Dance & The Fear of Looking Silly

The First Full Episode!

This episode of the  Movement Sherpa Podcast explores the fear of looking silly while dancing, particularly among adults. The episode delves into the reasons behind this fear, including the influence of social media and the Spotlight Effect, where individuals believe others are overly critical of their actions. It also highlights the positive impact of dancing, such as fostering a sense of community and triggering a state of flow.

The discomfort with dancing in the United States may stem from a cultural shift from participation to performance. While many cultures view dance as a communal activity, Americans often see it as entertainment for professionals. This shift has led to a lack of practice and a fear of looking silly, highlighting the importance of embracing movement and participating in activities like dancing for the joy of it.

Thank you for taking your time to listen!

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:12

Hello and welcome to the Movement Sherpa podcast. I'm Chris, and I'm looking forward to our movement conversation today. It was the writer, poet, and art collector Gertrude Stein who said, You look ridiculous if you dance. You look ridiculous if you don't dance. So you might as well dance. I think she was on to something. You know, on a serious note, I I have a question. And the question is sort of like the theme of today's podcast. Why are adults afraid of looking silly? Especially when it comes to dancing. Do me a favor. Uh I want to try something. Close your eyes for a second. Imagine you're standing in a crowded room. The music is isn't just loud, it's pounding against your chest like a second heartbeat. The lights, they you know, sweeping across the room, having faces come in and out of focus. Uh your body is bumping into other bodies without anybody apologizing. They just keep moving. And across the room, it's like a group of strangers. They just they just know when to move. Or maybe it's not a nightclub at all. What if it's a country dance hall? Uh you know, where you can you can hear the boots as they slide across the floor, creaking on the floor. Alright, or or maybe it's a wedding reception where grandparents and toddlers and family just gather. Or it could be a party at someone's house. Where some kids with aspirations of being rock stars are filling the air with uh music that people can dance to. The vibe is kind of part chill and part liquid courage as they dance around a bonfire. And maybe, maybe, just maybe, an NBA player at that party hurt his ankle while jumping over said bonfire. And I hope by now he has forgiven me for that. Look, really, the the setting doesn't, you know, the setting changes, but the movement doesn't. If you think about it, I mean for thousands of years humans have danced, and throughout that history, I think we've invented thousands of types of dance. And it's it's not because someone handed down some instructions, and it's definitely not because all of us are good at it. I think it's because moving to music is one of the oldest conversations humans can have. And this is the the beautiful thing about dancing, or at least from my opinion, that if you're dancing for yourself, you can't do it wrong, you know. You're I wrote one of these cool notes to myself. I said, if you're dancing for yourself, you're simply translating sound into movement. I really think that's a cool phrase, but uh you know, here's a funny thing if you think about it. I mean, I believe that if you were to take any kid up till age nine or ten, uh you just put on some music, these kids, they're just gonna start dancing. They don't care about rhythm, they're not gonna look around and see if anyone's judging them. They the shoulders start bouncing, their hips start swaying, their hands are all over the place, and their feet start some kind of move that we've never seen before. And for them, it it's not a performance, they're just responding. You know, at school, with my younger students, I could give them a dance party every single day, and they would love it. But here's the problem: somewhere between our childhood and our adulthood, something changes. I mean, don't get me wrong, we still love music, we still build our playlists, we drive with the windows down and scream our heads out to the every song lyric, right? Uh but the second someone says, Come dance, we become like statues. And I want to know what happened. So today I want to explore that question. I want to look at, you know, even my own experiences growing up where dance dancing seemed to be everywhere. Um, kind of it was like it was like woven into our everyday life, really. I I want to explore what science tells us about the embarrassment and how our brain handles all of this. And then I also want to kind of look at at culture that never stopped dancing. Um so I'm really excited for today's episode. You know, growing up in the 80s, it felt like dancing was everywhere. In those days, oh my god, I sound old when I