This weekend I attended a California Dance Festival.
One class I went to was called “Bachata Refinement.” I expected a discussion about footwork, timing, and technique. Instead, they kept returning to the same idea. **
Find your center.
Find the center of your partnership.
Connect.
At first, it sounded almost spiritual. Maybe even a little “woo-woo.” But as the weekend went on, I started realizing they were pointing toward something I desperately needed to hear.
I’ve approached dancing the same way I’ve approached everything else.
Performance.
Am I doing this correctly?
Am I good enough?
Do I look competent?
Do I look attractive?
Am I improving fast enough?
If I’m honest, that mindset didn’t start with dance.
I have multiple graduate degrees. I run businesses. I teach. I help people for a living.
Many of those accomplishments have been meaningful. Many have created opportunities I’m deeply grateful for.
But if I’m being completely honest, there was often another force operating underneath.
Fear.
A fear that if I didn’t accomplish enough, become enough, or prove enough, then maybe I’d discover something terrible about myself.
Maybe I wasn’t enough after all.
For years, that fear worked.
Fear is an incredible accelerator.
It gets people moving.
It gets people degrees.
It gets people promotions.
It gets people into the gym.
It gets people to build impressive lives.
The problem is that fear can tell you to run, but it can’t tell you where to go.
Eventually, many high-achieving people run into a strange problem.
The thing they spent their lives trying to prove starts to lose its grip.
You realize your worth isn’t actually hanging in the balance every day.
You realize you don’t need another achievement to earn your right to exist.
You realize the monster you’ve been outrunning doesn’t have as much power as you thought.
And then something unexpected happens.
The engine sputters.
For years you’ve been running on fear, obligation, and self-pressure.
Now those fuels don’t work the same way.
And suddenly you’re asking a question nobody prepared you for:
If I’m not trying to prove myself anymore, why do anything at all?
This is one of the hidden challenges of moving beyond a performance-based identity.
When your entire life has been organized around avoiding failure, avoiding rejection, or avoiding inadequacy, you can accomplish incredible things.
But avoidance is unstable fuel.
Once the threat fades, motivation often fades with it.
From a psychological perspective, this is one of the limitations of avoidance-based living. Avoidance can create action, but it rarely creates vitality.
Which brings me back to the dance floor.
The moments I enjoyed most this weekend weren’t the moments when I was evaluating myself.
They weren’t the moments when I was trying to impress anyone.
They were the moments when I became genuinely curious about the person standing in front of me.
What happens if we connect?
What happens if I stop performing and simply participate?
For three minutes, two people who may never meet again get to create something together.
There will never be another dance exactly like that one.
There will never be another version of that moment.
And suddenly the dance isn’t important because it proves anything.
It’s important because it is happening.
I think that’s the lesson I’m slowly learning about life.
Fear tells us that moments matter because something bad will happen if we fail.
Presence teaches us that moments matter because they will never happen again.
One is urgency.
The other is preciousness.
Urgency is easy to notice.
Preciousness requires attention.
It requires slowing down enough to see the conversation, the friendship, the dance, the sunset, the aging dog, the ordinary Tuesday afternoon.
Not because those moments prove anything about us.
Because those moments are our life.
Maybe a good life isn’t learning how to push ourselves harder.
Maybe it’s learning how to stay deeply engaged after we’ve stopped trying to earn our worth.
Maybe the goal isn’t to run faster.
Maybe the goal is to learn how to participate more fully.
And maybe that’s what the dance was trying to teach me all along.
Find your center.
Find the center between you and another person.
Connect.
The dance was never about the dance.
Drew
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