I just spent a week in Thailand and I find myself with plenty of time to reflect on a long flight back to LA. The original purpose of the trip was to deepen my bodywork practice by taking the next level of course work in energy-based healing with my Master Teacher Mike Tan. My days overflowed with cues on technique, movement training and ah-ha moments about myself. All this year, I’ve had very clear goals, much like a New Year’s resolution on steroids coupled with a typical Chinese work-ethic, I mentally laid out a plan for 2018 and started executing. As the year wore on, my original timelines began to make less and less sense. I became so attached to a pre-determined outcome that I was unwilling to budge, even though it didn’t serve me. Two-thirds into the year, I found myself anxious, sleep-deprived and in physical pain all because I put my timeline in front of my self-care. My friends ask how long I could burn the candle at both ends and my response would be, “It’s temporary, I’ll rest when I finish this project.”
This trip acted like a lead foot pumping the brakes in my life. I realized my intentions are not actually in harmony with my goals. One of my goals is to be a better teacher and reach more students who are hungry to learn. Writing this blog, creating tutorials and filming video content are a part of that. Instead of my intention driving me, I found myself on a hamster wheel trying to keep up with the calendar. I don’t think I am alone. So many of us are just desperately trying to keep up with the demands of work, family or school. Sometimes hectic schedules cannot be helped, but our intention behind what we do can.
Get Clear
Reflect on why you are doing aerial and try to define what your goals are. Maybe it’s about being healthy and fit or enjoying the community around the activity. Perhaps you want to be a professional or you love how your body feels in the air. Ask yourself if your intentions in your training matches your goals. If you find yourself being super competitive with your classmates to get tricks faster but your actual goal is having a sense of community in your life, then there might be a disconnect. Maybe you live for the way your body feels in the air but you beat yourself up about not looking as good as you’d like. I’m interested in hearing your thoughts on this.
Keep Goals Not Timelines
Goals are great, but pre-determined timelines can be counter-productive to your growth as an artist. I have a lot of students who thought they would be much farther as aerialists in the amount of time they have been training. This expectation causes a lot of frustration. One student inverts into straddle-back on the first try where another takes six months. Another does well for a couple years then hits a plateau for an entire year. Your training may test your patience, but there’s no right or wrong length of time it takes to get good at something. If anything, it takes more time and practice, not less.
Learning Something is not the Same as Knowing it
Movement is not mastered just by learning it. The week long course that I just took is now complete, I even have a signed certificate to prove it. But as my Sensei says, this is day one. It may take a year or ten to really master one arm movement. It’s not enough to know the steps, you must walk the steps and the same is true for aerial. When you learn a trick in class, it’s day one for that trick. Now that you know the wrap, it’s time to work on articulating the technique. Then comes repetition and after that artistry where you get to put your own stamp on it and make it special. You’ll get to a point with that element where your efficiency is high and your risk level is low. The process is more important than the product. I find myself needing a reminder of this all of the time.
Perfection Kills Art
First things first – perfection is an illusion. The perception of perfection is what can exist in us. From a practical stand point, the idea of it can hold us back from creating and sharing our work with the world. I’ve been guilty of working a combination to death striving for perfection. I film the darn thing dozens of times in a week, throw my hands up in frustration and put the project down. While reviewing the film days later, I realize that the video I almost trashed because it wasn’t perfect, is the one that I love the most. If I hadn’t been able to be flexible in how I view my work, that silks combination would still be digitally rotting away in the bowels of my iPhone.
Re-aligning myself with WHY I do what I do is powerful and can change my energy around everything. Instead of focusing on the stress of daily posting on social media, I hope to bring it back to the reason why I do it – so that I can share the movement that I am so proud to create. I hope to remind myself that it’s not really about the dates on the calendar or perfecting a trick but about connecting with other people through art. The goals and work load might not change, but my perspective on it can. I hope that if you relate to some of these struggles, this will bring a voice to those emotions and I’d love for you to share them with me.