Clutching my coat, I tilted my head down to cut through the wind blowing toward me. I’m speed walking down the streets of downtown Norfolk to make sure I’m not late to my own event; as I get to my destination I see one of the students with her parents waiting outside the studio.
“Oh! I was just beginning to think we missed you!” Declared the mom as I come into earshot. “No, no! I’m right here.” I say with a laugh, “C’mon, let’s get inside!”
The “inside” I was referring to was Todd Rosenlieb Dance, a non-profit dance studio that BeatHunter rented a room from to host our latest event. Moments later, the second student walks in with her mom. The Personal Kinetic (PK) Coaching form is The Formation so I only have two days to work with them.
Time to get cracking.
The first day we covered Musicality, Diversity and talked about Choreography including their homework: 5 impactful moments in their lives and an original piece of choreography. This is standard for the first day, but when I got home, I had my own homework to do. I dived into PK to hammer out the curriculum and find ways to improve it. Two expansions resulted from this:
The first is “Textures are Visuals”. Beathunting is “listening to a song for the specific intent of dancing to it”. So when a dancer beathunts a song, they are creating visuals in their mind in order to match the feel of a song or a specific sound in it. By doing this, they are becoming a visual representation of the music; the definition of Musicality, the first step of the Personal Kinetic Curriculum.
The second thing that God gave me was an evaluation document. I went back to the past two BeatHunter events and evaluated the students that went through the program as well as myself. The result was that I got to see the development Personal Kinetic has gone through as well as how I taught. I could now see where I started so I can plan where I am going.
The take away from this journal is that we need to be intentional with our growth. If you’re starting a business, it might look like making tabs of where you have been and setting goals for the future. If you want to develop certain skills as a dancer such as freestyling, record yourself and review it to see where you need improvement. These two things allow you to have realistic view of where you are and where you have been. Once you have a proper view of your own self, you can then start moving in the right direction.
Don’t sit back and let others be the masters of your progress. Instead, go out and search for it. You may discover that what you actually need to grow in is completely different from what you thought you needed. Either way, it takes actively searching for what you need.
Intentionality grows progress. Complacency chokes it.