Our Two Left Feet

A lot of us come with two left feet into most new things, most new experiences. It expands beyond learning a new dance, it can be a new skill set like teaching, or public speaking, or a more demanding professional role, becoming a new parent, assuming a new responsibility. We come with this assumption that this will probably be hard for us, and we plunge in nevertheless, but we are not sometimes willing to leave that assumption, or belief aside. And what happens is the journey, the learning journey, our learning journey gets affected. It is not as enjoyable as it could be, nor as positive as we would like, or as expansive as for other people. We experience a greater struggle or effort than we would have to, we pack it with assumptions of how we should be doing things, of how other people might see us, of what our learning partners think of us, and of the kind of progress we should be having, so we experience it in a much more critical way and all the heavier physical sensations critical thinking brings to us. What's more, often we are not aware of this happening.

The question is how much of our critique is true, how much of the way we set up our stage before we even step on it do we need, how much of it is essential, useful, and how much of it is taking us closer to often what was our true intention in the first place, to learn this new thing because it just looked like fun?

If we had been aware of the fact that we entered our new experience from a presumptuous state, what difference could it have made to our decision-making regarding how we wish to record this experience in our mind and in our body? Would we have taken actions to shift things? Would we be aware of the consequences of not doing so? What actions could we have taken to indeed shift things, and what could we have believed about us and about our experience having reached our destination in the end?

This is not to bring about regret. We could go down that route, sure, but what if we chose today not to. What if instead we just decided to stay with curiosity and question what before might have felt like it had been written in stone? What goodness could that bring?

If you wish to have greater clarity of thought and would like to benefit from professional support, you can reach me at constantina@thelantern.uk

Constantina Stamou

Constantina Stamou is a certified Strategic Intervention Coach, has trained with the Robbins-Madanes coaching school, is an NLP Master Practitioner, has attended Tony Robbins’ Business Mastery, and has a PhD in how we change the way we put sentences together as we grow older. Her work experience includes tutoring at her university, working for a charity, and entrepreneurship which has so far translated into the TNT Dance Salsa Club in London and her own Reformer Pilates Studio at Kensington Olympia, London, where she had the pleasure of working with her team of four teachers.