I've been juggling for almost 50 years and there's a lot of good stuff in this post. I just want to add a few things from my own approach to juggling and teaching others.
I often tell beginners two things: (1) a big part of learning to juggle is training yourself to suppress the panic reflex, so simply mindless practice solves a lot of problems, and (2) you have much more time to react than you think (yes this is related to #1).
Joining a juggling club is one of the top suggestions I can offer. I juggled 3 balls and practiced various tricks for years before I joined the motley collection of engineering, physics, and math students juggling in the chemistry building at the University of Michigan, and my progress accelerated massively after I had a chance to see what people were doing and get advice from people who could see me. They also pushed me to try things that I wasn't particularly interested in, and that helped a lot even though I don't do most of those things regularly anymore.
Personally I juggle as self-entertainment more than performance, so as time went on I gravitated toward turning errors into repeatable tricks that look good from behind the balls, with no concern about how they look to observers. If you want to look good to observers then you have to approach it differently. I practice controlling ball collisions (hit them intentionally and make them go where you want!) as well as ball slaps and other really fast recoveries that are honestly too fast moving for an observer to grasp but they make my hair stand on end and that's the point. Do something wrong, then do it intentionally, then do it controllably, then repeat it. Occasionally these look cool but mostly it is more like a fidget spinner than a performance.
My ongoing practice for the panic reflex is things like hitting myself in the face with the balls repeatedly. You have to escalate that to keep gaining benefits. I'm winning if I can smash balls in my face repeatedly without blinking. It can be done!
I often tell beginners two things: (1) a big part of learning to juggle is training yourself to suppress the panic reflex, so simply mindless practice solves a lot of problems, and (2) you have much more time to react than you think (yes this is related to #1).
Joining a juggling club is one of the top suggestions I can offer. I juggled 3 balls and practiced various tricks for years before I joined the motley collection of engineering, physics, and math students juggling in the chemistry building at the University of Michigan, and my progress accelerated massively after I had a chance to see what people were doing and get advice from people who could see me. They also pushed me to try things that I wasn't particularly interested in, and that helped a lot even though I don't do most of those things regularly anymore.
Personally I juggle as self-entertainment more than performance, so as time went on I gravitated toward turning errors into repeatable tricks that look good from behind the balls, with no concern about how they look to observers. If you want to look good to observers then you have to approach it differently. I practice controlling ball collisions (hit them intentionally and make them go where you want!) as well as ball slaps and other really fast recoveries that are honestly too fast moving for an observer to grasp but they make my hair stand on end and that's the point. Do something wrong, then do it intentionally, then do it controllably, then repeat it. Occasionally these look cool but mostly it is more like a fidget spinner than a performance.
My ongoing practice for the panic reflex is things like hitting myself in the face with the balls repeatedly. You have to escalate that to keep gaining benefits. I'm winning if I can smash balls in my face repeatedly without blinking. It can be done!