say that. Uh we had MTV, music television, like it actually showed music videos back then. Uh you know, we had unforgettable films like um uh Flashdance, Footloose, uh Dirty Dancing. You know, we even had films that weren't about dance that had like memorable dance scenes. Um and I think that those scenes like they had some pivotal emotional breakdown to them. I mean, I right off the top of my head, I'm thinking of Breakfast Club when they might have enjoyed on some herbs, and uh or even Ferris Bueller's Day Off, where one of the funniest scenes of the movie is this whole parade scene dancing to the Beatles. But uh, you know, the movies they weren't about perfect cinematography or choreography. I got the words wrong. They weren't about choreography, right? Cinematography is the filming. Uh they in my mind I got the sense that they were about freedom, that the dancing was the moment when characters they they let their worry go and they just simply became a a better, I don't know, I want to say a better version of themselves, but a freer version of themselves. And now I look at today, and it feels like we are inundated with incredible dancers. I mean, social media is filled with like meticulous, meticulously core graphed uh TikToks and and routines. And and it's left it leaves me to wonder if is that why we're afraid to dance? Because of a fear of comparison. And uh I don't know, maybe if we go back and watch those movies and realize that you know the dancing was was uh it wasn't the ultimate goal of anything, it was just about a getaway. And that brings me to uh a personal story. It was maybe a year ago, I don't know, probably two now, but I went to a father-daughter dance, and it was a Taylor Swift themed father-daughter dance, pizza drinks, crowded room, a little too hot for my comfort, but a room full of dads celebrating their daughters. The girls were dressed beautifully in dresses and gowns, and uh, dads did their best to look snazzy, and I felt myself pulling off the dance floor as my daughter kept pulling me onto the dance floor, and I felt myself being judged, and I know she had a good time because we still think back to that time, but I think that I should have had more fun and should have been more relaxed and enjoyed myself, and so I want to ask you uh, you know, when was the last time you danced? You know, and I'm and whether it's in public or just by yourself, you know, are your experiences like mine? Do you feel that sensation? Or you know, are you free and you just will dance anywhere? And I'm not talking about, you know, you were at a wedding and you were swaying your feet and you're like, yeah, I was dancing. Um, I'm talking the real stuff. And for some people, you know, moving to music in public can feel like a nightmare. Oh, we we we freeze, we stiffen, and and and I want to know why. Why do we feel silly? Why do we feel like we can't just move? So the kinesiologist in me, I went searching for answers because I want to know what science tells us about what I'm what we're feeling, and uh what I found is is pretty interesting. Uh, and I'm gonna do my best not to sound teachery here, but I mean it's a lot of information, but I think it's good stuff. I mean, uh for some of us, it's not that we're bad dancers. Uh I've never been the best, so I'm gonna say that maybe there's no guarantees to it's not you're a bad dancer. But you know, what I've discovered through all this is that it's our brain is trying really hard to protect us. Uh, there's actually a psychological term for this, and it's called the spotlight effect. I don't know if you've ever heard about it, but I'm pretty sure you felt it before. I want you to imagine walking into a room, and when you do, you are convinced that every person there notices any awkward step you take, uh the way you're dressed, you bump into something, or you know how you move. But here's the funny thing about the spotlight effect most, if not everyone, is not watching you. The funny fact is that most people in the room are feeling exactly what you're feeling. Okay, we're all feeling the same feeling, some of us are just better at processing it or dealing with it. But this is where it gets really crazy. Once you start moving, research has shown us that when people move together, even something as simple as swaying back and forth to a same beat, our brains begin to synchronize. Okay, it's really crazy stuff, but the crowd, the people you're around, even if they are strangers, they no longer give you that sensation. It starts to feel a little bit like a community, like it's your tribe. And I don't know, it it you can almost feel when it happens, right? At first, you're you're counting your steps, or you're you're rocking back and forth with everyone, and you're following the music, and next thing you know, you're laughing and having a good time, and that's where you stop worrying about how you look. You start making sure you're in the rhythm. You your body has a totally different conversation. Instead of focusing on yourself, you