Last week I heard Baylor University's women's basketball forward, Brooklyn Pope,
talk about how they won the NCAA championship. She sounded so self-assured, so much in command of her mental and physical resources, and yet so young. "Whenever you let negativity sink in your head, then it's possible. We
never even gave it the thought [sic] of day."
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| Baylor University's Brooklyn Pope and Coach Kim Mulkey |
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| Photo courtesy of Cheryl Vorhis |
Hearing this collegiate champion made me wish I had been an athlete when I was a kid. Instead of training with a coach who encouraged me to
think the best of myself in order to perform better, I trained with
Marcia Dale Weary at the Central Pennsylvania Youth Ballet (CPYB). Marcia is an internationally
renowned teacher who probably produces more professional ballet dancers than any other unaffiliated ballet school in the US. She didn't get
to be to internationally renown by passing out warm fuzzies every time
you nailed a triple pirouette. Marcia's training style is strict and unforgiving; the best you could hope for after a well-executed move was a slight grin and the
instructions for the next combination. Marcia pushed her dancers to
work harder, to stand stronger, to jump higher, to stretch longer, to
point feet better by showing them that what they had done so far was
not enough. You were
never thin enough; you
never jumped high enough;
your leg was
never extended enough; the lines were
never clean enough;
the timing was
never precise enough. As a young dancer at CPYB, you
always knew that whatever you had done, it was never enough. Because I was young, naive, and thought that people only said things that were true, I believed her. So in my
formative years, I grew up thinking I was just simply not good enough to
do any of the things I really wanted to do, in spite of the
voice deep down inside that told me that I was perfectly capable of many things, including becoming a professional dancer. Even though I recognized I had various talents and
skills, I believed Marcia and others who focused more on my weaknesses than my strengths. This negative thinking dismantled my dreams of dancing, further eroding my faith in
any of my abilities, and haunted most of my pursuits throughout my adult life.
It's taken the Italian Mama half a century to figure out what 23 year old Brooklyn Pope and presumably her teammates already know: believing you can achieve your goals turns that belief into reality. If you allow self-doubt, you have invited failure into the dream, and it just might take up permanent residence.
With less to lose at this point in my life, the Italian Mama is old enough to shrug off the ingrained self-doubt that crippled me in my youth. At this point, I guess I just don't care that much if I don't achieve my mid-life goals. If I don't succeed, it's fine; if I do, that's great. Ironically, this nonchalance makes those goals more attainable. Certainly
the more positive approach increases my chances of
actually fulfilling my dreams, rather than walking into an
endeavor with those nagging self-doubts that I'm just not good enough. Now that I am old enough, the Italian Mama wonders how many more dreams I might have fulfilled had I embraced the power of positive thinking
when I was younger and the stakes were higher.
