In about two weeks, I am presenting to a group of medical professionals. It’s a custom designed show, and I’m very excited about it.
As I have been sitting here planning and rehearsing the show, I had a bit of an epiphany that I thought I would share with you today.
I am an active “swing dancer,” and part of the “scene” of swing dancing is not just the dances, but workshops and classes that take place just before them. There are also private lessons. I have taken a lot of these classes and lessons, but there are about four or five of them that really stand out in my mind.
For example, I once took a class with a woman named Brandi Tobias. She spent the hour teaching us one single pattern. Now you might think, that an entire hour for one single pattern would have been a very inefficient use of the time, but this was not the case. The reason this class was so memorable was, the pattern she taught was just so immediately and universally usable. I think I have tossed that pattern into almost every single dance I have done ever since.
I had a similar experience with another instructor named Maxwell Ho. There was a pattern I had seen people do but I just couldn’t do it myself. He watched me trying to do it, and he made one simple comment . . . I won’t go into the details, but essentially what I had to do was to add one extra little “shove” at a certain point in the pattern. Once I added in that extra shove, the follower did the pattern whoosh, automatically and easily. To this day, I refer to that pattern as my “$50 move,” as that is what that private lesson cost, and that one single shove is all I got out of it. I’m not complaining. I’ve gotten more than my money’s worth, as it is a wonderful move, and he showed me how to do it well. ( I’m sure he talked about other things in that lesson, but that has all been lost. The only thing I remember is that little shove.)
I have taken many classes where the instructor taught a very complicated pattern. Such classes are interesting and challenging, but for me anyway, they offer no long term residual benefit. These fancy patterns that they create for these workshops are, for the most part, essentially unusable. Typically what happens is, you will try the pattern once or twice in the dance event after the workshop with a partner who also took the workshop to see if you can do it. That’s all the use you get out of it. To incorporate them into one’s repertoire would require several hours of practice with a willing partner, and even then, less than a third of the available dance partners at an event would be able to execute the pattern. And then, there is just the simple question of, is this a fun pattern to lead in the first place? After a while, it's just too hard, and you give up.
So anyway, that is a long way around of getting to my point here, which is, while I am terribly eager to stuff massive amounts of information into this upcoming presentation, if I were to spout huge amounts of impressively complicated data, that would not really serve my audience very well. “Showing off how smart I am” is not really in the customer’s best interest. Instead, if I can share just one single “pattern,” trick, or tool that all the people in the audience will immediately implement on a daily basis for the rest of their lives, then I will have earned my speaking fee.
Wish me luck.
© Justin Locke
