The Day that Changed the Way I Danced for 40 years!

Have you ever stopped to think about how one sentence can change the course of someone's life?

When I was thirteen, my best friend and I were taking English riding lessons from a respected instructor. The goal of the day? How to sit the trot.

She picked it up almost immediately.

I didn't. It wasn’t that I didn’t know how to sit a trot. I rode bareback for a year when I got my first horse because I didn’t own a saddle. I knew how to sit a stupid trot. But not this day. This day was one of those frustrating days where my body refused to do what my brain and instructor were saying. My butt refused to stay in that saddle!

After this particularly frustrating lesson, my instructor looked at my friend and said,

"I bet you dance with your hips moving front to back."

She smiled and said, "I do."

Then she looked at me.

"I bet you dance with your hips side to side."

I remember thinking, How in the world does she know that?

I told her she was right.

Then she said something I'll never forget.

"That's why you'll never make a good rider."

Now, I want to be fair. She wasn't trying to be mean. She wasn't insulting me. She was trying to explain the biomechanics of why I was struggling to sit the trot. In fact, I'm sure she forgot that conversation by lunch time.

But I didn't.

I was thirteen. I didn't hear an explanation about biomechanics. I heard a verdict that I was naturally wrong for riding.

From that day forward...

Every.

Single.

Time.

I danced...

I tried to change the way my body moved.

Instead of dancing naturally, I tried to make my hips move differently because somewhere inside me I believed...

If I could just change the way I moved... maybe I could become the rider I wanted to be.

I'm fifty-five now.

And just the other day, I realized something. I spent more than forty years trying to change the way I danced because of one sentence from someone I respected.

Here's what I know now.

People in authority can be wrong.

Teachers.

Coaches.

Parents.

Bosses.

Mentors.

They can be wonderful people... and still be wrong about you.

Authority is not the same thing as truth.

If you're someone who teaches children, please be careful with your words. You may forget what you said by tomorrow. But, they may carry it for the next forty years.

And if you're the one carrying someone else's words, maybe today is the day you ask yourself...

"Is this actually true? Or is it just something someone once told me?"

I'd love to know...

What's one sentence someone said to you as a child that you're still carrying today?

Alisha McGinnis