Get away from your phone. In this digital world, it’s too easy to see what everyone else has and how quickly they’ve got it. Comparison will shred resilience to pieces, so taking time away from social media is important. It’s also important to regularly remind yourself that everyone has a different path, and how you get to your goals won’t look the same as anyone else.
As a part of our series called “Grit: The Most Overlooked Ingredient of Success” I had the pleasure of interviewing Maddie Jamieson.
Maddie is an internationally-renowned dance team choreographer, coach and adjudicator. Following a dance career which saw her place 7th in the world and work for the BBC, IKEA, and Disney, Maddie went on to coach the national dance team of Scotland to a bronze medal at the ICU World Championships in 2022. Since then, she had judged across three continents including at the ICU European Championships in 2023.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Can you tell us a story about the events that have drawn you to this specific career path?
It’s been unconventional to say the least. I started out playing football (soccer) because of my dad. However, girls weren’t really playing football in Scotland back then, so I’d be going to training sessions and only two or three other kids would show up. I’d play in the garden and a bit at school too, but it wasn’t really going anywhere.
I’d watch the local men’s football team play every Saturday, and the only other girls in the stadium were the cheerleaders. So when I was 12 years old, I quit football and joined the cheer team. From there, I branched into the sport of dance team.
Over the years, my career has grown arms and legs and now I work all over the world choreographing, coaching, and judging.
Can you share your story about “Grit and Success”? First can you tell us a story about the hard times that you faced when you first started your journey?
There have been so many. I guess I’ll start at the beginning. When you start a sport later than most, it’s a real struggle. Unless you have buckets of natural talent, you have to work twice as hard as everyone else to get half as good. Your body isn’t conditioned for what you’re asking it to do. The coaches don’t know if they can rely on you. Your teammates probably don’t appreciate having someone with less technical skill than them on the team. Persevering on the days when negative comments have been made is so hard.
But even beyond that, there are real challenges. I ended up leaving my first team after about a year because I was being bullied so badly by girls who were three or four years older than me. I remember we went to a residential camp, and they put salt all over my bed on the first night. I had to ask for a sleeping bag so I wouldn’t have to lie in it!
Throughout those early years, the one goal I had was to compete for my country. Scotland has a national cheerleading and dance team, and back then it held open auditions every year. It was all I thought about day-in, day-out. I practiced every night for hours. Right after switching teams, I auditioned for the first time. You can imagine my devastation when I didn’t make it, and all the girls who’d bullied me did.
The national team stopped holding open auditions for a while after that, so my next opportunity came when I was in university. The team were training in a different city from where I was living at the time. I didn’t have a car, so the commute was about two and a half hours hours there and the same on the way back. I auditioned for a second time and was given the option to reserve. In hindsight, I should have just said yes and made it work, but at 18, I decided it was too big of a sacrifice to perhaps not even make the team.
Instead, I worked hard. I was on a mission for a full year. When the next round of auditions came along, I tried out again. This time, I wasn’t even offered a reserve spot. It was a straight rejection.
When you have a single dream in life, and you’d rejected three times, it’s devastating. There is no other word for it.
Where did you get the drive to continue even though things were so hard?
Well, firstly, the love I have for what I do trumped everything. Being told you’re not good enough is horrible and there were many times I didn’t want to show up to my class. However, I always wanted to go to a class. I think when you’re truly passionate and you’ve truly found your calling, there is a natural drive which comes with that. I knew exactly where I wanted to be, and I knew that there were many different paths to get there.
In the face of rejection, you have to find coping mechanisms that work for you. For me, music has always been a source of comfort. Knowing that other people have felt that kind of sting and could tell the story was healing. I remember sitting on the train after my second audition and knowing it hadn’t gone well. I was blasting Jess Glynne’s ‘Don’t Be So Hard on Yourself’ on repeat.
So how did Grit lead to your eventual success? How did Grit turn things around?
To put it bluntly, grit is everything. The will to regroup and find another way is invaluable. I think living in the knowledge that success takes time is vital too. However long you think it’ll take, times it by three. If it happens any sooner, you’ve been lucky.
Grit is what made me go back to training after every rejection. Grit is what made me show up at my fourth audition. Grit is what made me dig my heels in. Without grit, I wouldn’t have placed 7th in the world as a dancer, nor 3rd in the world as a coach/choreographer. More importantly, I wouldn’t have the career that I do now without it.
