The Ballerina Mindset
How to Protect Your Mental Health While Striving for Excellence
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- 3,49 €
Description de l’éditeur
Learn how to thrive in intense, competitive environments with these secrets from one of America's premiere ballerinas--and get a sneak peek at what her life is really like.
Ballet may look glamorous and effortless to audience members, but it requires grueling discipline. It's a competitive and physically and mentally demanding career that combines elite athleticism, artistry, and performance. Not only do dancers rehearse for six to eight hours a day before performing at night, but they also must make it all look easy!
As a principal ballerina with New York City Ballet and a one-time Broadway star--not to mention a mother of three and an MBA student--Megan Fairchild is all too familiar with these challenges. In The Ballerina Mindset, she shares all the wisdom she's learned from her nearly two-decade career, drawing upon her own experiences to show us how she learned to overcome challenges ranging from stage fright to negative feedback to a packed calendar to weight management--and how we can do the same. Inspiring, warm, and revelatory, The Ballerina Mindset is the perfect how-to guide for dancers, athletes, artists, and anyone struggling to stay sane in a high-pressure environment.
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Fairchild debuts with a compendium of hard-earned wisdom she picked up during her 17 years as a principal dancer with the New York City Ballet. After moving from Utah to New York City to study ballet at age 16 in 2000, Fairchild found that, in the insular dance world, "the idea of not expecting perfection from oneself didn't even seem like an option." After enduring crippling anxiety, Fairchild sought peace with Transcendental Meditation, and passes on lessons gleaned from putting the practice to use, such as learning not to script out an outcome before an experience ("anxiety lives in the anticipation"), figuring out how to stay strong in the face of negative feedback, forging a healthy relationship with food (no small feat in the ballet milieu), resting when necessary and not feeling bad about it, creating balance between work and play, and not being afraid to fail ("life is hard enough even if we aren't on our own side"). Mixed in with the advice are outtakes from her life outside of ballet, with highlights being her role in a Broadway musical, getting married (twice), and having three daughters. Fairchild provides type A readers eminently practical and practiced advice for dancing ahead in life without the drama.
