Eyes Up! Not Just On The Floor

A master instructor at Millennium named Eric Ellis is famous for saying "Eyes up, use the mirror. The floor isn't telling you anything!" when people are looking down while dancing. (I've also heard him being more direct in private with, "The floor doesn't tell you sh#t!" but I doubt he wants to be quoted on that one.)

It's hard to fix some habits on the dance floor. We have to fix them in life, then it's easy on the floor.

Eric has said "eyes up" to me occasionally, and we discussed it last week because I had one of those "Ah-ha" moments. While he had said it in the past, I was too worried about other aspects of the exercise to pay much attention to that specific comment, assuming it was because of my concentration at the time.

Then I saw someone else in a class looking slightly down during an exercise, and realized "hey, that's me." She wasn't looking at her feet, but she was looking a little below eye level. It wasn’t a great look on an otherwise accomplished dancer. I had never noticed it before, but it was so easy to see why that doesn't work when I saw it on someone else.

After seeing her and becoming aware, I realized I look slightly down when I'm not dancing. It's subtle, and I doubt most people would notice directly, but it doesn't look right while on the floor. Eric said I could fix it by bringing my chin up about a quarter-inch or so, and after reviewing I see he is right. It's not a big change on one hand, but years (decades?) of doing something different make it a tough adjustment while dancing.

Then the obvious thought hit me again. If I walk around 15 hours a day looking slightly down, it would be really tough to fix it while dancing for a few hours. I need to make looking at eye-level part of everything I do, and then doing it while dancing will be easy.

Recently, I started practicing "eyes up" everywhere, including when I'm walking to my office, standing in the kitchen, shopping at Home Depot, taking a shower or brushing my teeth. Rather than focus on this fix when I hit the floor, my goal is to make it part of my overall look all the time, especially outside the dance studio.

This concept applies to posture, balance and many other dance elements. Some things can't be fixed on the floor alone, but instead need to be a part of your day-to-day life if you want them to stick.

It's why strong dancers, gymnasts and many athletes carry themselves with great posture outside of their professional life, because it's tough to be hunch back all day and gracefully elegant while dancing or performing.

Now I am not worried about mastering it on the dance floor, I'll get it right during the day, knowing over time it will be natural during the dances.

Let me know what skills you are practicing in life to upgrade something in your dancing!

Have the courage to be ignorant of a great number of things, in order to
avoid the calamity of being ignorant of everything.
--Sydney Smith

Micro Practices: Quickies Are OK!

"Two or three minutes? That's not even one song!" he said when I told him I did a series of quick practices over the day. “That doesn’t sound like enough to me.”

He’s missing the point. I call them “micro-practices” (MP) and everybody should integrate them into their daily routines. They could work for partnering, but as a rule they are for upgrading your individual dancing skills like spinning, footwork, Cuban motion, posture, and other body control exercises.

When you’re a pro, you get up each day and can practice for hours, refining your dancing on the way to the next level. You're paid to dance, and practicing is a way of life. However, if you’re working for a living and want to advance your social dancing, sometimes it's hard to carve out chunks of time for practice. That’s where micro-practices (quickies) can be a winner for you. Like your love life, they shouldn't be all you do, but in balance they keep things moving in the right direction.

It may be counter-intuitive, but a set of quickie practices often beats longer sessions, assuming you do enough of them. Often they're gold, where the combined effort of a dozen one to five-minute practices gets you further than one forty-five minute session. Some techniques require longer practices, but the micro-practice beats the heck out of "I didn't practice today because I couldn’t find a twenty or thirty minute block of time”.

There is magic in repeating something over and over, every hour or so, for a couple minutes throughout the day. Time management gurus always say when you’re interrupted from a task, it takes you time to restart. Micro-practices use that principle to your advantage, because the start-up time is reduced if you repeat an action often enough.

