It’s too hot in this conference room and I’m sweating through my blazer. On the way up to the podium, I trip over someone’s laptop charger and almost drop my notes. The screen freezes on the second slide of my presentation, and then someone walks out of the room while I’m in the middle of a sentence. I need to sneeze.
Needless to say, this presentation isn’t going the way that I had hoped. This is a big conference and there are important people in this room, but things keep going wrong. What should I do?
Once upon a time, that would have been the end of the story. The panic would have set in. Flustered and overwhelmed, I would’ve forgotten everything I once knew about aerospace, including the name of my own talk. Eyes downcast, I would have mumbled my way through the rest of my slides, praying that no one asked me any questions. And then I would’ve fled the stage, retreating back to the safety and anonymity of the audience.
But now? Now, I can relax. I take off my blazer. I make a joke about tripping, and I wait serenely for the screen to unfreeze. I notice when the woman walks out, but I don’t let it distract me from the rest of the audience that’s still here. I let myself sneeze.
So, you might ask, how did I achieve this state of zen? When did I acquire these nerves of steel? Where did I learn to embrace chaos and uncertainty instead of letting it knock me off my feet? Exactly where you think: at a ballroom dance competition.
Aside from being a casual Dancing with the Stars viewer, I knew nothing about ballroom dance before I came to MIT. I had just moved across the country to start grad school, and I was looking for a new hobby. Something fun and easygoing, where I could make friends and take a break from the demands of research. I found something else.
Now, a master’s degree later, I’ve just wrapped up my third year on the MIT Ballroom Dance Team. I was looking for a chill, stress-relieving hobby and I accidentally joined a competitive ballroom dance team. Whoops. But I love ballroom dancing, and becoming a competitive dancer has changed my life for the better in so many ways. It’s made me the kind of person who can laugh instead of cry when things start to go wrong. And if that sounds silly to you – don’t worry, I’ll elaborate.
Most types of competitive dance involve the dancer or the dance group performing a set routine one at a time for a group of judges. These steps are choreographed far in advance of the competition and, while there can always be mishaps, the routines are practiced in exactly the same way they will be performed. Ballroom dance is different.
During a ballroom dance competition, around fifteen couples are squished onto the dance floor at the same time. And each of those couples has their own unique routine that they intend to dance. Since each dancer has no idea what everyone else on the floor is going to do, they have to be prepared to change their plan at any moment. A couple might have to suddenly change direction to avoid colliding with other dancers. Or they might run out of space to do the step that they were planning to do and have to try something else. Or another couple might crash into them and throw them off balance. And throughout all of this, they have to keep dancing and looking beautiful and smiling like everything is going perfectly. It’s dancing, improv, and a beauty pageant all at once. So, how do they do it?
Maya in a ballroom dance competition. Image used with permission from Studio by Hope at the Big Apple Dancesport Challenge. All rights reserved by photographer.
Each person in a ballroom dance partnership has a different role: one is the leader and the other is the follower. The names are pretty self-explanatory: the leader is the one who decides which steps to dance and guides the couple through the traffic on the floor. The follower detects what the leader is doing and, you guessed it, follows the signals that they receive. The leader and the follower communicate only through their physical connection–no talking allowed. Because of the direction of most dance steps, followers spend the majority of their time on the floor moving backwards. This makes it hard to see where they’re going or what obstacles are in their way. As someone who dances as a follower, I have to rely on my leader to keep us out of trouble and trust my own ability to understand what the leader is trying to tell me.
When I step out onto a competition floor, I have no idea what’s going to happen. I can’t see what’s coming and I can’t read my leader’s mind to know what they’re planning to do, so I always have to be prepared for anything. And I mean anything. Don’t listen to anyone who tells you that ballroom dance isn’t a contact sport. I’ve been shoved, kicked, tripped over, and elbowed in the head during competitions. I’ve also had my shoe fall off of my foot mid-dance. All of this in front of an audience and a panel of judges.
And so I’ve had to learn to keep my cool. It certainly didn’t come easily to me, but over the last three years, I’ve gotten used to it. I’ve discovered how to expect the unexpected, how to smile through pain (sometimes actual, physical pain) and uncertainty, and how to recover quickly when things go wrong. I’ve actually learned to enjoy the feeling of not knowing what’s going to happen and to relish my own ability to adapt to whatever does. I’ve found that I like the way that it gets me out of my head and into the moment of what I’m doing.
And, without my realizing it, these lessons began to seep into other parts of my life. Before, when I was giving a presentation, I would memorize a script of exactly what I wanted to say. And then, when I inevitably messed up and deviated from the script, I would panic and forget everything. Not a great strategy. But now, I approach it like a ballroom competition. I learn my material instead of just memorizing it. I think about what could go wrong and I prepare for how to deal with it–writing myself notes with my main talking points, making extra backup slides, saving the presentation as a powerpoint and a pdf, etc.
And when things do go wrong, I can lean into my skills as a follower and think on my feet. If I mispeak or mess up, I stop and take a moment to collect my thoughts – it’s better to stop and start again than to keep dancing to the wrong beat. If something goes wrong, I stay calm and make a joke about it. I try to make it seem like whatever happened was the plan all along. And, I listen to my audience. In my pre-ballroom days, I would block out the audience when I was speaking–it was all about me getting through the script in my head. But now I know how important it is to stay present, to pay attention to the reactions of people around you. After all, the audience is who you’re doing this presentation for. And thanks to ballroom dance, I can do all of this with a smile (only slightly forced) on my face.
Obviously, this entire blog post has been a shameless plug for everyone to take up ballroom dancing. If you’re at MIT, you should seriously consider checking out the MIT Ballroom Dance Team… But even if dancing isn’t your thing, if you’re looking for a way to improve your confidence and skill as a public speaker, I highly recommend taking up some kind of performance or competition-based activity. That could be dance, music, theater, improv, sports, competitive Rubik’s cube solving–whatever speaks to you. Learning how to do anything under pressure and in front of an audience will benefit you for the rest of your life. When you’re facing an uncertain situation or when things start to go wrong, you will know how to stay calm, cool, and collected.
And if you don’t believe me, go watch a ballroom dance competition.