Hired, Fired, and Aligned

What happens when your dream job disappears overnight?

In this first episode of Essence Embodied, I share the story of moving to Los Angeles at 17 to pursue a professional dance career—landing my first world tour and being fired on day two. What felt like rejection and failure ultimately redirected me toward dancing on the High School Musical tour directed by Kenny Ortega and a career more aligned with who I truly was.

A story about rejection, resilience, and trusting the unexpected turns of a creative career.

Listen to Part 2 to hear how the job I was fired from also shaped my love story.

You can watch this video on YouTube here: 

https://youtu.be/xHziHeigNWI

Thank you so much for being here. This space is about building community, you can connect with me on instagram here:

https://www.instagram.com/tynestecklein?igsh=NTc4MTIwNjQ2YQ%3D%3D&utm_source=qr

Interested in coaching with me or booking me for a speaking engagement? Contact me here: https://tynesteckleinartdesigns.com/coaching

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I'd like to say a massive thank you to my editor and dear friend, Nikki Dalonzo, for supporting me on this journey!

Transcript

Welcome And Origin Story

Speaker 0:00

Welcome to Essence Embodied. I'm your host, Tyne Stecklein. I'm so excited to be here for episode one of the show. Thank you for listening or watching with me today. Uh, okay, let me give you a little context. Who am I? I am a girl, just a girl from Colorado, born and raised, who decided to move to Los Angeles at the age of almost 18 to pursue her big wild dreams as a professional dancer, a professional performer. Let me tell you, I have had some really wild things happen over the past almost two decades now in my career and in my personal life. And I am going to share those with you on this podcast. Now, with some perspective and honestly some age, I am able to look at these things that happened to me and see them in a completely different light. And I am learning the lessons now that I wish that I knew at 18, at 20, at 25, even at 30. So I want to share these things with you. I want you to know that there are a lot of people's lives who from the outside it looks really shiny and glamorous and perfect. We all know the Instagram highlight reel, right? And yet the reality of what is actually happening on the other side is typically so far from perfect. Some of my biggest bullet points on my resumes have been some of the most challenging experiences in my life. And that is the truth. So today, this episode is for you. If you have ever had an experience make you feel like you are not enough, you had an experience that made you feel embarrassed or ashamed or uncomfortable. This is for you because I am going to share with you about my first experience as a professional dancer, my first hire, my first fire, and how that also led to my first romantic fling. This happens to all fall under one story. Let me give you a little context. I grew up dancing. That is what I knew myself to be, a dancer. So much so that instead of really getting to know myself and the person that I was, I hid behind that name tag. This also made me train exceptionally hard to be the best dancer that I could be. So I am grateful for that element. But I didn't really know much about myself as a person. I just knew I was a good dancer and I was going to do everything that it took to become a dancer for my living. So I already had a dance agent before I was an adult because I worked so hard that I had a really wonderful reputation. I had done really well in the competitive dance world, and I was given the award of a dance agent at a national convention when I was growing up. So my agent essentially was just waiting for me to move to Los Angeles. They were like, when you're 18, we can't wait to have you here and start submitting you for work, which was really exciting to feel like I was just literally waiting for August 11th, which is my birthday, to pursue my dreams. And my dreams came knocking before that because I got a call the week before my 18th birthday from my agent at the time saying, we just booked you on your first job. Now, jobs in the field of being a professional dancer can range from a one-day very low budget music video to you're going on tour with Taylor Swift for the next five years. So I was just so excited I was getting a call from my agent. I hadn't even moved to LA yet, let alone, you know, what's this job? And then there's the bit that not only do I get to pursue what I love for a living, but like you get to make money doing that. And I find out you just got booked on a world tour dancing for an artist. You're signing a two-year contract, you get to travel all over South America, and you are one of only two female dancers going to be on this job. And there's gonna be four males. And I was just ecstatic. So my mom helps me pack my car. I move to Los Angeles, I find an apartment, I find a roommate. We will get into the details of all of that in another episode. But here I am, bright, bubbly, excited, energetic, ready to go into day one of rehearsal for this job. So those adjectives that I just used to describe myself, those are things that now at 37 years old and three children later, I am so proud of. I love about myself. In fact, one of the things that I say is that it is my mission to walk in and brighten any space that I enter. I want my outfit, my energy, and my outlook on life to lift, to elevate a space. I didn't know this about myself at 17, going on 18. And even once I figured it out in my, I would say, early 20s, I thought it was a negative thing. I thought I had to dull and dim myself and my light. But at 18, I just showed up. This is who I am, bright, bubbly energy. That was day one. And I was feeling myself. I was feeling it. I was like getting to do this like really mature dancing, very different than what I had done as a competition dancer growing up. I was dancing with a male partner. It was exciting, it was fun, I was living the dream. I show up on day two at lunch. The choreographer pulls me aside and says, We are going to take a break from rehearsal. Your agent will be in touch when we're starting back. And I know nothing about the business, about a world tour, about Hollywood. So I say, okay, and I do what I know how to do, which is to train. I am a lifelong learner. So at that point, I was on, you know, my professional dance kick. I get my butt