The series of little practices gets you to the point where you can hit the move immediately, rather than after 10 minutes of warm up. It’s amazing how much you can advance with micro-practices alone, although you can gain even more when combining them with intermittent longer rehearsals.

Edie the Salsa Freak is famous for learning to spin in the bathroom at work before she turned pro. The floor is tile, there is a great mirror, and she would spin a couple times to the right, a couple times to the left each time she used the restroom. If nobody was around she might sneak in a few extras, but most of those practices lasted 60 seconds or less. With just 10 extra spins per day, she had over 300 spins each month BEFORE doing any extended practicing. Over time, it adds up to thousands of extra spins, giving her the experience she needed to get to the next level.

Most work days I’m at the computer all day, and each time I need a break I practice a shine, a spinning combination and/or a new part of a "pattern in progress." It may be just a tiny fragment, but doing it repeatedly over a couple days (or weeks) makes a huge difference when I get to a block of time for an extended practice.

Before starting work, I often sneak in a two-minute practice before sitting at my desk. Nobody cares if I start two minutes later, and it reinforces the new materials I’m working on. Some days the quickies are the only practice I get; sometimes it’s part of a bigger practice day, where I combine micro-practices with much longer sessions or classes.

I’ve stood in line at Sam’s Club or the bank, doing footwork practice, knowing that may be my only practice for the day. In previous articles I've mentioned I practice head/shoulder exercises in my car. (Shines and partnering are highly discouraged while driving.) When you hit the dance floor, your partners don’t care if you practiced at a dance studio, in your bathroom or in line at the grocery store; they simply notice your improvements.

Some days when I haven’t had much practice, I’ll sneak in a few minutes before bed. It may not be much, but again, it’s my way to move myself forward. It takes about as much time as brushing my teeth, so I have little excuse to skip it. I'd love to practice more some days, but that just isn't my reality at points.

You don’t have to tell anybody you’re sneaking practices around your bathroom breaks. That really falls into the “TMI” category (“too much information”). Keep this little secret between us and they’ll just think you are improving using the traditional extended practices. If you can do regular practices, that's great, but I want to grow even when I’m timed starved (the story of my life).

Try it yourself; sneak in a few micro-practices, multiple times per day, especially on those days when you can’t get to a complete session. You’ll see it makes a substantial difference if you keep it up. Once you're in the habit, you'll find little slivers of time and use them to your advantage, even if it's just working a body roll twice or an extra couple of spins per day.

Let me know how you are getting the most from limited practice time; I’m always looking to accelerate my growth and I’m sure some of you have your own best practices. Please share!

Indecision may or may not be my problem.
-- Jimmy Buffett

I Can't Dance Like Nobody's Watching

Maybe you’ve heard someone say "Dance Like Nobody's Watching," and maybe you’ve already embraced it yourself. But I’ve noticed that most people who spit this mantra at you are already strong dancers. It’s easy to dance like nobody’s watching when everybody likes watching you dance.

I think that’s like the calendar girls who say “the human body is art, and showing it is fine.” It’s easy to be comfortable in a swim suit (or less) when you could be on the cover of Victoria’s Secret. And I’m pretty sure they haven’t seen me without clothes, or they would amend their "body is art" statement.

Recently, I’ve been thinking about the process of dancing without care or inhibition. In some venues, I do pretty well with that concept, but it isn’t always the case. In most clubs, there are a set of people dancing and a set of people watching, and I just do my thing, effectively ignoring them and focusing on my partner. In that environment, I know I’m a work in progress, and I’ve learned to deal with the discomfort of others being critical.

Frankly, I realize that most people simply don’t care about me; they’re focused on themselves, on their dancing, on their image. That’s fine with me.

As a musician, I learned a long, long time ago that when performing, someone is always in the audience saying “I could do that better.” In LA, many times there IS a set of stronger musicians in the audience, so I learned to ignore them and think, “Ok, maybe he could do it better, but he’s sitting in the audience. I have my strengths too. These musicians asked me to perform, not him, so I must be doing something right.” The more energy you spend worrying about what others are thinking, the less focused you are on your performance or social dancing.

