A friend of mine got upset after a recent dancing competition in which he or she failed to finish in the top three. (Lower placings are not announced on the night.)
I left this comment on his or her blog, which was well received, and as I find the topic interesting I reproduce it here along with an except of the original post.
Original post (excerpted):
When you're being judged, regardless of result, its really hard, excruciatingly hard not to take things personally. So, ultimately in a creative space, being judged is large a contradiction. How do you NOT take things personally? I'm guessing that you need to have enough self resolve, enough worthy self esteem and enough perspective that conditions and subjectivity explains the judgement.
If I don't have a goal, then I'm just messing around. And in this creative field, there certainly is space for faffing about. But my goal was to achieve. To be validated. Which is unfortunate because the nature of competition is to be validated by others. I certainly feel like I got the skills, but do others? Do my peers think the same? They can SAY I got the skills but in my book, it needs to translate. You are good and here is the evidence. Without my goals, I am merely faffing. I don't wanna faff. I wanna succeed. And if I faff about then in an amazingly absolute statement, I don't wanna be a part of it.
There seems to be too much out of my control. There are those who have so much natural talent, effort and time to continue to win and get the box ticked in their favour. Its an equation of variables. Sometimes, you don't have what it takes to win.
So: you competed, and expected validation in the form of a placing; it
was not forthcoming. You feel rejected. But what have you failed at?
You
have failed at only one thing: convincing the judges that you were one
of the three leads who best demonstrated mastery of the criteria by
which the event you danced in was assessed.
Succeeding at this
task would not have made you "good at dancing". While it is true that
it's practically impossible to win a dance event and not be "good at
dancing" – which is why it works so well as a validator – it's eminently
possible to be "good at (almost all) dancing" and suck at competing. So
while I recognise the attraction of competition, I think you should be
clear about what role it plays in your dancing.
Most people's
goal in dancing is, I posit, to be as good as they can be – or, at
least, to be good enough to do X. (X = have fun, dance at 200 bpm, do an
aerial, whatever.) Most people don't enter dancing with the goal of
being better than anyone else. However, trying to be better than someone
else is one of the best ways of improving yourself – that's the point
of competition in the swing dancing scene. The goal is not simply to be
the best: it is to have become the best by improving. And good on competition for doing that.
I
have a competitive personality. Board games, foot-races, mental
puzzles, sport – subconsciously, I will want to win, even if I don't
enter them with that purpose; and to win, I need to beat other people.
For mainly that reason, I don't compete as a swing dancer: my goals as
dancer are to be good enough to do X, and I don't want my satisfaction
with my dancing to become something that relies on me beating other
people. Even if that means I don't improve as quickly as others.
Do
I want to be "good at dancing"? Absofuckinglutely. Does it feel awesome
to be recognised as such in front of a crowd? Hell yeah. Are
competitions the only form of validation? Fuck no. Do people come up to
you and complement you on your dancing? Do follows seek you out for
dances? Repeatedly? Do people watch you dance; hoot and/or cheer? More
importantly, do you feel as though you can express yourself
musically through the form of dance? Do you get those moments of 'flow'?
Isn't that why you dance?
TL;DR
Competitions are great for
making you better dancer, but to win you need to be better than other
people. If your goal is to be a better dancer, but you can't handle
being worse than other people (even if you're better than you used to
be), reconsider competing and/or your attitude.
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