatic and we can use less and less of the pre-frontal intentional part of the brain. You might experience a lot of impatience at this stage because you are getting it and feeling better about it and just want to have it down perfectly. Stage three--Apply Knowledge Consistently--This is where you translated the knowledge into your body and you can execute it consistently. You can rely upon it. You feel more confident in some areas because you have performed them successfully repeatedly. You have a lot of muscle memory in this stage but it can be a little deceiving. This is because you may not realize there is one more stage. Stage four--Apply Knowledge Consistently Under Pressure--You know this stage. This is when you can practice on your own and execute it but when you try to do it for your teacher, you can't do it as well. Or you can do your routines well in a lesson consistently but then things might fall apart more on the competition floor. This stage requires overlearning and we just plain don't do that work very often. You don't need to be in stage 4 to be successful or even feel confident. The biggest problem lies in us expecting to have the ease that we have not quite earned. Listen in to find out how to have more confidence in where you are at and find out if your expectiations are really the problem.

Ask this episode

“What did the council decide on item 42?” — answered with the speaker and the moment.

Transcript

Related