Back in 2005, in the early days of owning my former dance school, Dance Dynamics, a new family joined our studio. From the beginning, they were incredibly enthusiastic. They loved the school, the way we taught, our ethos, everything we were doing. I remember them watching a class and immediately offering an enormous amount of praise.
I relayed this feedback to one of my employees and, instead of sharing my enthusiasm, she became quite serious. Her response is something that has stayed with me ever since.
“I’m always careful when people praise me too quickly and put me high on a pedestal, because eventually you may experience the opposite from them.”
I remember thinking about that a lot.
Around the same time, I was studying extensively with Global One Training, an Australian personal and professional development company (that has since ceased operating) they ran programs in leadership and human behaviour. At the time, Dr John Demartini delivered his programs through Global One, and over the next four years I immersed myself in that work, attending courses and eventually facilitating within his programs. One of the ideas I encountered repeatedly was that when we put someone “on the pedestal”, we will eventually put them “in the pit”.
At that point in my life, that explanation made sense to me. My understanding of human behaviour has developed considerably since then via expanded study and life experience, and today I would put much more nuance around it. I don’t believe that idealising someone means you will inevitably turn against them. Human relationships don’t work according to such a neat formula.
What I’ve become much more interested in over the years is what is actually happening psychologically when we idealise someone. At what point does admiration become something else? And, particularly from a leadership perspective, what happens when you realise someone is idealising you?
In psychology, idealisation describes an exaggeratedly positive perception of another person. At the more polarised end, idealisation can sit alongside splitting, where we struggle to hold both the positive and negative qualities of a person at the same time. I’m using these terms here to describe psychological processes, not to diagnose the people involved. Research examining idealisation and devaluation suggests that contradictory information can initially be explained away in order to preserve an idealised view. Under some circumstances, when enough contradictory information accumulates, our perception of that person can change quite dramatically (Story et al., 2024).
When I look at the dance industry through that lens, I think there is a lot worth considering.
Dance has always had its revered teachers, choreographers and directors. We seek out people whose work inspires us. Dancers understandably want to be noticed by people they respect. We have mentors, coaches, adjudicators and educators whose opinions can carry considerable weight. And now we have another form of influence through social media, where a dance educator or influencer can become enormously influential to people they have never actually met.
There is nothing wrong with admiration. I think mentorship is incredibly important. I have had teachers and mentors who have profoundly influenced my life and work. The question for me is when admiration starts moving into idealisation.
A teacher can become more than someone with expertise. They can become the person a dancer believes will make them successful. A director may appear to hold the keys to a career. A choreographer’s approval can begin to feel like confirmation that you really do have what it takes. When someone represents opportunity, belonging, success or even the future version of yourself, their opinion can take on extraordinary significance.
Leadership research is useful here because charisma isn’t simply understood as something that exists inside a charismatic person. Followers bring something to that relationship as well. Ehrhart and Klein (2001), for example, found that followers’ own values and personality characteristics influenced their preference for charismatic leadership. So when we talk about influential leaders, we also have to consider what the people following them may be projecting onto the relationship.
Sometimes leaders deliberately cultivate their own mythology. But sometimes we help create it for them. That doesn’t make the power in these relationships equal. Particularly where young dancers are involved, the responsibility for maintaining appropriate boundaries and using authority responsibly remains with the adult and the leader.
Once we have decided someone is exceptional, it can become harder to evaluate their behaviour independently of that belief. In dance, a harsh interaction might be interpreted as high standards. Favouritism can be reframed as recognising talent. Poor boundaries may be overlooked because a relationship feels special. Concerns can be dismissed because the person produces successful dancers.
None of this is an argument for minimising harm. In fact, the opposite is important. Idealisation can make harmful behaviour harder to recognise because what we are seeing has to compete with everything we already believe about the person doing it. Understanding projection, charisma or the role followers play in idealisation does not shift responsibility away from a leader who behaves harmfully. Power still matters. Leaders remain responsible for how they use it. The point is that we should be able to evaluate behaviour clearly, whether it comes from someone we admire, someone we dislike or someone we barely know.
Someone can be an extraordinary teacher and still have blind spots, make poor decisions or behave in ways that cause harm. Their talent does not cancel the impact of their behaviour, just as harmful behaviour does not require us to pretend they never had talent. Being able to hold both realities is, I think, part of moving away from idealisation in the first place.
There is another side to this that I have become increasingly interested in as I’ve grown older in my own leadership: what happens when you are the person being idealised?
If you teach, choreograph, direct, adjudicate, mentor, coach or have a public platform in dance, at some point somebody may place far more weight on your opinion than you realise. And there is something quite seductive about being admired. I don’t think we need to pretend otherwise. It feels good when somebody tells you that you changed their life. It feels good to be respected for your work.
For me, the more interesting leadership question is what we do with that.
I think we need enough self-awareness to notice when people stop questioning us, when someone becomes unusually dependent on our approval, or when we begin enjoying being needed a little too much. I also think we need to notice our own reaction when somebody who once admired us starts disagreeing with us. Can we tolerate that without interpreting it as disloyalty?
This is where that conversation in my studio all those years ago probably influenced me more than I realised. It made me cautious about being put on a pedestal, not just about putting other people on one.
Because if you lead for long enough, you will almost certainly disappoint someone. You will say no, set a boundary, choose another dancer, make a decision they don’t understand or simply get something wrong. Sometimes you will just turn out to be different from the person they imagined you were.
And this is where my understanding of the old “pedestal and pit” idea has changed.
Idealisation does not inevitably become devaluation. But research suggests that when our representation of someone is highly idealised, contradictory information can be difficult to integrate. Story et al. (2024) found support for a model in which negative information may initially be attributed to circumstances, preserving the idealised view, until sufficient contradictory information can produce a substantial shift in perception.
I think the healthier alternative is learning to hold a more complete picture of people.
Someone can be an extraordinary teacher and still get things wrong. A mentor can have changed your life and still disappoint you. You can acknowledge that someone caused harm without needing to deny every valuable thing they ever contributed. And you can disagree with someone without rewriting the entire relationship.
From the leadership side, perhaps we shouldn’t be trying to maintain the pedestal in the first place.
I don’t want good teaching to make the teacher indispensable. I want it to strengthen the dancer’s own judgement, confidence, artistry and voice. If someone works with me, I would ultimately hope they become more capable of thinking for themselves, not more dependent on what I think.
Twenty years after that conversation in my studio, I still think about the pedestal. I just understand it differently now.
Admire great teachers. Learn from extraordinary choreographers. Find mentors and people whose work challenges you. I certainly still do. But keep them human.
And when you become the teacher, choreographer, director, mentor or leader somebody else admires, let them keep you human too.
Maybe the goal of leadership was never to stay on the pedestal. Maybe it was to build relationships that didn’t need one in the first place.
References
Ehrhart, M. G., & Klein, K. J. (2001). Predicting followers’ preferences for charismatic leadership: The influence of follower values and personality. The Leadership Quarterly, 12(2), 153–179.
Story, G. W., Smith, R., Moutoussis, M., Berwian, I. M., Nolte, T., Bilek, E., Siegel, J. Z., & Dolan, R. J. (2024). A social inference model of idealization and devaluation. Psychological Review, 131(3), 749–780.