Drills and Donuts

This workshop, Drills and Doughnuts, is for regular, everyday dancers who have non-dance jobs, families, and occasionally eat doughnuts before heading to dance class. We will learn ways to build strength, stamina, and flexibility as well as improve technique through Bellydance drills that can be incorporated into your busy schedule. If you are an ATS ®dancer, the drills will also help even out strength differences between the muscles on your right (ATS ® dominant) and left side. Lisa will also teach science-based strategies for maintaining motivation, sustaining habits and using “cues” in in your everyday routine to help these new strategies become second nature.

Sneak Peak

Why is it Difficult to Change Behavior?

1-     Battle between current self and future self

In other words, we have a hard time valuing anything, including ourselves, that is in the future. For example, people will almost always choose an immediate reward even if you get something much bigger by delaying the reward. Your current self would rather stay in bed than go to rehearsal. It is hard to imagine your future self-- maybe dancing better at your next performance. Psychologists who research human behavior posit several reasons we, as humans do this:

a.      "End of history" illusion (underestimate amount you will change)

We think that our current successes and struggles will stay the same, even 10 or 20 years in the future.

b.      Usual human tendency to overvalue immediate gains

This makes sense from an evolutionary standpoint. Why wait to eat those calories when you might need them to survive the winter?

c.      Will only delay gratification if delay has huge and tangible payoff

Over and over, research studies show that it takes a very large payoff to encourage people to focus on the future. And the payoff usually has to be tangible (think a large sum of money, not flat abs).

d.      Temporal discounting (devalue future)

As humans we tend to devalue the future and focus instead on satisfaction in the present.

2-     Willpower decreases as the day progresses

I always believed the inspirational message I learned from fitness experts... willpower is like a muscle, the more you use it the stronger it gets. Actually, this is not true. Actually willpower fatigues fatigues throughout the day (sticking to diet all day and giving in at night) therefore, it is a weak tool for us to use to motivate change. In addition to not being very effective, failing willpower can be detrimental to your emotional and physical health. It can make you feel bad about yourself and make poor decisions.

I hope you enjoyed this sneak peak. This class was designed and juried into ATS Reunion 2018 in Scottsdale, AZ where 24 dancers attended. Six additional dancers have taken this class online. it is available through the Belly Dance Business Academy for $35.