Developing Discipline: Part 4 | What Do You Want In Life?
Last week in Part 3, Developing your Daily Habits, we learned about the power of discipline and the challenges that will face us, so let's start thinking about what we'll use this newfound power to achieve, create or enjoy!
What do you want your life to look like?
As we talked about in Part 3, specific goals can be discouraging if you’re motivated only by results. Therefore, we must learn to be motivated by other things, such as vision for your life and the process itself (e.g. getting excited about the fact that you did something, not in what came from it).
When life throws you a curveball, it can really knock the wind out of your sails if your heart is set on specific goals and milestones versus being excited about the process or an overarching vision.
Your vision can be within ballet or anything within your life. Discipline is how you work towards what you want; how you shape your life into what you've dreamed of. But I think the key is that it has to be in search of what YOU want. So what do you want?
KNOWING WHAT YOU WANT, MUCH LESS ACTING ON THAT, IS VERY HARD BUT INCREDIBLY FREEING. HERE’S MY STORY.
In 2020, I reached none of my goals, yet simultaneously reached all of them.
How can that be?
Since February, Broche Ballet has gone from a team of 12+ teachers and 3 studios, to now just me operating this online business from my spare bedroom. Needless to say, I've learned a lot about goals and vision.
My vision for Broche Ballet was to help adults find their love of ballet, help them achieve their goals, and give them a place to be taken seriously as dancers.
While my specific goals for growing our Denver presence had to be set aside (e.g. our second recital, a fourth studio, improving our pointe program, offering exams, etc.), my overall vision still remained, if not strengthened, as I can now help dancers across the globe, and not just in Denver.
So, while I achieved none of my specific goals, I am still on the path towards my vision.
And, because of this change in environment, I've unexpectedly discovered meditation, yoga, and bodyweight strength training, which have all improved my ability to inspire, teach, and feel confident, but that I never bothered to make time for in the past because I was too busy obsessing about specific SMART goals.
Perhaps what I've come to see is that we need is a "vision" which can contain "goals." But then we need to learn to be flexible on our "goals" while remaining steadfast in our "vision."
HANG ON TIGHT TO YOUR VISION, BUT LET YOUR GOALS BE FLEXIBLE.
So what is my vision? This year has helped me remember, but it was not an easy journey to re-discover this.
During this period of time, I had to make many difficult choices that would affect the livelihood of many beyond myself, including our beloved team and our community of dancers.
For a few days leading up to the final decision to close the studios, I experienced something new: Feeling nothing.
I did not feel sadness, anxiety, apprehension, happiness... just nothing. It was just a black hole where normally I'd feel my gut and emotions. I had no idea what direction to take. How odd, I thought. Where did my feelings go?
It is very difficult to make decisions from this place of emptiness.
Especially when from March to June, I'd done nothing EXCEPT feel intense things. So when those feelings went away, that was almost more terrifying than feeling it all.
By early June, I pretty much knew I couldn't go forward with the studios any longer, as we were nearly out of money and, quite understandably, very few dancers felt safe enough to return to our unusually small studio spaces. The road ahead was long, and I was exhausted. But I was looking for a sign, or some way to know what to do. I don't know what I was looking for, but something other than the nothingness I felt.
Am I doing the right thing? Am I a failure if I close the studios? What does my life even look like without them? Can I really throw in the towel or should I keep fighting? How can I know what I should do?
I turned to my journal, where Past Julie (as I call her) had written a bunch of entries from about ages 23-27 when she'd ride the train to and from work every day in New York City.
She’d ponder life, work, family, and hopes and dreams. Time and time again, entries appeared with the themes below, even during those years while I was a web developer and product manager and ballet was a night/weekend activity:
I want to have the discipline to dance and stretch every day
I want to take time to read and learn every day
I love to meet people, learn their stories, teach them complex things, and help them see that they can achieve what they put their minds to
I love to overcome my fears and help others do the same
And in reading these entries, I could see that my life had actually drifted farther and farther from that. I was not doing the work to make time for myself, and as the studios grew, the responsibilities took me further from my love of meeting, teaching, and inspiring dancers directly.
In reading these entries, I could answer the questions that my emptiness couldn’t. I could take a step back and think about my vision, instead of only thinking about the loss of this specific chapter of my life:
Am I doing the right thing? — You can inspire people from a studio or over the internet
Am I a failure if I close the studios? — No, your dream was never “studios” specifically, but inspiring people, teaching, and learning
What does my life even look like without the studios? — Maybe my life would actually look like what I’d always wanted it to look like. Maybe I’d actually take this as a wake-up call to finally work towards my life vision
Can I really throw in the towel or should I keep fighting? — Maybe it’s ok to throw in the towel, when continuing to fight is not necessary in order to continue on the way to your vision.
How can I know what I should do? — I knew I had to first step back and take care of myself so that I’d be able to inspire others and move forward in this crazy time.
All this isn’t to say I won’t open studios again. Who knows what post-COVID life will look like! We could hardly predict 2020, so there’s no way to predict 2021 and beyond. But this time, if I do open another physical location, I’ll be wiser, more experienced, and know the difference between hanging onto specific goals and what it looks like to actually build towards a vision.
All that took a tremendous amount of courage
It was not easy. By any stretch. It still isn’t, and I still have days where I miss my friends and my studios and my old life and what I was building towards. But, I always remind myself, that my vision is still strong.
I’m just on a different path to the same vision.
If you remember from Part 1, I finally feel that I’m working towards the discipline to create my life vision from all those years.
What’s your life vision? What do you envision your days looking like?
It’s not an easy question to answer. It may require courage, time, reflection, change, and asking yourself hard questions. But when you do answer it, you can start to shape your life into what you want.
Take some time to answer it this week, and then next week, we’ll talk about how to get started!
