Bettering Yourself

“I do not try to dance better than anyone else. I only try to dance better than myself.”

-Miklail Baryshnikov

In a previous blog post I gave insight on how a dancer is their own worst critic. With this being the case, the main focus of a dancer is to learn, grow and create new and better pieces, as time and age conquer. It becomes less important to beat out the opponents in a competition, because the satisfaction of bettering your own dancing ability and being better than the last performance you gave is much more rewarding. In my opinion the improvement of a dancer is most significant when they feel they have reached a greater potential, with more confidence and understanding than the time before. Improvement should be about bettering yourself, not comparing yourself to other dancers.

To better yourself as a dancer consider the focus of your own development as the most important effort. You don’t have to prove yourself to anyone, but yourself. With that, take the time to polish you weaknesses and develop them into strengths. This will better yourself as a dancer, as you are using your time to focus on yourself over anyone else.

The feeling you receive when you have accomplished something you once never thought possible is something that comes along with the encouragement of bettering yourself as a dancer. You feel you have reached the next milestone to be your greatest potential. You should start feeling better and better about yourself, before and after taking the stage. It’s shouldn’t even be the feeling of winning over your peers that makes you feel this way, but the joy of knowing you are better than you ever have been before. It’s such a rewarding pleasure to think about how far you are headed in the right direction, with respects to a dancing career. It improves confidence, and understanding of dance that only furthers a dancer for the better.

Every dancer is unique, and has their own style that makes them stand out. Dancers should be bettering those unique features, instead of attempting to compare their own stylistic qualities to another dancers, whose may be completely different. The improvement will come to a dancer, when they find how to improve their own style.

Dancing is about self-improvement. Bettering yourself to new heights, that make you feel more confident and improved. Always remember to take your own dancing and grow, learn and create from that. It’s about bettering yourself, not comparing yourself to be better than everyone around you. It will come faster if you use the motivation of bettering yourself, than trying to be better than every other single dancer. If you are growing, learning and improving yourself to your new best, that’s what counts. Bettering yourself is so vital and should be strived by every dancer, every day.

~Julia Brewer