There will be times where you will need to dance in a style of dance that you are not familiar with.
Perhaps you are working with a choreographer and they decide they want to throw in some moves from a style unknown to you.
Or perhaps this happens in the familiar environs of your dance teacher's class and they decide to throw a curveball one day and teach something completely different.
If you've ever had this happen to you before you will find that while your previous dancing experience will help you and be advantageous, all the skills will not be readily transferable into another dance style.
The reason for this is because each style of dancing has techniques and core skills that are specific to it.
So the best way to approach this dilemma is to do something which might seem a bit counterintuitive and that is to drop everything that you have learnt and your previous training.
Why on earth would you want to do that? After all you may have spent years training in a dance style so what's the worth if one day you just give it up when something new comes along? Well you don't drop it exactly like that, but you drop it while you are learning the other dance style.
The intelligence behind this is that each style is unique and you need to treat it that way.
When you bring your training from another style into the new style, you colour it with the flavourings of the previous dance style and are no longer doing it authentically.
So you must forget everything you know and learn the new style from scratch.
This also sets you free because some of the good habits you learn in one dance style will actually hinder you in another style as the movement qualities vary from style to style.
As far as the learning is concerned, naturally it takes a few cracks at the whip before you can get your new undertaking truly up and going.
But as the old saying goes, a little bit of practice goes a long way.