No matter what aspect to your life, at some point someone you don’t care for will appear. Whether it’s that hardcore guy from accounting, the creepy lady at the gym or most importantly, the dancer who makes your skin crawl; learning from your enemies will help you grow. While it may not be readily apparent, there’s always something to learn from them and by bettering yourself, you’re in a sense, getting sweet revenge.
Sure, the jerk on the dance floor is all over the map, crashing into people and always seems to choose to groove near you. Perhaps there’s something that you don’t readily see that you can learn from? Maybe it’s the way they make their partners feel the music, or always seem to have them laughing or does some really sweet isolations?
Recently, I had someone I occasionally work with disrupt my work-flow by being overly aggressive and rude to me. While it definitely hurt to deal with, I found myself avoiding this person at all costs, which exacerbated things.
To make a long story short, I decided that instead of avoiding and stoking the aggressive nature of this relationship, I decided to be positive and observant of them, to discover any gems of knowledge that I could, in turn, use to bettering myself.
Being a very accomplished artist, it was easy to not only pick up on great practices from them, but to work directly with them on how to improve my own techniques. I’ve found that since I’ve taken this stance that our relationship has been excellent and I’ve felt happy to have let go of the ‘hate’ and truly value the education that I’m receiving.
Back to that annoying dancer, have you thought of anything that you can learn from them? If you’re stuck and truly think that this person is still pretty much a nuisance look at it this way, this person may be just far less experienced than you and is just trying to get by. Perhaps instead of sending aggression their way, try to help help them? You never know as you may find you and your previous enemy helping better each other… or at least you won’t feel as annoyed when they step on your toes.
Till then,
Stay Shining Salseros!
