Climbing a ladder in ballet shoes

“You should have made me keep dancing.”

This was a phrase I said to my mother after seeing a performance of some dancers when I was a young teen. (Of course I was a teen, the audacity of such a statement could only come from a kid that age.)

At this point in my life, I was a few years removed from when I tried ballet dancing. I stopped dancing because I didn’t love it enough. If I had a passion for ballet, I would have stuck with it.

As an adolescent, I saw the results of these dancers who put in the hard work and were beautifully performing on stage after years of effort and commitment. I wanted that glory! That could have been me!

If only my mother had forced me to keep at it.

In my mind, my mom “letting me quit” was the reason I didn’t have that grace and physique and talent. 

It was lost to me that my desire to dance would have been the only thing that would have brought me to that place. My mother forcing me to continue with an activity that I had chosen to stop doing would have only led to resentment. It would have been a miserable endeavor, not a beautiful journey that I imagined myself ending up in after watching 20 minutes of others' success.

If I really had a passion for dancing, I could have started up then. The truth was that I didn’t really want to dance.

This reminds me of the lesson that you should be careful about which ladder you climb. You don't want to end up at the top only to find it was leaning against the wrong wall the whole time.

Could dancing have been rewarding for me? Maybe. I might have cultivated a real passion if I'd stuck with it. But at the time I quit, that ladder was definitely against the wrong wall for me.

Here's the thing though—sometimes you're already partway up a ladder when you realize it's against the wrong wall. Pretty scary, right? You've made progress. Starting over means coming back down to ground level.

But starting from scratch beats spending your whole life in a job you hate. That's like dancing your entire youth only to realize as an adult that you never actually wanted to dance.

As a coach, I help people figure out if their ladder is against the right wall—and if it's not, we move it. Still thinking "my mother should have made me keep dancing" and you actually DO want to dance? Go take those lessons. Dreaming about starting that business? Let's talk about how to move your ladder to that wall.