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Wellness Wednesday for October 18, 2023

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

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I personally think I have next to zero dancing talent (I'm literally flatfooted and empirically the people who started with me got to higher levels before me) and I get complements on my "skill" by untrained people frequently. A surprisingly high number of people in my club are super nerdy STEM type people and the teachers explain this as dancesport being attractive to the sorts of people who like systemising stuff since it's literally "we tell you how exactly to do this move step by step and which portions of your body to move when and where" and there is basically zero "just do what feels right to you" crap.

As a proper sport there's literally a book that details how exactly each step is to be performed and what steps are permitted in which dances. In competitions judges will notice how well you perform your steps when deciding to mark you down for the next round or not.

Here is an example video of what it's like to learn a step: https://youtube.com/watch?v=jNq75FrUgV8 , this one is a bit complicated (it looks simple, it's really not) but you can see the process to learning a step, it's all systematic.

I'm worried I'm too uncoordinated for even rote learning to work on a useful timescale, but I'll certainly give it a try when I can! Thanks