Hi dancers, and welcome back to The Reel Deal! As Fall majors come to a close and we approach the Holiday season, now is a great time to start planning for your next big goal. Some of you will be preparing for the North American Open in February, or working up to St. Patrick’s Day in March. Whatever your next big goal is, planning ahead is an important part of getting the process started.
Sometimes big goals can be overwhelming, and to deal with the uncertainty, we feel the need to make a perfect training plan and follow it to a tee. But this strictly regimented planning is an easy way to fall into a negative thinking pattern called all-or-nothing thinking.
What is All-or-Nothing Thinking?
All-or-nothing thinking, also referred to as black-or-white thinking or dichotomous thinking, is a thought pattern based on extremes. With this thought pattern, there is no in-between and no middle ground. It's all, or nothing. Black, or white.
Here are some examples of thoughts you may have if you’ve fallen into this pattern before:
Always and Never
“I always get this wrong”
“I’m never going to figure this out”
Everyone and No One
“Everyone is doing better than I am”
“No one even thinks I’m that good”
“I made one mistake so my whole dance was bad”
“I had a bad run-through, so that whole class was a waste”
How does All-or-Nothing Thinking impact Planning?
When we create a new training plan or schedule for our next big goal, it is easy for all-or-nothing thinking to sneak into our plan. As I mentioned previously, when we start planning big goals, it can sometimes feel overwhelming because we are uncertain of how the process will go and what the outcome will be. Creating a training plan can be a way to turn that uncertainty into certainty by laying out detailed steps to reach your goal. But if you’re not careful, strict planning can leave you susceptible to all-or-nothing thinking.
Say for example you have “Week 5 Bootcamp A” from the RNH Majors Academy on your plan for January 8th, and something comes up and you have to skip it. If you’re prone to all-or-nothing thinking, skipping one day of your plan might lead you to think, “My plan is worthless now, I’ve already fallen off the wagon,” or “If I can’t even stick to my plan, I’m never going to reach my goal.” These kinds of thoughts can lead you to abandon your training plan entirely. But remember that training is a continuous journey, and a blip in your plan doesn’t need to bring it all to a halt.
Challenging All-or-Nothing Thinking
Awareness: The best way to start combating all-or-nothing thinking is to be aware of it. If you can catch yourself as you’re thinking like this, you can challenge those thoughts. Maybe you think to yourself, “I’m just never going to get this right,” and you notice you used the word “never.” You can say right back to yourself, “I don’t have it right now, but I will get it down. I just need to keep practicing.” Catching these thoughts as they come so they’re not sitting with you will help you shift your mindset away from all-or-nothing thinking. The more you practice challenging these thoughts, the more automatic it will become.
Flexibility: If you prefer very specific training plans with certain dances to run or classes to do on certain days, flexibility will be your friend when you’re trying to avoid all-or-nothing thinking. Flexibility is about being willing to change your plan if you need to. Let’s go back to our previous example where you had to skip “Week 5 Bootcamp A.” Instead of saying your whole plan is off and there’s no point in continuing, try moving it to another day. And if you have to move some other things around to make room for it, that’s okay too. Let yourself rework it. I like to make my training plans in a Google doc so that if I need to move things around, it’s easy to delete things from one day, move them to another, or change things around as needed. Plans on paper can feel really permanent, which can make you feel stuck to your original plan and make you feel like you have no space to adjust if you need. If that sounds like you, try a digital plan! It might help you practice being flexible and allowing your plan to change.
Measurements: Flexible thinking is hard, and takes lots of practice. If it’s not coming easily to you, you can always think about different ways to structure your training plan to make it less rigid, that way the flexibility is built in. In fact, using different measurements for your training can help you feel more accomplished, more motivated, and help lower the chance of all-or-nothing thinking sneaking in.
One measurement you can try is repetitions. Instead of deciding specific days to do your RNH training videos, just plan the number of classes you want to have done in the next week. That way you have the flexibility of doing them whenever you have the most availability in your chosen time frame. You could also do the number of reels you want to run in the next 10 days or the number of times you want to sit down and journal in the next month.
Another measurement you can try is time. That way, any time you spend on any day counts towards your weekly training, not just a “full” session. For instance, say you had 30 minutes scheduled on Wednesday for practicing at home, but you had a lot of homework and could only practice for 15 minutes. With a stricter plan, you wouldn’t be able to check the box for your training that day. But if you measure your training in time across the whole week instead, your 15 minutes still count for something. Say you want to practice an hour in the next week, that 15 minutes is 25% of your goal! Tracking your training in time spent is a great way to remind yourself how hard you’ve been working and beat the all-or-nothing mindset!
To recap…
All-or-nothing thinking is a negative thought pattern based on extremes. You can identify it by key words like:
Always and Never
Everyone and No One
Everything and Nothing
Whole or Entire
All-or-nothing thinking can impact our planning by making us feel the need to craft a perfect, very specific plan, and it can impact our training by convincing us that any small deviation from our plan makes it void.
We can start to challenge this thought pattern by being aware of how we talk to ourselves and how we think.
If you like having a more specific training plan, try to be flexible with your plan and don’t let a change in your plan change your motivation. If you want to build a plan that recognizes progress over specific accomplishments, try measuring your training differently, such as in repetitions completed or time spent.
Having a good training plan is a great way to approach big goals, so don’t let your plan be spoiled by all-or-nothing thinking!
Thank you for the questions and topic suggestions! I will be addressing these topics in the coming weeks! Next week, we’ll be talking about taking care of sore muscles.
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