Tomorrow night I'll get up in front of a couple hundred people at Ignite Seattle and explain how you can use the same strategies that make it possible to walk a slackline to help you better navigate life.
Five minutes isn't much time to go into depth on this topic, so I'm posting some additional content here. If you have thoughts or questions, feel free to comment!
Slacklining in action
Below you can see my friend Lauren walking the slackline as I lie underneath recording video. The video shows how much the line moves around even for an experienced slackliner.
Photo by Fred P Seifried
Video by Laura Lantz
Getting started with slacklining
If you'd like to try slacklining, there are a
lot of great resources online. A good way to get started
is to find a local slacklining group and come out to a meetup. Slackline.com has great community forums where you can ask questions and find slackliners in your area.
For Seattleites, NWslackline.org focuses on slackline in Seattle and the Pacific Northwest. They also have a Facebook group.
Slacklining tips and life
Art by Anup Doshi, layout by Stephanie Bercht
The phrase "Wobbling is normal" comes from a poster of slacklining tips my friends and I made for Slackline Pittsburgh. It's our very first piece of advice to new slackliners: Wobbling is normal; don't wait for it to stop because it won't.
Here are some tips for navigating dynamic situations on slacklines and in life:
Wobbling is normal. It's ok for your foot to drift around in ways you don't control. Fighting to hold your foot still will actually increase the wobbling and make you less stable. If you can resist getting caught up in trying to control a dynamic situation, you'll be able to spend your energy in more useful ways.
Step up all at once. It can be hard to commit your weight to a surface that doesn't feel stable, but the slackline will wobble less under your weight and you'll be in a position to shift in ways that allow you to balance. It's like a leap of faith -- sometimes you can't do things halfway, you have to commit fully before you can begin to make things work.
Keep your knees bent. Bending your knees makes it easier
to shift your body weight in response to the movements of the line,
which is how you balance. Being prepared to make adjustments as
needed is vital in adapting to changing situations.
Look straight ahead. Staring at the line, the ground, or
your own feet can be disorienting. It's useful to glance down at the
line occasionally, but you don't want to fixate on it -- focusing downward changes your body's entire posture. Better to look
where you want to go. Don't center your attention on the trends and
changes you're experiencing, or even on your own process; you're most likely to succeed if you focus on the goal you want to
achieve.
Breathe. Holding your breath in static situations stills some of your body's involuntary movements, which can help you regain stable balance. In dynamic situations, though, holding your breath is counter-productive -- you'll run out of breath before you ever feel stable. In life, there is a similarly important need to express yourself and be receptive to outside influences. Although interchange of ideas can create more potential for change in an already changing situation, this is actually a good thing -- cutting yourself off would only limit your resources.
Photo by Stephen Dewhurst
Use your arms to help you balance. On the slackline, your arms are a valuable counterbalance because they have a large range of motion. New slackliners are sometimes hesitant to experiment with waving their arms around, but if you do you're likely to discover that movements you wouldn't expect to be helpful (jazz hands, tai-chi-like circles, etc) significantly improve your ability to recover from imbalance. When working to develop new dynamic balancing instincts, be willing to try things that don't make sense to you, feel silly, or might not work.
Try using two feet on the line. There is a trade-off between stability and freedom. As a slackliner, standing with two feet on the line limits your mobility, making it slightly harder to balance, but allows you a little more control over the movement of the line. If you're not yet comfortable with how much the line moves -- or if you want to intentionally move the line, as in slackline surfing -- standing with two feet on the line will make this easier to do. In life, you can sometimes make use of trade-offs between freedom and stability to alter the amount of dynamic change in a situation.
Figure out which foot you feel more comfortable balancing on. Most people discover they feel more stable balancing on their left foot than their right, or vice-versa. Try balancing on each of your feet to discover which one you prefer, and then focus on being able to stand and balance on the slackline on that foot. Getting comfortable with standing balance on the slackline can make it much easier to walk the slackline -- it's a matter of standing on your preferred foot and then stepping through with your opposite foot and back onto your preferred foot. Recognizing and working to enlarge your comfort zone can enable you to make faster progress more easily.
Get to know your center of gravity. Ultimately, getting a feel for your center of gravity will enable you to balance without having to pay conscious attention to the movements of the slackline. In life, developing a deep understanding of your self makes it easier to weather upheaval and uncertainty with an intuitive sense of balance.
Manipulating center of gravity on slacklines and slack ropes
So far, mastering the trick of hula hooping on slack rope has done the most to deepen my understanding of my physical center of gravity. Here are a couple
videos of me hula hooping on slack rope:
Video by Laura Lantz
The trick to hooping on the line is to isolate your hooping movements as much as possible, using forward-backward pushes to keep the hoop going while simultaneously making whatever side-to-side adjustments are necessary to keep your balance.
Video by Laura Lantz
For comparison's sake, here's a video from back in my early experiments with hooping and dynamic balance:
Video by Stephanie Bercht
You can see I've come a long way! My next goal is to learn to backwards somersault on slack rope, like so:
Video by DRESSING RUHM & SÖHNE
I've experimented with this move a little but not yet managed to get a feel for how my center of gravity shifts as I roll back over my shoulder. I got sidetracked relying on my strength rather than my balance to keep the rope underneath me throughout the course of the somersault -- I used an extra-loose rope, allowing me to keep more of my body in contact with the rope and just muscle it into position.
Video by Stephen Dewhurst
It just goes to show how tempting it is to try and control a situation, and how doing so interferes with developing the understanding needed for dynamic balance. Before somersaulting backwards, Marie Juana Jimenez lets go of the rope and makes a series of exaggerated pedaling movements with her legs. I suspect this time spent getting a feel for the rope helps her find a genuinely balanced position from which to start the somersault, greatly increasing her ability to pull it off with success.
I can think of similar instances in my life. Pushing through complex situations by force of will or personality can work when there's enough slack, and it's tempting to just rely on that. It feels much riskier to develop and rely on your sense of a situation rather than trying to control it.
I'll feel out more insights for navigating dynamic situations as I continue to experiment!
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