I saw this  comment on Yehoodi a few days ago in a thread about people who improve at the lower end of the spectrum in dance.

I think almost anyone can make a vast improvement by fixing the three worst things they do. Often these are things that are deeply ingrained and take the most effort to fix. – slipandslide

It reminded me of something Mickey Fortanasce said in a class I took from him a few weeks back at Balboa Rendezvous where he said words similar to these,

“Take your weaknesses and make them your strengths”.

This struck a chord with me because often the problem many dancers have (including myself) that keep them from taking it to the next level is either mental barriers or long standing technique issues. In the yehoodi thread one poster commented the difficulty in this is often these problems are often deeply ingrained and take considerable amount of effort on the behalf of the dancer to fix it. I whole heartily agree with this, in the past fixing my more serious problems felt awkward and frustrating because I had ingrained bad technique through so many repetitions that it was an uphill battle trying to get the new technique into my system.

The most frequent problem I see among leads that I teach in my local classes is often they are not confident in their movements and leave follows guessing what they are trying to lead.  Once they have the mentality though of “I know this” the dance becomes much less of a guessing game for follows.  This is just one example of how fixing ingrained issues that can significantly improve ones capability to dance well.

My recent challenge to myself is through video recording and asking around finding my three biggest weakness and fixing them. If you feel up to it do it yourself as well and tell me how it goes.