You’re not failing, you’re sucking at a higher level
How social dancing helped me rethink learning plateaus
There’s a stage in learning that feels like failure. It’s losing a game of tennis to that friend who only recently picked up a racket or struggling with yoga poses you thought you’d mastered.
They’re called learning plateaus. And they suck.
Or so I thought until I was offered an alternative perspective.
It was a regular Friday night social at Avec, a partner dance school in Helsinki. I was standing around the snack table with some fellow dancers, taking a break and chatting.
It had been one of those nights for me: constantly missing the leads, feeling clumsy and awkward.
“I feel like I’m ruining everyone’s dances,” I said.
“You’re just sucking at a higher level,” one of the dancers said.
Sucking at a higher level?
“Not noticing your mistakes is where the real danger lies,” he said. “That would mean you don’t know you have something to improve.”
Huh.
At an outdoor party a few months later, a leader said he could tell I was a perfectionist — I wanted to get it all right.
I didn’t have time to get upset about being called the p-word, because my mind was going, How the heck can you tell that by just dancing with me? I’d never hung out with him outside the dance floor, let alone exchanged more than the usual dance-related small talk.
But he was right: I am a perfectionist. I want to catch all the leads, move gracefully, never miss a beat.
Only perfection doesn’t exist. It’s like the horizon — no matter how far you sail, you’ll never reach it. All that exists are higher levels of skill and craftwomanship. New waters, perhaps an unexplored island or two.
That must’ve been what my dance friend meant by sucking at a higher level. When we make progress, we regularly enter unknown waters that force us to develop new skills. We feel like beginners again.
It can feel demoralizing — why am I back at square one? — which is why a reframing is welcome.
And to my grim and realistic Finnish mind, “sucking at a higher level” is just the right frame. It embraces the unavoidable feelings of disappointment and inadequacy while acknowledging that you’ve improved.
Later at that same Friday social, one leader told me I’d improved tremendously since we’d last danced.
Improved? Hadn’t it felt like one big catastrophe?
But his reference point was somewhere two or three months earlier. I saw only my mistakes; he saw my progress.
Turns out, I wasn’t failing. I was just sucking at a higher level.
