There was a time that I wrote about the possibilities of living my dreams, now I write about living my dreams. What does that even mean Rishone? Let me explain. I’m a far better writer and thinker than taking action. This is something that I had to intentionally figure out how to change. I would tell myself stop thinking about it, writing about, reading what you wrote, and doing nothing about it. All these beautiful ideas would be in my head and then I would write about them on paper but never do anything towards making it happen in this lifetime. I would lead my life with the dreamers phrase, “what if?”
This is how most of us live our lives. We create these what if visualizations in our heads and sometimes we may try to make that vision a reality but after the first failure or mistake, you throw that vision in the trash so prematurely with the follow up phrase…”What was I even thinking?”The truth is that you weren’t thinking, you were doing and while you were taking action, it gave you the rush of truly living. Most times we get so distracted by a mistake or what seems like failure that we quit on ourselves just because we didn’t get it right the first time or the 2nd time or the 3rd time. I think the culture we live in has made us truly believe that success is linear so we stop ourselves from enjoying the journey if discovering new parts of ourselves. Especially when we dont experience success after a few tries. As humans we are designed to make mistakes and fail multiple times before discovering the beauty of achieving what we dream of.
I spent most of my 20s in my head. I wrote about my dreams and living life in the most beautiful stories I could create with my pen. Then at about 27 I truly started to live my words. I took action. I wanted to get my career started so I lobbied for a position that represented that. I wanted to learn how to be a better dancer and performer so I auditioned for so you think you can dance. I wanted to become a better chef so I auditioned for Master Chef. I wanted to present myself better on camera so I made youtube videos, auditoned for commercials, auditioned for a live musical, and made instagram stories. I wanted to be better in so many areas of my life that I wrote or thought about obsessively that I was now at a point where taking action was the only viable next step.
Was I successful in achieving everything thing I pursued in the above paragraph? The answer is no but also yes. I didn’t make it on SYTYCD but i became a better dancer becasue of it. I learned multiple new styles of dances and styles I didn’t even think I would enjoy like ballroom disciples. I also started Musicality Central and continued to improve as a choreographer and instructor. I didn’t make it on Master Chef but I became an incredible chef because of that experience. Now I own my own private chef business of 10 years. However, I did get the position that lead to sucessful career path as a validation engineer. I did make it into a few commercials one being a superbowl commercial. I did star in a musical in which I played 3 different characters. And Yes, I did make 100s of Instagram stories that allowed me to find my authentic self on camera. The best part about doing all of this is that I fell in love with the journey of who I was becoming. The journey of becoming someone who did it despite being nervous and someone who took action despite knowing my efforts might not be even close to a finished product. I learned from my failures and mistake because I knew the next 50 to 100 steps or tries would eventually lead to a version of success that I dreamed about.
I’m sharing this with you because I know from experience that we get caught up in thoughts way too much. It takes up so many years of our lives. The fear of making a mistake when we are in the process of doing cripples of our most resilient quality of being human. That is getting up and trying again or finding a way no matter what obstacles you are faced with. We do this in so many areas of our lives because we love the comfort of our own thoughts being unfulfilled and we just let them be that way.
When you decided to join us in our dance classes for the first time or maybe you’ve been taking classes with us for a while, remember that one or even 10 mistake doesn’t define your entire experience. The routine you learned may have had a total of 100 moves and you executed 90 of them well enough but there may have be 10 moves that tripped you up. That is Ninety(90) moves that you didn’t know how to execute prior to being in class. However, you processed that as a complete failure and decided that something you spent so much time dreaming about is no longer for you. Then the phrase “what was I thinking?”comes back with a vengeance. Take a second and truly think about how absurd that is. This describes our process on a very small scale of things we want to accomplish in our lives. Why did I bring this up? Because I also wanted to incorporate how we look at learning even from a dance perspective.
To wrap this up expeditiously, start taking action in your life. You are only here for a short time. Do the thing you have been thinking about for days, weeks, months, years and for some decades. So what if you make mistakes or fail a few times. Try again and remember that it is a journey about learning and evolving into the final product or goal you always had in your mind for yourself. Stop thinking and enjoy dancing even if it is to your own beat. I am still in the process of making mistakes and experiencing failures as I go after my goals. However, I am enjoy this journey that is shaping what I use to write about. Now I’m sharing with you how I’m doing on this journey while I am living it.