Expectations

I want to talk for a minute about expectations and how rarely they match up with reality.
I want to talk about self-confidence and the power of a self-defeating attitude.
I want to talk about how many of my eye-rolls I do as a result of people whose expectations are lowered by their self-defeating attitude.

So the other day I was at work and I had a newbie, this happens about once a week. This newbie was, as are the majority of my adult students, female. Society has been telling this woman from birth that she is weak and pathetic and can't do anything physically as well as a man (which I am, for all intents and purposes) and so when she sees me doing something that looks physically difficult, her assumption is that she is not going to be able to. I tell her "don't you see - it has nothing to do with strength, it is all about technique, you can be the strongest man in the world, and without technique, you can't do a fraction of the stuff I can" and I try and I try to impress upon her that it has to do with the way you are doing it, not the size of your biceps.

She tried to climb and couldn't do it. She said "I can't do this, I'm not strong enough" and for anyone who has EVER taken my class you know that "I can't" is an unacceptable phrase unless it is followed by "yet."

Her particular problem was that she was rushing through a technique because when she was in the air doing it, she had to support her weight by her arms alone, and because she spent her whole life hearing "you are weak" she believed it. So, naturally, I decided to prove her wrong. I told her to do a dead hang - and to hold on to the rope and pick up her feet. She held on for about 10 seconds before her arms gave out. For those of you who have never done dead hang, for a beginner, 10 seconds is a very very long time. She got this huge look of surprise in her eyes like she never expected to do what she just did, and almost didn't believe it.

Then she climbed the rope to the top. Twice.

She expected to be weak, and so she was, and when I proved to her that she was not, she nailed it on the first try.

In my years of martial arts, dance, aerial arts, fire arts and sports, I have realized exactly one thing: people are way stronger, way smarter, and WAY more powerful than we give ourselves credit for.

I cannot count the times I hear a student say "I can't do it" and then I say "tough, do it anyway" and then they do it. I also cannot count the times I have heard a student say "I can't do it" and I say "tough, do it anyway" and then they get halfway through and give up, not because their arms gave out (I know what arms giving out looks like - you don't land gracefully or talk while it is happening, arms giving out is the point of falling) but because they didn't think they could do it.

You need to have faith in yourself. You need to stand up to everyone who ever said you can't, and you need to get right up in there and say "Watch me"

You need to believe that things are within your physical abilities. Sometimes they may not be. There are many things that I cannot do. Yet. But that list gets smaller and smaller every day, and that is because I push myself to realize my potential.

We are so complacent and so willing to give up, and sometimes, even with a teacher saying "I know you can, you just have to try" that we are so afraid of... actually, I have no idea what people are afraid of.

And then there are the people who come to my class and complain about it hurting or it being hard. To which I have to spend a great deal of energy not to reply "FUCKING DUH!"
When you do something amazing, you should expect it to be difficult, and you should expect that you will struggle, but if you do not expect that you will succeed, you will not.
If you do not go into an activity or a test or any aspect of life saying "I can do this" I almost guarantee you that you will not.

So please. If you want to come to my class to bitch and moan and whine about how much it hurts and about how hard it is and about how I make it look so easy -
1) how do you think I got to this point?
2) shut the fuck up and let me teach someone who actually wants to learn this stuff

The woman I was talking about earlier - I hope she comes back, because I can see the walls starting to come down and that is awesome, that is how it has to happen. But I have another student who is taking my aerial class and
1) is afraid I am going to drop her in acro
2) has a low threshold for pain
3) cannot do a pull up
4) doesn't want to strength train in class
5) wants to learn more than just climbing, which she has yet to do successfully

for those of you who don't know much about what I do - 2, 3, 4, 5 pretty much is what aerial is. It is pain, it is doing pull-ups, it is strength training, and it is climbing. What did you think this class would be like?

So (finals words, I promise) the next time you decide to do an activity, I want you to ask yourselves some questions
1) what do I expect this class to be like, and on what basis am I basing that expectation
2) what are my fears/desires and how far am I willing to push those
3) what are my physical limits and how far am I willing to go to increase them
4) what do I expect from myself
If your answer to number four is vastly higher than your answers to 1-3 would allow, I would suggest revisiting your priorities and what you actually want. Are you willing to go through the learning process in order to know what you want to know? Because if you are not, don't waste your teachers' time - we have better things to do than listen to you talk about how hard this is and then refuse to do any exercises that would make it easier.

Beauty of Failure

"Thomas Edison tried and failed nearly 2,000 times to develop the carbonized cotton-thread filament for the incandescent light bulb. And when asked about it, he said 'I didn't fail; I found out 2,000 ways how not to make a light bulb'"
~Nicolas Cage as Ben Gates in National Treasure

I have no idea if this is true or not, but it is a cool idea nonetheless, and one I want to talk about.


