How Being Competitive Can Help and Hurt You

               Being competitive is very normal and common during everyday life. However, during a dancers whole career they have to be competitive. Even during normal classes, you're always thinking "Who's the best in class?", "How can I be like them?", "Which one of these people should I pay the most attention too?", "Who's my biggest competition?" , because, during class your teacher is writing your evaluation, you're possibly being chosen for competition, and you just have that natural drive to pass every ones limits and do everything that they can't do. In fact, I was actually thinking about all those things right before my teacher chose me out of about 20 other dancers to participate in competition this year.

               Being competitive is a real confidence booster. You can push yourself to do new routines and movements or even just perfect the ones you were working on before! Being a naturally competitive person myself I can say truthfully that it can really help you improve, however I also remember a time when it could eat me whole... I would go to a piano recital and get first place but I'd still beat myself up for missing a note or playing off tempo, even though the judge said I did good. Therefore, even though being competitive has its good parts, it also has its bad.
                
      The down sides of being competitive are,

1. Possibly over exerting yourself because you tried something you weren't ready for.                    If you over-do yourself you could get any type of injury from, getting a twisted ankle to seriously hurting your back. You could even just get a really bad blister, but even that can have some major consequences.
2. You get really emotional and angry when you can't and/or didn't do something you wanted to do and you often direct those feeling to the people around you. This is actually something that I do, and it definitely doesn't help me or the other people around me.
3. You might spend a lot of money on things that you don't really need, but you felt the need to get them just because you wanted to seem better than everyone else. Remember, you don't need any fancy-smancy stretching devices, that usually don't even work, to make you feel like you're better than everyone else.

 Ballet is sweat, tears, blood, blisters, time, money, and competition, but the most important part is to always have fun!