For years, one of the things I’ve always been scared of is dance clubs.  Never mind the socializing aspect -- that was another issue.  The dancing part terrified me the most.  My big fear was looking stupid.

It wasn’t until earlier this year that I finally decided to do something about it.  I first noticed at my local 24 Hour Fitness gym that they offered free hip hop dance classes as part of my membership.  It wasn’t freestyle stuff for the club, but it was a start learning rhythm and choreography.  So I began going to the classes and fell in love with the style and personality of my instructor, Tiffaney Boyd.

Soon after, I began taking private lessons from her.  After my first 1-hour lesson, she thought I needed about 19 more lessons in order to be dope (I only signed up for 10).  At least she’s honest.  Anyways, this is some footage from some of our lessons together.  She’s teaching the Pac-Man (one of my favorite moves), basic body rocking, and puppeting.  Isn’t she adorable?

So for the next 10 weeks, I took my freestyle hip hop lessons.  It was some of the most frustrating times.  My brain understood how to perform different moves, but it was another thing to get my body to do it.  It felt like one big piece of flesh.  But slowly over time through hours of practice in front of a mirror, I learned to isolate different body parts and could begin to actually look decent dancing!  In addition to dancing at the gym, I would also practice doing the ‘real thing.’  I remember weekends where I would go to the dance club by myself just to dance from 10 PM when the doors opened to 2 AM when the doors closed, just so that I could learn to become comfortable on the dance floor.

After a couple of months of this, I naturally started to feel good and enjoy dancing.  I’m comfortable enough that I’m OK with being the first and only one on the dance floor.  I learned to have some rhythm and move my body to music.  But most importantly, I learned to stop worrying so much about what other people might negatively think of me if I couldn’t dance well.  And that feeling of liberation was well worth all the hard work.