CandoCo is a professional contemporary dance company based in Great Britain that includes disabled and nondisabled dancers. Over the years, the dancers have included single and double amputees, paraplegics in wheelchairs, and people with a wide range of other conditions. The vision of the company, founded in 1982, is to inspire audiences and support participants “to achieve their highest aspirations in line with the Company’s ethos that dance is accessible to everyone.” CandoCo works to broaden the perception of dance through its performances and through its education and training program. The directors of the company say that CandoCo has always aimed high—“High in quality of movement, high in integrity of dance as an art form and high in expectations of ourselves as performers. Our focus is on dance not disability, professionalism not therapy.” One of a growing number of “integrated” companies in dance, theater, and music, their ambitions have been fulfilled through numerous international awards from professional dance critics and festivals around the world.
“To truly appreciate the CandoCo Dance Company,” one reviewer noted, “it has been said that one should discard all conventional notions of the dancing body. Why talk about swift and articulate footwork with pointed toes, when legs are of no consequence? [In these performances] representations of the perfect and physically complete body are thrown out of the window, introducing less‐than‐whole figures with no less talent than their able‐bodied counterparts… those who expected the CandoCo dancers to perform gravity‐defying stunts with crutches and wheelchairs would have been sorely disappointed. Instead, their performance was a visual and psychological confrontation that was not so much a slap in the face, but a lingering thought that warms the heart and caresses the mind.”
Whether you’re disabled or not, issues of attitude are of paramount importance in finding your Element. A strong will to be yourself is an indomitable force. Without it, even a person in perfect physical shape is at a comparative disadvantage. In my experience, most people have to face internal obstacles of self‐doubt and fear as much as any external obstacles of circumstance and opportunity.
The scale of these anxieties is clear from the burgeoning worldwide market for self‐help courses and books, many of which focus on just these issues. For me, the best in breed is Susan Jeffers’s landmark book Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway®. It has been translated into thirty‐five languages and has sold millions of copies. In it, Jeffers writes with passion and eloquence about the gnawing fears that hold so many people back from living their lives in full and contributing to the world. These fears include the fear of failure, the fear of not being good enough, the fear of being found wanting, the fear of disapproval, the fear of poverty, and the fear of the unknown.
Fear is perhaps the most common obstacle to finding your Element. You might ask how often it’s played a part in your own life and held you back from doing the things you desperately wanted to try. Dr. Jeffers offers a series of well‐tested techniques to move from fear to fulfillment, of which the most powerful is explicit in the title of her book.
Sociaclass="underline" It’s For Your Own Good
Fear of disapproval and of being found wanting are often entangled in our relationships with the people closest to us. Your parents and siblings, and your partner and children if you have them, are likely to have strong views on what you should and shouldn’t do with your life. They may be right, of course. And they can have positive roles as mentors in encouraging your real talents. However, they can also be very wrong.
People can have complex reasons for trying to clip other people’s wings. Your taking a different path might not meet their interests, or might create complications in their lives that they feel they can’t afford. Whatever the reasons, someone keeping you from the thing you love to do—or from even looking for it—can be a deep source of frustration.
There may no conscious agenda from others at all. You may simply find yourself enmeshed in a self‐sustaining web of social roles and expectations that forms a tacit boundary to your ambitions. Many people don’t find their Element because they don’t have the encouragement or the confidence to step outside their established circle of relationships.
Sometimes, of course, your loved ones genuinely think you would be wasting your time and talents doing something of which they disapprove. This is what happened to Paulo Coelho. Mind you, his parents went further than most to put him off. They had him committed repeatedly to a psychiatric institution and subjected to electroshock therapy because they loved him. The next time you feel guilty about scolding your children, you can probably take some comfort in not resorting to the Coelho parenting system.
The reason Coelho’s parents institutionalized him was that he had a passionate interest as a teenager in becoming a writer. Pedro and Lygia Coelho believed this was a waste of a life. They suggested he could do a bit of writing in his spare time if he felt the need to dabble in such a thing, but his real future lay in becoming a lawyer. When Paulo continued to pursue the arts, his parents felt they had no choice but to commit him to a mental institution to drive these destructive notions from his head. “They wanted to help me,” Coelho has said. “They had their dreams. I wanted to do this and that but my parents had different plans for my life. So there was a moment when they could not control me anymore and they were desperate.”
Coelho’s parents put Paolo in an asylum three times. They knew their son was extremely bright, believed he had a promising career ahead of him, and did what they felt they had to do to put him on the right track. Yet not even such an extreme approach to intervention stopped Paulo Coelho from finding his Element. In spite of the intense family opposition, he continued to pursue writing.
His parents were right in assuming he had a promising future ahead of him, but that future had nothing to do with the legal profession. Coelho’s novel The Alchemist was a major international best seller, selling more than forty million copies around the world. His books have been translated into more than sixty languages, and he is the best‐selling Portuguese‐language writer in history. His creative reach extends to television, newspapers, and even popular music; he has written lyrics for several hit Brazilian rock songs.
It’s entirely possible that Paulo Coelho would have made an excellent lawyer. His dream was to write, though. And even though his parents tried extraordinarily hard to put him on “the right course,” he kept his focus on his Element.
Few of us are encouraged to conform to our family’s expectations as firmly as Paulo Coelho was. But many people face barriers from family and friends: “Don’t take a dance program, you can’t make a living as a dancer,” “You’re good at math, you should become an accountant,” “I’m not paying for you to be a philosophy major,” and the rest.
When people close to you discourage you from taking a particular path, they usually believe they are doing it for your own good. There are some with less noble reasons, but most believe they know what’s best. And the fact is that the average office worker probably does have more financial security than the average jazz trumpeter. But it is difficult to feel accomplished when you’re not accomplishing something that matters to you. Doing something “for your own good” is rarely for your own good if it causes you to be less than who you really are.