are now enjoying the movement with everyone, and the psych there's a term they have for it, it's called flow. Uh, and athletes know about it, and musicians know about it, and artists know about it. It is, they describe it as that wonderful moment when you stop narrating your life and you start living it. It's crazy. The the stress hormones they begin to fall. Chemicals, the endorphins in our body that help us feel connected and relaxed, they begin to rise. And incredibly, the thing you are afraid of is the thing that will help make you feel better. But as I was going through all this, I really I wondered, you know, why do we go from unbridled children who will be goofy and silly and dance and play and have a good time, uh, and then we shift to these adults who experience the spotlight effects, and we get into our own heads, and you know, as I look at this, I'm not trying to be a psychologist, and though I would love to get one on the show so we could revisit this topic, but I went through more of the research, and what I found is that children possess this natural, well, it's not so much that they possess it, it's they have an egocentrism, right? They they're not really capable of seeing the world from any other perspective but their own. Yet as we mature out of that, uh you know, something else steps in. And if you look into the history of us, you know, our ancestors, we lived in in interdependent groups, right? So thinking way back, this is our our our ancient history, but it still seems to resonate with all of us that uh we were trying to fit in, we wanted to avoid rejection because that could be the difference between life and death. You know, being aware of how others perceived you helped prevent social exile. And that spotlight effect as it comes back around, you know, it acts like, as it says here in the definition, it an evolutionary mechanism urging you to monitor your social standing. You know, it's so funny being a dad, one of the things I love to do is start to embarrass my children. And picking up my daughter from school, one of the things she's afraid of is, as she describes it, social death from embarrassment from her father. I think it's a privilege of being a dad. But there's also this great term, and it's it's called the illusion of transparency. And uh the way this one's described, it's it's where we falsely believe, right, that that that our internal state, all the the doubt, the anxiety, our nervousness, and our fears and our embarrassments are painfully obvious to everyone around us. And that's of course what turns on the spotlight effect, and but no one really notices how you feeling. Oh they they don't truly know how you are, so uh it's something we need to recognize and find ways to let go. But as we move past the science aspect of this, I then wanted to look at culturally, you know, I sometimes I wish this podcast came with like a television budget because I'd love to tell you right now that you know we're walking down the streets of some great city like Buenos Aires and we're watching people dance and have a good time. But uh no, I had to do all my traveling on the internet and reading and and and watching and listening. But uh, as I think about this culturally, I wondered, is is this is our discomfort with dancing human or is this cultural? And the more I looked at this, it became very obvious to me that it's different here than it is around the world. Um dancing in the rest of the world, dancing is is something you participate in. It's not you know just about watching a performance. Now I'm gonna give a couple examples here. In Argentina, you have neighborhoods that gather to do a uh they're called Miolongas, and it's a dancing gathering for doing the tango. Uh in Ireland, children grow up learning the oh, I'm gonna slaughter these names today. I just feel it. The Kaylee. I hope that's right. Dances, you know, these dances are part of weddings and and festivals and part of their uh family traditions. Uh across India, millions of people gather during the Navatri. Uh they dance different dances. One's called the Garba, another's called the Dundri Ras. Dundi Aras. I'm so sorry if I slaughtered that. Oh, I wrote these down, even I wrote it down with enunciations, but you know, between my nasally tone and uh my tongue getting twisted. Anyways, between like West Africa, Brazil, you have dances that are just celebrated by the peoples. Hey, even if you go travel to the land of the hobbits, right, New Zealand, they have a dance that many people have witnessed at like start of rugby matches. It's called the Hakka. And that's not just for starts of sporting events, it is something celebrated through graduations and honoring loved ones, and even marking some of the biggest moments in people's lives. And then my travels took me to Asia, and I saw some really neat stuff going on. Um, you know, you have traditional dances still going on, like in the Philippines, Taninkling is still a big deal, but younger generations are finding new ways in China to connect