Mindful Intentions: Working Towards Your Dancer Goals in 2022

Have you set resolutions or goals for 2022, professionally or personally, in or out of dance? We’re about a month in 2022 – how’s it going? Absolutely no judgment if things haven’t really progressed or if new behaviors you wanted to incorporate into the long-term have begun to fade; all of that can be really challenging for the most driven and organized among us!

I'd love to offer a new frame for making resolutions and goal-setting, from the methodology and philosophy of yoga and mindfulness: that of an intention.

How does an intention differ from a “resolution”, you might wonder? To me, an intention comes with:

🔹️Non-judgment: If you fall short of succeeding at your goal or intention, your mental and emotional energy does not go into judging yourself. You have compassion and understanding for why you might have fallen short of the goal.

From there, you can fully look forward to what you can do to take another try at the goal or reassess the goal itself. Maybe when you wanted to get your leaps higher, but that’s not happening, instead of judging yourself you take a step back and a deep breath, and you begin to re-evaluate the situation.

🔹️Curiosity: When you’re curious, you remain open to all that you can discover while you work towards your goal. You can even bring a sense of joyful wonder to that process. With the example of getting higher leaps, working towards that goal with curiosity might very well mean that you take concrete action towards learning more about the technique, mechanics, and conditioning involved with grand or petit allegro: reading books and/or articles, asking teachers or master teachers for their insights and assistance, taking Leaps and Turns classes and absorbing all that you can.

While you learn, you listen before rejecting anything out of hand. Going back to non-judgment, you don’t beat yourself up for not already knowing the things you’re now learning; you just focus on integrating that knowledge into your technique, artistry, and conditioning going forward.

🔹️Patience: In this context, patience means allowing progress to happen on its own timeline. Say that you’re really wanting to improve your tap technique. Working with patience, you do all that you can: taking class, practicing at home, demonstrating effective class etiquette like asking insightful questions and watching other dancers go across the floor to see what you can learn from them (all within balanced and respectful bounds, of course).

Beyond that, you allow progress to happen in its own time, and you don’t get too upset when it happens more slowly than you thought it might. Your wings or time steps might not sound as clean as you’d like right now, but you keep working hard (balanced with rest) and you trust that it’ll come at some point.

🔹️ Non-attachment: With non-attachment, you can be adaptable and willing to "let go" of things that don't serve you in your journey towards progress. That can help you keep things balanced in terms of logistics, time-management, and even mental/emotional things such as your expectations (going back to patience, perhaps an expectation of how fast you’ll progress). You can “let go” of things that you might have thought help keep you on track, but in fact aren’t helpful and can even be harmful to your holistic health: such as comparing yourself to other dancers or feeling like you can’t ever take a day off.

Non-attachment can also allow you to refine or fully reassess the goal or intention itself – even when you’ve already put a lot of time and energy into it. If the goal or intention isn’t right, the best answer might be to change course, however far along in the journey towards it you may be.

🔹️Acceptance: With acceptance, you can be generally alright with whatever happens along the way towards our goal/intention. You release the negative emotional weight you might feel, that which might come from challenges on the path towards progress – at least releasing it at some point. However high the leap is today, or the tap sounds are, are however well you notice yourself practicing non-attachment, you keep your eyes on the prize of the goal at hand: putting your mental and emotional energy and focus there rather than on the negative. Negativity is a weight that can hold you down When you stay positive, you can reach new heights.

All of that said, it’s also beneficial to practice acceptance of where we are with any of those practices and capacities. If we’re not patient with our pace of progress today, for example, we can keep working at it, just as we work at any other skill in dance. We can’t will ourselves to feel a certain way, and it’s not helpful to try.

Feelings need to be worked through in their own time and in their own way. We can only keep coming back to the thoughtful approaches detailed above. They’re practices – to be cliche, but very honest, about it – not perfects.

In other words, we need to work at these skills – just like we work on our plies and degages. We’re not automatically good at them. Good thing that dancers are skilled at coming back to the work, over and over again, right? As I always reinforce, let’s just remember to do so in a balanced way: taking sufficient rest and living full, dynamic lives (engaging in things outside of the studio, too!) as we do so.

Here’s also some information from psychology that might also be useful for you in working towards your intentions in a mindful way. Behind all of this that I’m discussing, you might wonder why it can be so hard to change behaviors and work towards growth in a consistent way. In large part, that’s from the natural human tendency of drift, or the pull back towards comfortable, familiar habits and behaviors.

Dr. Matthew Boland, a Clinical Psychologist (and my wonderful brother), shares some tips for fighting back against drift. Social support and engaging with communities of like-minded individuals can be very helpful for sticking with your behavior-change goals, he notes. For dancers, that could be connecting with a fellow dancer or dancers with similar goals: be it to get turns cleaner, get better with choreography retention, or to take class more often.

From there, you can help keep each other accountable (with care and kindness, of course). With the example of getting to class, the chance to connect with other dancers could also help inspire you to keep coming back! As you work towards your goals, fellow dancers can cheer you on and continue to inspire you.

Stepping back to actually setting intentions, before you’re working on them at all, Dr. Boland also suggests connecting your goals to your values – and being quite clear on how those goals connect with your values. For example, if your goal might be cleaner turns, why do cleaner turns really matter to you?

Is that so that you can dance more virtuosically, and from there have the chance to dance more intricate, challenging work? Is it so that you can dance more confidently, and maybe bring that confidence into your everyday life? Will it help you to achieve a larger mission or purpose you might have within dance? Whatever that might be for you, what matters is peeking behind the curtain and getting clear on why a certain goal or intention might really matter to you.

As with anything I share, and ideally with all yoga practice and wellness, please take what resonates with you and serves you and don't worry about the rest (at least for now). And as always, I share this with all possible non-judgment and loving-kindness.

What do you think? If you’re comfortable and it seems like it might serve you, please let me know about your intentions and your thoughts on the topic via DM (see the “Contact” page on the website to find those, if you’re not already following) or via email: mindfulmovers5678@gmail.com.

Finally, I wish you all the best on reaching towards growth. Part of being an artist – and of being human, I’d argue – is that continual reach. I also believe that the more we can enjoy the journey of growth, less focused on the destination than on the path itself (as, again, cliche as that can be), the sweeter the fruits of the journey will be. Happy 2022, all!

Images courtesy of the writer and Unsplash