Have you ever destroyed something in your attempt to make it better?
When teaching someone to dance, I often find my student growing frustrated with himself. He focuses harder on making the move work, but his anger at himself for not getting it right bleeds through the lesson and causes more resistance in his body. The more he tries, the worse he gets.
“Let’s work on the other pattern we did and we'll come back to this later,” I say.
“No, I wanna get this right,” he demands.
“We will do it two more times, and then we are going to move on,” I insist.
The man shakes out his shoulders, takes a deep breath, and visualizes what he is going to do. He starts out determined…and completely overshoots the entire trouble spot.
His jaw clenches as he resets and does it one more time. Again, he is dead set on getting it right…and again is farther away from the goal than he was in the beginning.
“It’s okay,” I say. “You are focused too much on perfecting it, and I need you to un-focus. I want you to forget this pattern and just dance something else with me. Pick a song.”
It takes a while for my student to release the attachment to the last pattern, still tense from pushing himself. As he moves through patterns his body already knows, I talk to him about the baseball game he went to with his son the other weekend. His face lights up as he takes his mind off the problem. His arms loosen and his chest expands.
I have him review a pattern he had learned with me another time that he had gotten good at. Then I have him return to the trouble spot.
“Don’t think about what your feet are doing,” I say. “I don’t even want you to think about your frame. I just want you to just stay connected with me, look where you are headed, and keep me in line with where you want me to be in relation to you.”
On the first attempt, he gets the timing and placement exactly right. He is so excited about it, he forgets to follow through the next step and crashes. We laugh, and I have him repeat it five more times, sometimes smoothly, sometimes terribly. But something has changed.
He isn’t trying so hard. He is more relaxed and letting himself make mistakes. He is enjoying the process again instead of being driven by the results.
There’s a difference between power and force. Force is the energy you use when you try to control or make something happen; power is the energy used to allow sustained flow in the right direction.
In dance, less is more. Arms are an extension of your body; your body is your power center. Instead of using your arms to force a move, use your core and your chest to naturally move yourself.
* * *
In high school, my honors and AP classes were predominantly female, and I remember once that my teacher distributed an article to all the students about an overachiever. The girl in the story was like us, enrolled in all honors and AP classes, played in extracurricular sports throughout the year, performed in the school play, had a part time job, volunteered in her community and served on several club boards. She would push herself to work hard to beef up her college resume, getting little sleep and stressing herself out…until she would break down and cry. After losing several hours to the breakdown, she’d pull herself together and push on.
A hush fell over the class as we finished reading the article, like an empathetic moment of silence to honor the girl who looked just like us. Then we slid the article into our binders and resumed our driven lives as usual. That was just the way it was, we thought.
Indeed, the common belief was that we worked well under pressure. Many students purposely procrastinated just to artificially create the anxiety they needed in order to perform. They would burn the midnight oil to cram for a test or write the essay that had been assigned weeks ago. But I was concerned it didn’t work well for me, and I would sit in class during a timed-writing, frozen and blank while the clock ticked, like watching the blocks falling in a game of Tetris, powerless to make a move. Eventually, I too became trained to go into an altered state and attend to the fake emergency at hand. The only thing that mattered was completing the task and getting an A before the time ran out.
* * *
A standard of excellence was instilled in me from childhood, and I became a legalistic disciple, mom, and wife that strove to juggle it all, managing everyone and everything. But the more I tried to keep everything under control, the more I found myself stressed and resentful. Like so many in my achievement-oriented culture, I thought if I just tried harder and served more, I could fix everything. Little did I know that my drive for perfection was adding to the unhappiness of my family.... Until I broke. And not only did I brake, but I took everyone down with me. (Even though at the time, I believed it was everyone else’s fault.) That’s what happens when you keep pushing.
I still value self-improvement, which means I likewise require my romantic partner to value it too. I firmly believe that iron sharpens iron and personal growth is the pathway to greater fulfillment in life. I find the drive to do and achieve to be a very attractive masculine trait, and I am highly drawn to goal-oriented men. Because of my background, I understand the need to push the self to get things right.
However, after burning down everything in my attempt to make it better, I learned that trying to control things causes burnout and disconnection.
I dated more than one man whose drive I highly admired. But their rigidity and dedication to rules made them blind to the experience they were actually having. Instead of trying to solve a problem by mutual conversation, my boyfriend would consult a book or a podcast and try applying the strategy like a science experiment.
“Hit me!” he said after taunting me till I was all wound up.
“No!” I screamed. “Why in the world do you think I’d want to hit you?”
“Because you need to release the rage.”
Had he gone crazy?
“I wasn’t in a rage until you poked and poked and poked. I don’t stuff everything like you do until it explodes.”
“You don’t?” he said. “But the therapist in the podcast you liked said on her latest episode that a woman just needed a safe place to let out her rage and hit stuff. She said her husband would put a pillow over his body and let her wail on it.”
“Did her husband bully her and invalidate her reality when she would come to him with what was bothering her?”
“No, it was after years of people pleasing that she had built up resentment. He provided a place for her to just let it all out.”
“Well there you go,” I said. “I’m not her. People are not a one-size-fits-all. And I am not a people pleaser with pent up rage. You are providing an UNsafe place, trying to pick fights as a way to connect.”
“But I was listening to that podcast in order to understand you. She is a relationship coach and I thought I could learn more about relationships if I listened to more of her content. You said you wanted me to apply what I learned.”
“I understand your intention is to get better at relationships. But you are trying in the wrong way. That’s like when I went to a GI doctor about my digestion issues and he pushed me to take antacids because that's what everyone else does, and it made my lack of stomach acid worse,” I said. “If you want to know why I get mad, listen to ME; stop consulting everyone else and work with ME. Stop trying so hard to fix it and start being here now.”
He tried. But he didn’t know how. Instead, he hit the books harder. He joined a men’s group. He went to church. He listened to more podcasts. He took me out on more dates. He did more things around the house. He took notes on my favorite subjects so he could talk to me about them. He worked so hard to make me happy.
But at the same time, he was leaking resentment like a sieve.
When he brought up the subjects I was so fluent in, he would shoot them all down, starting the conversations with the things he didn’t agree with or didn’t like. He would use straw man arguments to disprove things. In an effort to show me he understood me, he would crush the things I loved.
He never applied them to himself, but instead talked about what “people” thought and repeated antidotes with the general “you.” It was like he was a parrot, a student regurgitating things he read in textbooks in order to get an A on the test.
And he did it without even realizing it. Because he had an eye single to the purpose of getting things right.
“Stop trying so hard to show me you know everything and just ask me. Stop trying to be something you think I want and just be you. I promise, it’s easier if you just try softer.”
Sadly, I couldn't feel his love over his misguided ways to get me to love him. In trying to fix everything, he ended up blowing the whole thing up.
The more wound up you are and attached to the outcome, the less regulated you are. Release the tension and it can fall into place naturally. The phenomenon is universal and has incredible importance in human relationships.
Stop pushing and go with it. Let go of the need to control or make something happen, and allow a things to flow. In the words of Bruce Lee, “be water, my friend.”
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