Over time, I matured, and I suspect the same thing applies to dancing. You have to toughen yourself as you grow, putting yourself in situations that are not always comfortable. Over time, you realize that other people think about you much less than your paranoid ego fears they do, and you have to go through the experiences to get better.

I’ve had a couple times over the years where I’ve thought, “Maybe I should stop going to clubs for X months, and just practice on my own. The next time I show up at the clubs everybody will marvel at my progress.” Then I realize, “Ahhh, that’s not realistic; going to clubs and practicing is what makes me better, so just get over yourself and ignore everybody else while you learn.”

Of course, it’s easy to say that, but sometimes I’m still moderately embarrassed while working through different phases of growth. Being a work in progress means some days will be better than others, but nothing beats the experience of being in the arena rather than sitting and watching others have fun.

Here’s a simple example: Sometimes I’m in my car, and working on head, neck or shoulder isolations while driving or sitting in traffic. Funny thing is, I’ll often stop when I realize someone has noticed me doing exercises, even though I dance in front of hundreds of people per week at the clubs.

The exercise will help my dancing, and the car practice is good time management, as long as I don’t hear breaking glass from impact with those around me. I don’t know these people now, I doubt I’ll ever see them again, they can’t hear my music, and I’m actually making progress with my practice.

Why do I stop? What’s my problem? In that situation, I’m obviously too worried about them thinking I’m crazy or otherwise abnormal. When I take a cold, hard look, it’s obvious I shouldn’t care what they think.

If I actually continue my exercises, possibly entertaining them and giving them a good laugh, I’m making their world more interesting and improving my dancing. In a way, I’m giving them a gift, even though they may be laughing at me rather than with me.

Of course, if I continue and my dancing improves, I’ll have the last laugh. Someday all those car hours of practice will fool people into believing that I’m a naturally gifted dancer, rather than someone who practices good time management.

Think of them telling their friends, “Yeah, I’m sitting in traffic, and this gray-haired guy in his Lexus is grooving to something. I think he was on drugs, or maybe he was having a seizure, I almost called 911, but then I figured out he thought he was dancing and I laughed so hard I had to pull over and wipe the tears from my eyes. This guy is a hoot. Watch for that gray Lexus.”

So I’m on crusade: I’m trying to worry less about others, especially those who don’t know me. I’m thinking about what can I do to truly dance or practice like nobody’s watching, and give myself the mental freedom to occasionally look like an idiot.

How do we toughen ourselves, so we grow to our full potential? We can take different classes where our skills put us in the lower third of the class, then stick with it to become above average. We can read books about mind/body connections and high-pressure performance situations and find situations where growth is required. This may include doing a performance, going to new classes, entering a competition and/or joining a dance team.

In my case, I’m adopting the same dance attitude I have while playing music, plus taking classes and practicing.

We should also look for little things, like practicing shines in the line at the bank, or doing a few spins at the grocery store. The idea is to be bolder than you were in the past, doing little things in places where people will notice, knowing you have to ignore them and focus on refining your techniques.

For example, it would be easier to do our favorite, most rehearsed shine sequence while waiting at the bank, but we should also working on the ones that don’t always work, because the risk of temporary failure makes us stronger. Ninety-nine percent of the people around us can’t do the shines either, so if we “fail” temporarily, refine, and then get it right, it toughens us and makes us stronger dancers.

In some classes I've moved my location from hiding in the back, to being in the front row, someplace close to the instructor. I'm no longer in the middle of the pack on the "across the floor" exercises, instead going close to the front, or sometimes even last, which means almost everybody else in the class is watching.

It’s not always easy for me, but I do it anyway, and you should too.

I’m wondering what others are doing to toughen themselves? Let me know your thoughts and techniques.

I feel like I'm in a rut. Every time I go to bed at night, I find myself getting up again in the morning.
-Brad Stine