How to Succeed at Failing
How learning to dance is teaching me how to fail
I have never been ‘a dancer’. Sometimes, if I’m doing a yoga pose with fancy fingers, or standing in a queue with my legs splayed quasi-ballet style, people ask me if I’m a dancer. But I tell them no. I just dance.
I danced as a ten-year-old in a sequined costume, accidentally out of line with the other girls, and moving a bit too enthusiastically so that my head bobbled like I was trying to shake it loose, and my arms jerked violently into position, rather than elegantly glided. “It’s OK,” my mum said. “You’re good at other things.”
I danced as a seventeen-year-old at school formals and end-of-year parties, awkwardly swaying side-to-side and unconsciously gathering my arms up towards my chest in the style of a tyrannosaurus rex. I was a dinosaur dancer, a neck-too-stiff, arms-too-thin dancer, lips sucking inwards like a lizard dancer. I once fake-fainted at a party just to get off the floor. “It’s OK”, I told myself, “I’m good at other things.”
I have never been a dancer. And so I decided to learn how to dance.
There is fantastic freedom in being terrible at a thing. The pressure is off and every grain of learning is an achievement unlocked. It is easy to seek knowledge and feedback when the ego is uninvolved; you left ego outside, she was otherwise engaged drawing rings around all the other things that you’re good at. She’s not needed here because there’s nothing to defend.
I started dancing for the challenge and stayed for the intoxicating joy of the rapid learning curve when you don’t yet know how much you don’t know and the faces saying “well done” and “you’re really good” are smiling and easy to impress because I’m just a beginner and there’s nothing else they can expect.
I learned Salsa. It was fine. I wasn’t very good at turning and I sucked at balancing in heels. But I could keep my feet moving in time and trusted most people (men) enough to let them throw me around. They seemed to like that.
I tried Bachata. It was fine. I hadn’t memorized the steps as I had in Salsa and I giggled occasionally when the bass sounded like a farting whale. But I could wiggle my hips and let most partners (men) lead my butt in various directions.
Going out dancing was an activity that I started to enjoy. I began to feel like my body had knowledge that my mind could not compute — my legs saved me from tripping before I understood I was about to fall and they could do a cross-body step as long as I didn’t think about it too hard. I noticed that I began to like sitting on the train with my legs uncrossed.
Do you remember those people at school who seemed to fully fit their skin?
I remember the sporty girls, who played netball and volleyball and always seemed to be in track pants with the waistband rolled down. They were captains of things and for a while, they wore fluorescent shoelaces around their foreheads like skinny, ineffective sweatbands. And they didn’t make it look silly. I would have looked silly. On the train home from school, they would slide down in their seats and their legs would be apart, not in a vulgar fashion — just a comfortable fashion. As if their body was making the most of its ease but could jump up again at any moment and catch something.
Learning to dance helped me uncross my legs on the train. And being danced with by men in clubs made me feel sexy and powerful. By the time I was asked to teach beginner and even intermediate classes at a dance club in London, I felt like my sense of self was about to change.
So what does this have to do with failure?
I’m starting to realize that my journey to this point has a lot to do with my struggle to fail.
I now dance (and have taught) a style called Brazilian Zouk. It is also a social partner dance — but I found, soon after starting to learn — that to feel comfortable and bring joy as a partner dancing Zouk required not only new and more challenging physical skills than salsa did (turning while diagonal? Show me someone who doesn’t feel sick doing that) but also required a set of emotional skills that I had never brought into dance before. When I dance Zouk, I need to trust my partner and soften my body to their touch. I need to relinquish control over where my arms are and how they get to wherever they are going; I need to quieten my nice, helpful, rational mind that can’t plan out my steps quickly enough and therefore tells my feet “oh no! You can’t possibly get there quickly enough!”.
I would have gotten there, Mind, if it weren’t for your obstructive, self-conscious presence.
Failing to execute a particular move in Zouk, or failing to have a nice dance at all, suddenly becomes about more than physical capability. These mind things, soul things, go deeper than that and when I trip over my own feet I suddenly become (in my own ever-helpful mind) a bad listener and an untrusting person, a tense individualist and control-freak.
And when I fail long and hard enough, the person who can sit on the train with her legs uncrossed suddenly feels like maybe she doesn’t have the right to do that anymore. Every step of my joyful learning-to-dance journey begins to be undermined.
No wonder I really, really hate failing!
With all that said and done — do I have any helpful advice about how to fail?
1. Recognize the challenge
Doing turns on one leg while balancing in heels is really hard. Quieting your mind, or learning to stay present and not watch yourself critically from afar — these things are also really hard. Just because you’re an adult, or have been taking classes for years, or have lots and lots of money does not mean you should reasonably expect yourself to be good at something you’ve never actively practiced. Recognize the challenge. And give yourself credit for progress in the same way as you’d give yourself credit for doing a turn on one leg.
2. Take pride in failure
Did you try to do the thing today and just couldn’t? Good for you. Did you trip over every single time or only just manage to get through a practice session without eating a pillow or stomping around like a three-year-old? Congratulations. Remember how wonderful it felt when you were ‘still learning’ and left Ego at the door? I’ve found that redefining ‘success’ to mean successfully failing has a similar effect of keeping her otherwise engaged.
3. Talk to yourself
Nicely. Thank your body and your mind for trying, no matter the outcome. And talk to other people about your failures; ask them about their own. If we can make failure funny and fun — then chances are that we won’t be so frightened of it anymore.
4. Seek a continuum of identity
Failing now does not mean you’ve always been a failure. It means your goals have evolved. And that can only happen after you succeed. So a fall, or rejection, or really terrible dance (or year of dances) takes nothing away from everything you’ve done and been and felt in the past. You’re allowed to sit on the train with your legs uncrossed. There is no need to go back to the drawing board on whatever sense of self the things you have learned have helped you to build.
You may not be a dancer. Or a writer. Or a musician. Or an actor. But you can be a really, truly, experienced and excellent, positive failure. If you can succeed at failing, then you may find that you don’t fail so much at all.
As I think about failure, defining success, and the general meaning of life — I find myself increasingly towards older writers. I found Coffee Times through the personal essay of Lee Bentch. He writes beautifully about food, life, technology, and the experience of growing older.
