In this experiment I confront a form of personal kryptonite: the feeling of dancing. I like dancing, but I have always felt I can’t enjoy it or learn to do it because I feel so dumb when I try. This creates a “kryptonite effect” wherein I don’t do it because it feels bad, and it continues to feel bad because I don’t do it.

Original Raptitude post here.

Over the next 30 days I’m going to do an online dance course on Udemy, and see whether it neutralizes this kryptonite effect through familiarity. I will complete the entire course, and report what happens. I will not be posting videos of me dancing.

This experiment begins January 19, 2024 and ends February 17, 2024. I’ll report periodically.

The Log

23 Jan 2024

Okay so I’m done the first of five sections of the course, and already I feel more comfortable dancing, at least by myself. I’m putting on music regularly and dancing informally around the house from time to time.

What I’m most interested in about this is exactly what happens when I dance that feels so unbearable. “Self-consciousness” is too abstract. What is it specifically that feels so bad? Is it a thought I have? A physical feeling?

It seems to be a thought, triggered by an awkward, off-balance bodily movement, where I see myself in third person as this clumsy dolt, pathetically trying to appear normal and not pulling it off. It’s just a flash, like a single subliminal frame in a movie, but it’s there.

Competing with this jarring feeling is a natural urge to move to music. This natural pro-dancing feeling is a lot more prominent than the bad feeling when I’m dancing, but I still get these flashes of that bad self-conscious feeling that make me want to stop. It’s early in the experiment but I feel like the reflex to heed the bad feeling is already being eroded.

Since my level of dance training is about 2.5 out of 1000 right now, I’m actually improving quickly. The course has already given me some easy go-to grooves I can always rest in, and a few moves to add on top of that. Until now I was only going by impulse, which meant doing a lot of weird movements to fill the gaps. Now I have a very basic but reliable foundation, and the dancing I do throughout the day feels better and less weird.

Some have asked what the course I’m taking is. It’s called Get on the Dance Floor by Mike Grosser. You can find it here.

30 Jan 2023

Just completed the next section, which was a little more challenging in the technical sense. The lessons had me things with my body that don’t feel natural (chest bumps, shoulder dips, etc). I’ll go back to them a few times and see how the feel a second time around. Overall dancing feels more natural and I’m doing it spontaneously more and more whenever music is playing.

One thing I realized during these last lessons is that I have dropped a lot of my perfectionist tendencies. I know that if I did this ten years ago I would have got frustrated with some of the moves, and insisted in figuring them out before proceeding — I was always so afraid to incorporate mistakes “permanently” into the way I do things. Today I’m happy to just let it go and move on to the next thing. I’m incorporating new movements all the time, feeling better and better, and I don’t need to perfect everything this particular instructor teaches.

After all, there are TONS of instructional sources on the internet for dancing. Now that I’ve always got a basic touch-step to fall back on, I can just start freelancing anytime, trying and learning anything under the sun. I’ve really damaged the personal taboo around trying to dance, and I can’t see how it could do anything but continue to erode.

I did buy a second dancing course when I got the first one, so I’ll go through that after this, and also some YouTuber videos. I feel a sense of abundance, because there’s so much out there that’s suddenly no longer off-limits. Capoeira? Moonwalk?

If anybody knows any good dance instruction YouTube channels, let me know.

11 Feb 2024

Over the past ten days or so I noticed myself avoiding the dancing lessons, although I’ve still been dancing now and then when I hear music (even in public, which feels great). I’ve figured out why though. The course I’m taking, while I credit it with getting me dancing in the first place, has lessons on moves I don’t want to do and which don’t feel good. So I felt stuck, because I believed I had to practice and incorporate moves that I have no interest in doing in order to continue to progress.

With great relief, I decided to allow myself to deviate from the course and try out other lessons, and now I’m finding a lot more there that I like. At this point, the course has done its job; it helped me establish a basic sort of touch-step groove that you can build absolutely anything on. Now I can just find dance tutorials of the stuff I actually want to do, and add in whatever I like.

My frustration with some of the lessons revealed another element of the learn-to-dance challenge for me, which is that I struggle with spoken instructions that have to be executed in time. This is why I always bounce off yoga too, even though I feel no self-consciousness about it. I can’t process all the instructions as they come at me — you know, like step-two-touch-four-five-six-slide-and — and I get really frustrated with it. It’s like trying to jump into a fast-moving escalator with missing stairs. I’m always really tense trying to simultaneously remember and execute a set of physical movements. In yoga they just go too fast for me, and I’m often trying to synchronize breathing with it — I just can’t process it at that speed and I hate the feeling of going through the motions without really getting it. In dance instruction it’s the same problem, plus the (now diminishing) self-consciousness issue.

I always had that feeling about dance/yoga-type instruction, but never quite realized what a problem it is for me. Now that I know that’s the source of so much of my aversion, I can slow down and deconstruct a sequence into even smaller movements, and put it together without trying to play catch up.

The only other issue has been that I forget to work on dancing. I think it’s worth scheduling regular dance periods a few times a week, or I might just forget. Somehow this experiment’s 30 days is almost up. I had intended to disintegrate the self-consciousness with sheer volume over thirty days, but I never really scheduled much volume. I need to dance more!

22 Feb 2024 – Final report

This was a humble experiment but one of the most worthwhile ones I’ve ever done. After a month of dancing a few times a week, it is no longer krypotonite to me. At the beginning, I felt self-conscious dancing to music even when I was at home by myself. That feeling is about 85% gone, and the more I dance, the more it diminishes. I can enjoy dancing now, even when others are around. I’m not great at it by any means, but it feels natural and I no longer feel bowled over by self-consciousness when I try. Just getting some fundamentals into muscle memory, particularly the basic step-touch movement, was enough to almost neutralize the kryptonite effect. The worst I can do is settle into this basic movement, and I know I don’t look like a complete goof.

As for the kryptonite effect in general, I think it usually works exactly this way: a little familiarization rapidly dissolves strong aversions to particular activities, even those built on years of avoidance, because it was always a paper wall. You don’t need years to undo it. Each dance lesson I did knocked off a huge amount of that initial aversion, and by the sixth or seventh one it was mostly gone.

If there’s something you want to do, but you feel stupid doing it, such as painting, drawing, dancing, playing a sport or game, telling anecdotes, cooking — anything others do freely but which gives you strong aversive feelings — a short campaign of repeated dives into it might just knock down a lifetime of aversion in a few weeks.

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