There has to be a better way. I finally got fed up and said enough is enough. I refuse to continue to drown in the disorganization of my dance videos. I’m tired of feeling overwhelmed with choosing and tracking which dance techniques to work on. I refuse to continue to crawl in the darkness of lost lightbulb moments. No more flushing the hard-earned money I paid to take dance classes and private lessons down the toilet by never reviewing the recap videos.
I finally hunkered down to put action behind the idea of creating a solution to the problems I and many other dancers have been facing for too long. I needed to create a system for dedicated dancers who want to become better dancers. This 5 Step System is what I’ll be sharing in several posts and this system is run by the Dancer’s Training Journal (DTJ). If you have faced some of the same struggles and are ready to build a system around creating the right habits for you to become a better dancer, keep reading!
The first step of the 5 Steps to Becoming a Badass Dancer is to collect and organize your dance videos. Depending on how long you’ve been dancing and how many videos you have collected over the years the collecting process may take a few minutes or a few days. Becoming a better dancer isn’t something that will happen overnight. I truly believe the DTJ can help you create and track the right habits to put you on a consistent path towards unlocking your dance potential following these five steps. Let’s focus on the first part of step 1, collection.
You may be like me and have dance videos everywhere; on different phones, different memory cards, from my GoPro, DSLR camera, videos other people have sent me of myself and classes I’ve taken, just videos everywhere from years and years of dancing. So, the process I’m currently going through is to consolidate all of my dance videos in one digital place for easy retrieval, I’ll explain what place I choose and why later in this post. I’m definitely guilty of recording lots of videos with the hope of reviewing and studying them later, but never getting around to it for many of them.
If you have a ton of dance videos this process may feel like eating an elephant or doing 1,000 push-ups but don’t make the mistake of underestimating the power of small consistent steps over time. What would taking one bite or doing one push-up look like with this step? Once you have that idea, ask yourself what timeframe can you commit to to take this one bite or one push-up? one a day? one every other day? one a week? Once you decide what small step you can commit towards centralizing your dance videos in one place, we need to choose where the best place for cloud storage is.
Here’s a pro tip, cloud storage services like Google Drive, One Drive, and Dropbox all make you pay monthly for storage space. I spent years going through the hassle of compressing tons of dance videos to take up less space and thus pay for less storage with Google Drive until I found out the loophole with YouTube. YouTube allows you to upload unlimited amounts of video for free! Yes, you read that right! You can upload all of your videos as unlisted so they are only visible by the person who has the link to the video. So moving forward, I highly recommend uploading all of your dance videos to YouTube in separate playlists as needed and once you have the links to the videos we can move to the second part of Step 1, organization.
Now that we have the links to the videos from YouTube, we can now start to use the DTJ to start to organize your dance videos in a powerful way! Imagine an organized library of every dance class, festival, private lesson, and/or solo/partnered practice session that you have ever recorded, tagged by date, dance style, instructor, event, and more! With the power of Notion and the DTJ, you are able to filter and sort your dance videos to hone in on a particular event over multiple years, an instructor you’ve followed over the years from workshop classes to private lessons, or a practice partner that you practice multiple dance styles with.
With the level of organization the DTJ enables you to have, you can actually have a birds of view of how much time you have invested into your dancing. Seeing how much or how little you have done during your dance journey can help give you insight to increase or decrease the right amount and right type of dancing you are committing to. There’s a deeper level of review of your dance videos the DTJ has in step 2, but for now let’s focus and trust the process in order to take things step by step.
Our main goals for step 1 are to upload all of your dance videos to YouTube to obtain the video links and from there begin adding to the DTJ with the proper tags. As mentioned before, don’t let the quantity of videos overwhelm you, find the easiest one push-up version of this process you can do as often as you can. Being consistent with small habits will allow you to build confidence and momentum in your overall goal of becoming a better dancer. The best for you to have started organizing your dance videos would have been when you first started, the next best time for you to start organizing your dance videos is today!
If you’re ready to start taking the steps to create a system for you to become a better dancer, you can get the Dancer’s Training Journal right now to start your path to becoming a better dancer, by clicking here. If you don’t want to miss on the next blog that will dive into step 2, review & extract, and I highly recommend joining my Intellectual Dancer Newsletter or my Intellectual Dancer’s Guild Discord Server. I hope this blog inspires you to take action today, see you in the next blog!