I remember when I first started my choreography business, I was one of, if not the first person in the UK to make it ‘official’ in terms of having a website and a social platform. There were many naysayers who questioned my abilities and my credentials. Grit made me start anyway. Now many of those same people hire me.
Based on your experience, can you share your “5 Things You Need To Know To Develop More Grit”?
1 . Find your passion.
If you’re not obsessed, you’re not in the right space. Your grit comes from inside, and the first step is honing in on what you really want in life. Understanding yourself and your own motivation will help you stay focussed. I’m motivated externally by making a difference in young people’s lives. I see everyday the positive impact the sport can have on them. When the work sometimes doesn’t feel like work, you’re found the right place for you to grow.
2 . Ask the question. I recently stumbled across a TikTok trend called ‘Rejection Therapy.’ The premise is that people ask for things they’ve always wanted with the expectation of being rejected. For example, one asked an air steward to visit the cockpit of the airplane. We’re so afraid of failure, we often avoid rejection by never asking the question. However, asking the question is the most important thing. You’d be amazed how many times people will say yes. If they don’t, start seeing that rejection as desensitisation therapy.
3 . Let yourself feel.
For me, I find my resilience after giving myself time to wallow. Usually that happens overnight. After a big rejection, I need time to be upset. I let myself feel all of the emotions, maybe cry, maybe talk to a friend. When I’ve let it all out, I start to strategise.
It’s hard to think rationally in the heat of the moment. Giving yourself an appropriate amount of time to feel the full spectrum of human emotions — the bad and the good — will help you make better and more strategic decisions.
4 . Get away from your phone. In this digital world, it’s too easy to see what everyone else has and how quickly they’ve got it. Comparison will shred resilience to pieces, so taking time away from social media is important. It’s also important to regularly remind yourself that everyone has a different path, and how you get to your goals won’t look the same as anyone else.
5 . Find your tribe. I often say that the pandemic changed who I am as an educator. I’ve always been competitive, and I still am. However, before the pandemic I think I viewed educating others (in a dance team setting or otherwise) in a very traditional manner in which my success could be clearly measured by my results. The pandemic gave me a lot of time to think about my teaching philosophy and what kind of leader I would like to be. I began to name five things I was grateful for at night. I quickly noticed that they were often people.
Sometimes what you do isn’t as important as who you do it with. Go out of your way to find the people who will challenge your thinking but support you wholeheartedly when you need it. You can borrow strength from them when your own is depleted.
None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped you when things were tough? Can you share a story about that?
My parents are the kind of parents I wish every kid had. My mother doesn’t care much for any kind of sport, but she wanted me to stay active and understood that all the classes she was driving me to were giving me much more than just dance knowledge. My dad, on the other hand, comes from a sporting background. He made it clear that nothing was off limits, but I would need to work for everything I wanted. The balance they brought was important because I had to be intrinsically motivated. They weren’t pushing me to train harder. If I’d wanted to quit, they would have let me. Because of that mindset, I developed grit. Everything had to come from me.
How have you used your success to bring goodness to the world?
I see firsthand the positive impact this sport has on young people everyday. We talk a lot about how dance is a universal language, and I think that’s true. It’s great to see people being active and finding a sport they love. However, I think the lessons learned in a team-centric sport are what brings the good.
Athletes learn how to coexist. On a team, not everyone will be best friends. There will be differences in opinion, in abilities, in personal philosophy. However, they learn to coexist for the sake of the shared goal. And through the process of competing these routines, they learn all kinds of soft skills like determination and self-discipline.
Ultimately, I’m most proud of being a part of the process which gives these young people a support system which lasts far beyond their competing years. If they’re still in contact and supporting one another five, ten, or twenty years after they’ve stopped dancing, that’s a win.
What advice would you give to other executives or founders to help their employees to thrive?
Only hire great people who you think are smarter than you. Then, give them the autonomy to showcase their abilities. They’ll take your business to the next level if you let them do their thing.
You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be?
Thank you! I think inspiring young women to build the resilience and community necessary to go after what they want is key. The world would be a far better place with more women in positions of power.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
I’ve gone through a few over the years, but in Scotland there is this saying ‘what’s for you won’t go by you.’ It just means your life will work out with or without the thing you wanted. I’ve found a lot of comfort in thinking about the big picture in the face of setbacks. Life goes on.
How can our readers follow you on social media?
You can find me on Instagram @maddiejamiesondance, and you can also reach out at maddiejamieson.com
Thank you so much for joining us. This was very inspirational.
Dance Team Choreographer Maddie Jamieson On The Five Ways To Develop More ‘Grit’ was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.