old traditions with modern music, they're blending like hip-hop and electronic dance music with centuries old music, like the instruments and they're they're bringing it all together, and you have the dances and the clothing, and a way to keep that culture alive. And these communities, they don't they don't ask who's the best dancer, or at least in my travels, as I looked through these, that that wasn't what came up. They were more about who's joining in, who is celebrating this with us, and that brought me back home here to the states. And I've I was left feeling why does it feel so different here? And it's not that we as Americans don't, you know, we dislike movement. I think that's far from the truth. I mean, we fill stadiums to watch sports teams, we have marathons and turkey trots, and and there are billion-dollar sports leagues here. I I truly believe that we love movement, but I think one of the problems is that we've kind of changed where movement belongs. Uh I think it has drifted away from something we did and to something we watch. Dance became performances and competitions. It was something that the professionals do. Uh, you know, it's like it's just not something that ordinary people do anymore. And and I feel like maybe we don't dance anymore, or it's not that we've forgotten how, maybe we're just afraid because we don't see anybody else doing it anymore. I mean, if if all you have is these incredible people on social media to compare yourself to, well, it might prohibit you from enjoying dancing. And you know, it's it's this this that thinking that brings me back to a quote from President John F. Kennedy. And I'm probably gonna slaughter that as well, because that's just the route I'm on today. But I think the phrasing was he had worried about the day we became a nation of spectators instead of participants, and you know, I'm afraid that might be true now. We have so many things that we watch and so much less that we actually participate in. And there are a lot of things that uh that just you know once seemed normal and familiar in an everyday routine that don't seem the same anymore. You know, beyond dancing, I'm I'm talking about things like walking or riding a bicycle to school. I see so few of that, so little I can count it on one hand. Uh sitting on your front porch. Uh is it because it's just too hot? I don't know. But I've neighborhood pickup games. I don't see that at all. Now I am fortunate that we live in a neighborhood where the kids do play, but you know, whether it's being this nostalgia and trying to remember street games, I don't see the kids do it anymore. And how about this one? Do you when was the last time you heard anybody go out for dinner and dancing? I don't know anybody that does that. And you know, none of these things, they didn't disappear overnight. I think things went from normal to optional to gone. And after everything, you know, I've kind of thrown at you today, uh I sort of wonder, is this why dancing feels uncomfortable today? You know, is it because we don't practice being awkward anymore? I mean, yes, when I'm teaching, I'm awkward. I feel comfortable in a room full of kids dancing and being goofy. That's fine, because they expect it. But you know, outside of there, I wonder why we don't dance as much. I mean, dance doesn't ask for anything other than you to just do it. I know that it has exercise benefits and all these positives, but it doesn't take you anywhere, but it helps you on the inside. It makes you feel better. It it reminds you you're alive. So here's my challenge to you. I want you the next time you hear music to dance. Do something silly. And especially if you're younger, do it. Don't not do it, because let me tell you something. The future you is not gonna regret it. The future you will regret that you sat out. So, what do you think, guys? That was the first episode, first full episode. I'm kind of excited about that, and I'm really thankful that you uh stuck with me today, and I uh hope you enjoyed today's conversation. I think uh I wrote it down here because I feel like the lesson here isn't to think your way into dancing, the goal is to dance your way out of overthinking. Alright, don't be afraid to go out there and look silly. I promise nobody's watching. And if they are, hey, maybe they want to join in. So if you like today's episode, do me a favor, subscribe. That way you don't miss any of the future episodes. I always appreciate a rating and a review. And hey, if you can, share the show with a friend. I'd love to get your feedback and your feelings about what we talked about today. Don't forget we've also got the website movementsherpa.co and my cleverly named Sherpa Shop. Uh my next episode, we're going to shift gears and we're going to be talking about walking. Well, that's our journey for today. Do me a huge favor. Go outside, lift your face to the sun, and move around a little bit. It doesn't have to be perfect, it just has to be yours. I'm your movement Sherpa, and I'll talk to you next week.