So somewhere over the past few years, I apparently became good at handstands. It was a gradual process, and I really couldn't point to a time when I couldn't do them and then I could. People have also started to notice, which means I am now getting questions asking for handstand advice.
By a huge margin, the most popular exchange I participate in is the following:
"Hey, what can I do to get better at handstands"
Do handstands...
"Are there any exercises that I can do to get better?"
Yeah, there are. They are called handstands


Handstands are a delicate balance within your body. You have to align everything just right so that everything is right where it needs to be so that all forces cancel and you are left perfectly still atop your hands. Moving your body through the air in a handstand is much like writing. Incredibly small moves can create large consequences, and precision is required. Handstands, as with writing, comes in personalized form - everyone does them differently. If you don't write for a while and then write an essay, your hand is going to cramp up because those muscles are not getting used. With handstands, your muscle memory is what keeps you up, not conscious thought, and so if you don't keep training your muscles, they will fail you.


There are some things in this world which are irreducibly complex, and handstands are almost one of them. You can do headstands and other smaller handbalancing tricks, and that will teach you what alignment feels like, but you are honestly better off doing that with handstands against a wall. In the end, the only way to learn how to extend through your arms and legs at the same time and to find a place where everything just settles in, is to fall a couple thousand times.


The idea is this. For any given goal, there are a large number of wrong answers (possibly infinite) and a smaller number of correct solutions. If you continue to attempt over and over and over again, and if you make sure to try to avoid making the same mistake more than once, you will eventually, in theory correct every single possible mistake you are making until you get it right.


We are just such a society that likes easy answers. I know. I am a math major - and wolframalpha is my best friend, and as my math teacher said "mathematicians are lazy." But more than easy answers we like success. That makes sense to me. I get that. Success is good, it makes us feel good and it means we have done something. This is why we as students (and as people) are taught that a good strategy for problem solving is to break the problem up and do different pieces at different times, or just to set small goals for ourselves in a long procedure. In general, this is one of the best advices I can give people. But not for circus. In circus, you have to just go. You have to know the idea, and you have to do it, and do it, and do it until you figure out what works. Because unlike math, or literature or many other worthwhile pursuits, circus has a handwriting aspect to it. Two people doing a math problem could very easily obtain the same solution through the same means, and it is likely the more simple the problem is. And someone can show you, and you can repeat exactly what they did. But with circus, as with writing, your body is unique. You and you alone have knowledge of how it works, and so you can imitate, but you cannot duplicate, what you see in others, and in learning from them, you are forced to develop your handwriting. 


So try a different approach. Just take your problem, and fail a few thousand times, and when you finally get it, it will be just about the best thing ever.

They Changed It

In one of my favorite movies, Dustin Hoffman, who plays the producer of a theatre, says to Johnny Depp, who plays J.M. Barrie, author and playwright of Peter Pan,

Charles Frohman: You know what happened, James, they changed it. 
J.M. Barrie: They changed what? 
Charles Frohman: The critics, they made it important... hm, what's it called? What's it called? 
J.M. Barrie: Play. 
Charles Frohman: Play.

And that really struck a chord with me. Taking something that we all love and changing it into something that it shouldn't be.

I had that realization about something in my life today that I love. Math class. Somewhere in the past 4 years of my life they changed it. I've seen it changed before, but not in my classroom.

I saw it 10 years ago, when I was deciding which middle school I liked best. I went to Vail, a school with a GATE program that looked great, and all was awesome until I went to the math class and saw kids who didn't understand, and didn't ask questions. They were actually afraid to ask questions, and I wondered why that was. Now I know, because they did it to my classroom.

Somewhere in the past three years, they took math class, and made it about knowing the answers. It used to be about finding the answers, about learning how other people found answers. But now it seems to be about having the answers. And when you speak up in class, and say "I'm sorry, I don't understand a word of what you just wrote on the board" or even "wait, what was that?" you get them ost incredulous looks from some students and the teacher who them procedes to explain to you like you are five just how clear it is that this definition makes it. To which I reply "well, it isn't clear because I don't get it" and then they give you a roundabout answer, you figure it out in the book yourself and we forget the whole thing happened.
When did questions become a bad thing? Cuz the way I remember it, and correct me if I'm wrong about this one, Mrs. Kolesikova, but a question was an opportunity the way I remembered it. An opportunity for the teacher to teach someone something, an opportunity for another student to get some clarity on something, and an opportunity for that student to get one of those ever elusive "ah-HA" moments that all mathematicians long for. A question was an indication that your job was not done yet, and that this student wanted to see this the way you saw it, and was brave enough to admit that he or she could not see it yet. Of course he or she can't, that is why they are in your class - to learn about what you have to teach.

So.

When I ask you to go over the first problem of the homework that I just spent the last 15 minutes talking to everyone around me about how nobody had a fucking clue what was going on in that problem, and you tell me "oh, it's a very naïve solution, I'll show you" (that is his word for "simple," I figured out) and then writes the solution and then basically scolds me for not understanding it. I believe his exact words were "we went over this in week three, so you have no excuse for not knowing this." By the way, I checked with the other kids in my class - nobody had seen that before, including the grad student we went to get help from. When you act like a question is a chore that you should put the least amount of effort into, you remember this, Professor: if I don't understand something, it is because you have not done your job in properly explaining something, and I am allowing you the opportunity to fix that.

I noticed something: this is the norm in math classes here...

What happened? Why did they change it?