I have been working everyday. Sometimes I am not the most efficient at my tasks. Waking up around 8:20 am it takes me a second to get going. I have a beautiful team by my side now to help me keep track of my projects and I have found a consistency that I never experienced before. Free time is tinted with little tasks either for work or for my own self-care or home admin. I love what I do and when I am in the middle of a class, a meeting, or filming I am transported to a great place where I am feeling a life that I am super grateful I have.
Thank you to all the beautiful people that I get to interact with, I am learning a lot. All of this reminds me somehow, something that I tell my students about between being a beginner and being a bit higher level. Yes, you might know the steps and understand part of the technique, but being intermediate will require extra training and also to develop certain physical capabilities to be able to really go to the next level. I feel like professionally I am evolving to a higher level that I am not necessarily ready for. I can see that it is time to go up a notch but I am still not sure of all those little changes that I need to go through. I have some ideas, habits, mindset, and people.
Trying to grow my social media, I could not stop myself from checking my phone all the time and thinking about how I can improve in that area. Yes, that does not sound that bad, especially because we are getting great results. Not only that, having my phone in my hands allows Instagram and YouTube to grab my attention and despite their great entertaining and educative value, I love the channels and accounts I follow.
I often find myself doing several things at the same time and also trying to listen to an interesting video essay about the Afro Latin Museum in Spain or the path of the stoic. So yes, I found myself having to find ways to distance myself from my phone, I achieved charging it outside overnight or better yet leaving it outside the room overnight without charging it so I can not use it in the morning and honestly this has been amazing. It is a way of making it unattractive like James Clear mentioned in Atomic Habits. The main reason to do that is to calm all the anxious thoughts that live with me when I try to do several things at the same time and I do none of them, and then I feel bad. When I do it, it works greatly and with no phone in the morning I can do some of the basic good habit stacking, tasks that are a priority for me every morning, waking up, changing clothes, basic hygiene, teeth, face, then a big glass of water, short cold walk in the park and breakfast. If my phone is charged or in my way, it could make this process way longer and filled with agitation and most of the time I will not go for a walk or drink the water and sometimes it takes me 3 times longer to do the same actions. Crazily enough without the phones and with the completion of all those fundamental actions for my day, I can better execute this life that I really want to live. It’s not perfect and I am still working on my mindset.
I’m pretty sure that work will never end, especially mental work. I realise that in the last couple of days, I have been feeling a bit down, not necessarily tired but lower in energy and willpower. One of the practices that kept me sane and productive for longer was meditating. Because one of the things that meditation does best is to train you to stop labelling the world around you. Yes, labelling is part of my job, it is very important to judge the skills of my students so I can help them, but I don’t need to just think about every thought I have and everything around me for no reason. Not every judgment is a necessary expenditure. So this mindset is vital, not to judge everything especially when you could be very critical of yourself. Critical of things that are not a priority or not important at all, critical to the point that can stop my progress and cloud my mood and my actions for the whole day. Yes, and with meditation, I can also recover a bit more of my life, my present, the moments that seem unimportant and bring a lot of life to them. I believe in being present and working on the tools that stop you from attacking everything around you with judgment and criticism, distancing yourself from living your own life.
Sometimes when I write the line between you and me gets blurry, probably because of the assumption that you are going with me through everything I am telling you. I hope it does not bother you.
Notice that above I said we are getting great results and I am not saying I am getting results, because yes those results are impactful for my life and I would never be able to do what I am doing by myself. I am proud and happy that this is happening to me, but I am even more proud that there is a group of people guiding my path. For instance, this blog post that you are reading is read first by Emma Fulton, a great friend that I am lucky to have. She does most of my proofreading, then comes back to me to make sure that the ideas that I want to express are still in it. Then Jeva, my assistant, organises the look and finds the right pictures based on the format that I established in the past. She always makes the format better than I imagine. We are a team of three helping me to create these posts. They are a powerful multiplier of what I do because without them there would not be blogs and without my social media team there would not be Pedro’s cool Instagram. Yes, I think my Instagram is cool. I am not sure how we have and keep such a great team at Cortés Dance, volunteers, assistants, teachers, designers, a total of 15 people today, who are helping me and Tiffany to find the balance to create that great community we want to create. A community full of Latin culture, music and lovely people. Thank you all for the love and for allowing us to do so many amazing things.
Of course, this is not an I know it all kind of behaviour, and that I still have a lot to learn and a lot of consistency to add to this little formula and there is a lot more complexity in life. Yet, now that I feel I am levelling up in life, I hope I can still find amazing people, the right tools and correct mindset to move forward on the things I love.
Gracias,
Pedro