Superbowl & Ballet: Common Ground

I'm not sure if you watched the Superbowl the other week. It was kind of a big deal. I didn't watch it because I'm not much of a football fan.

However, it was *on* in my house, and I tuned in once the score tied at the game's end. (That had never happened before in the game's history.)

So they went into "Sudden Death Overtime" which meant the first team to score would win the game.

The first thing they did after the announcement of overtime was what made me think of you all.

They did a coin toss.  

(You'll see why that matters in a second...)

The Patriots called heads and won the coin toss, so they got the ball.

Once they got the ball, they showed up and played the game they've played thousands of times. They scored first. So they won the Superbowl, after having been seriously behind in points for the first three-quarters of the game.

• What if the coin had been tails?

• What if the Falcons had won control of the ball?

• Would they have scored first?

The answer is almost certainly yes. The Falcons had been killing it all game long. They were dominating the Patriots. Chances are, had lucked smiled on them in the coin toss, they would have won the game.

One coin toss. One outcome. And that was that.I was reminded of all of the times that luck played a part in my own career, and that of many of the dancers in my life. A principal dancer's partner retired so I got promoted; I was the right height to wear the costume for an injured dancer; I was the only one in an eye-catching red unitard at a midwest audition... the list goes on.

Luck matters in your dancing.

Opportunities will come to you or to your peers, and sometimes the only real reason why is that you got lucky. (Or she did.)

There's now way to control for luck or to predict it.If that makes you feel a little queasy, it should. Luck is like that.

However, what you can prepare for is what happens right afterwards. If the Patriots had played badly after the coin toss, or had let the pressure get to them, they wouldn't have scored when they needed to. Instead they played the way they knew they needed to play. They showed up and played their best when that door opened, and they won.

If you're an understudy, luck might help get you the part, but how you perform is entirely up to you.

Luck might help you land a contract, but how you dance your first professional season is in your hands.

So remember that while luck plays a part in success, it never plays the biggest part which comes afterwards. Prepare for that part, so that, like the Patriots in this historic Superbowl,  you're ready when luck finally smiles on you.