into class, I go down to the edge in Hollywood, and I'm training. And the days are going by and I am not hearing anything from my agent. Now, of course, I know you have an agent for a reason. You pick up the phone, you call them, you say, What's happening? I just signed a contract for this. But I was so green. So I let about a week go by, and then I realized I have the dance captain's phone number, and his name is Corey. And I think I let it go by a week because I was a little intimidated, but it felt better to call one of my quote unquote peers than it did to call my agent. So I called him and I said, Do you know what's happening with rehearsal? Because I'm just waiting to hear, essentially. They said, What do you mean? And I was like, I mean, that's what I was told the last day I was there. And I think he took a moment of a pause, unsure what to say, and he responded, I'm gonna take you to lunch. So him and another dancer meet me for lunch, and they were very kind and they felt terrible having to be the ones to break it to me that we hadn't taken a break from rehearsal. They had continued on with rehearsal, but I had been fired, and no one had had the courtesy to tell me. And that right there was my welcome to Los Angeles, welcome to Hollywood, welcome to the entertainment industry, to this business, to this dream life that you want for yourself. I was embarrassed to say the least, because, well, first off, this cute guy across from me is telling me that I just lost my job. But second off, I was so confident. You know, I booked this job without even auditioning for it. That doesn't happen. That's not a real thing. And I just went from being on top of the world to feeling like, what do I think I am trying to do with my life? Why do I think I can do this? I'm not good enough. Am I ever gonna book another job again? And if I do, am I gonna get fired right away? It made me spiral, downward spiral of that self-doubt. Having self-doubt is being a human being. We all experience this. But what I know is that when these tough things happen to us, we have to pick ourselves back up because they're happening to everyone. It just looks different. Their situation, their circumstance is different. But like I said, it's easy to see someone's life and say, wow, you know, it's perfect. I promise you it's not. But we have to be like, okay, this is gonna teach me something. This is gonna make me grow and evolve. If I could have had that perspective, this is gonna make me grow and evolve and get stronger, it would have been really eye-opening instead of oh my God, this means I'm not good enough. It means like I'm so embarrassed I shouldn't even continue down this path. The most successful people are not the ones who never fall or fail or get fired, but they are the ones who rise with more grit and more grace and more purpose each time. Look at Oprah Winfrey. She was told that she wasn't even fit for television, and then she created the biggest television empire that exists today. Even though it would have been really easy to pack up and move back home, which was Colorado, that's where I grew up, with my tail between my legs. I didn't because I was 18 and I was naive and my ego was a little bit inflated, to be honest. And I just was like, okay, then what's next? What else is out there for me? And in fact, there was something for me, and it ended up being a better something for me at that time in my life. Three months later, I ended up booking the high school musical world tour. They had taken the success of high school musical one, the film, and they had made it into a live show, and they were gonna take that on the road. And they were hiring dancers. And Kenny Ortega was directing this, and I ended up booking it. It was such a better aligned job and opportunity for me because that bright, bubbly, energetic girl that I am that I said I'm proud of now, she got to show up every single day of high school musical rehearsal and of that tour and for that job. It worked really well. It had not worked so well for the initial tour that I was hired for because every dancer in the space was about a decade older than me. The other dancers were much taller than me, much bigger than me. And I looked 18. And the artist was significantly older than me, and they needed a woman. They needed someone that was more mature, someone that had a different essence, if you will, than myself. And that is okay. My essence was perfect to play a cheerleader for high school musical, and it also led me to Kenny Ortega, who ended up being a huge support and mentor and someone that hired me over and over again in my career. So when the opportunities that are actually meant for us, for our essence, for our energy, for lack of a better word, right? For who we are, when we show up that way, those opportunities are gonna come in and they are just gonna feel so aligned, so centered, so heartfelt. You're not gonna have to even question it. It's just gonna be like, wow, this feels good. This feels exciting. I feel vibrant, I feel alive. What this taught me is that rejection might simply just be redirection. When one door closes, it's likely because there is another door, a better door, a more beautiful door that's about to open. One that is more aligned, more authentic for you. It's an interesting story because I never thought that I would be given an opportunity to do this thing that I love so much right out of the gate before I had even turned 18. And I was, and then it was taken away. And like I said, the optimistic 18-year-old didn't let it knock her down. She just was like, okay, then what's next? I can say that's actually harder to do now at 37, almost two decades later. It's a lot harder to say, I was rejected. What's next? So I have to remind myself about that 18-year-old girl all the time and the resilience that she had, because had I moved back home, I wouldn't have had the last two decades of a career in this business that I've had. That is the bottom line. So I'm really grateful for this experience and I'm really grateful for the lesson that it taught me and the perspective that I have now, which is just that we don't know why things happen, but there is a reason. If you want to hear how this story ends, the juicy details of my romantic life, then you need to listen to episode two, which is also available now. Thank you for being here with me today. I know how valuable your time is. This is Essence Embodied by Tyne Stecklein.