3 Things to Transform Yourself Through Hobbies
A year in Salsa dancing
Real connections on the dance floor and total rejections both transformed my personality from shy to outgoing.
“Can we dance?”, I’ve asked girls many times.
Salsa dancing expanded my relationships. The Cuban-influenced partner dance was how I met people from all over the world — America, Canada, Italy, and Taiwan.
I bet anyone can get better results in a much shorter time. Here’s how.
Step Zero: Pick a Hobby
Pick a hobby, or better yet, why not enroll yourself in your first dance class?
If you’re into personal development and improving your relationships, it’s hard to miss the benefits of investing in hobbies at any stage of your life.
Hobbies have this natural effect of bringing people together, either by making friendships stronger or by meeting strangers.
Shared interests can also spark up a romance. For example, activities like language exchanges or hiking are fun ways guys and girls look for potential partners. The people you meet at bars are vastly different from the people you meet at churches. Later on, having a separate set of hobbies and friends helps keep a marriage healthy.
Having taken upwards of 200 hours of dance lessons, I can confirm that a private dance class with close friends, or a special someone, will leave you with memories filled with laughter.
Hobbies also influence the perceptions of people towards you. I’ve introduced friends to each other by what interesting stuff they do outside work. I say, John does Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. So and so does this and that. When they introduce themselves, they start by saying, they like traveling, love learning new languages, drink craft beer, or do wine yoga.
I don’t doubt them, because it takes just one session at the gym to claim that you do Thai boxing, for example. Not that I agree with doing this.
Realistically though, it took one short, mildly intense year of committed effort for dance to make an impact in my life.
The three things that contributed most to my growth were finding great teachers, remixing what I know, and appreciating who I am today.
One: Teachers
Learn from those who have done it already.
Life today makes it possible to connect with many skilled persons around the world. Megacities, remote work, and ease of travel are examples of trends that enable us to spend discretionary time to absorb new knowledge. It’s easy to use weekends, time off work, and vacations to attend workshops, retreats, and classes that fit our schedule wherever we are.
- Go to a local studio every day. This was what I did to embody dance.
- Mix traveling and learning with Airbnb Experiences
- Spend holidays as an art apprentice with Vacation with an Artist
- Get accountability with other hobbyists at Meetup.com
- Diversify knowledge with teachers who have different perspectives: Skillshare, Udemy, Coursera, Youtube
The key is learning from people who are more experienced. Find opportunities to do the hobby together so that you can watch them how they do it. And also pick up their attitude and passion.
Keep in mind that the more experienced a person is, the more likely they’re unreachable. The most common approach to be near them is to take lessons, basically exchanging money for their time and expertise.
In-person classes are the most efficient way to pick up new skills. No instruction beats having an expert show you how something is exactly done. Add the ability to compare your progress against students of different skill levels, and you’re in a perfect place to learn.
Cheap airline tickets and lodging make it possible to visit teachers in nearby countries. And if attending in person doesn’t work, there are online courses on the internet.
Two: Remix. Break the Rules.
Learn the rules and break them.
Social dancing grew to be more than just a hobby after a year of weekly parties. But I knew that if I stopped I would lose the person I had become — the sort of muscle atrophy you get when you stop exercising. So, I kept going. I kept on even though the dance studio I go to every day for almost a year closed down. I was not discouraged even when friends stopped social dancing.
So there I was on the dance floor, bored. I was dancing but I wasn’t adding new moves to my set and my usual group support was gone. I reached a plateau, which I would later learn to be a recurring pattern. Months would go by before I got out of this rut. There I was between a habit and a real change in personality. I was almost calling myself a dancer.
Fortunately, the human mind eventually creates something out of boredom given enough time to wander. Spending time in real boredom does breed solutions.
One of the ideas to come out of that time was “breaking the rules.”
In the dance studios of the world, teachers pass down dance patterns and musical sensibilities. Students study and replicate these movements, carefully mimicking the timing and energy. The result is a momentary experience of what it’s like to connect with music, the dance floor, and the dance partner.
Dancers, as they grow, eventually discover how to break down patterns given to them by teachers, and recombine them into different variations. Discoveries happen sometimes unexpectedly. Magna Gopal, a Salsa social dancer, calls these accidents “beautiful mistakes”. While other times deliberate planning and practice unearth novel combinations.
This act of remixing, or breaking the rules is common practice for creatives. For example, Western painting history is crowded with artists who broke the rules of their eras by remixing elements. I first heard this probably when I was drawing comics.
Early cavemen started with stick figures, then symbolism mostly based on religion was incorporated by medieval artists, while later on two things, a technique called perspective and a new material called oil paint were both used during the renaissance to push in three-dimensionality to flat surfaces. And more recently the concept of abstraction replaced natural forms of beauty in the 21st century.
When the artists remixed and broke rules they also changed their identities. This relationship is documented in the 43 million search results in Google for the keywords “breaking the rules and creativity”. There are another 134 million results for “identity and creativity”.
Artists have continuously redefined the art of their times. In turn, these artists became rebels and mavericks. History called them expressionists, abstract painters, and renaissance artists, among other names.
Back on the dance floor, the moment I combined moves in new, interesting, and surprising ways, I felt more present. I remember telling myself, this is me. I did this. I’m a dancer now.
Three: Appreciate
Appreciate who you are today.
Appreciation is a skill just as important and essential as hard techniques. Appreciation not only helps you go farther and stay longer but also helps the hobby have a lasting effect on your life.
In my first 50 dances, you would not have seen me smiling or laughing a lot. Anyone who watched would be inclined to say I wasn’t having fun. To be fair they would have been right because feeling happy was just a rather tiny part of what I was after. Fun was nearly beside the point.
Now, I’m looking forward to my 200th dance. Thanks to having chased immersion for the movements, music, and dance partners. Immersion is more useful to think about.
Happiness is such a huge nebulous word anyway. It has no real meaning. Don’t use it that much.
Another way to express appreciation is to learn about different forms and styles of dance.
For example, in the parties I frequent, the dominant fashion for couples is to move in a linear direction. It’s no surprise having received mixed reactions when I got creative by adding circular movements on the floor. Some girls hated the combination, some liked the novelty, while some didn’t seem to notice at all. Rather than pick sides as to which style is superior, dancing both styles got me more dances in a night.
Don’t get me wrong. Focusing on a single style one at a time is efficient for learning dance. But staying narrow has little effect on keeping things enjoyable. Delight lies in being open and creating as many opportunities for dancing.
Appreciation is also a journey inwards without besting other people.
I’m not the first and only guy to have combined dance moves and styles in the way I did. Nothing I have done so far on the dance floor contributed anything unique to the encyclopedia of all dance moves in the world. Anybody could dance like me.
But nobody would ever feel the way I did. The important journey I was on is unique, surprising, and wonderful.
I like the truthfulness of the words of dancer and choreographer, Merce Cunningham. He said:
“You have to love dancing to stick to it. It gives you nothing back, no manuscripts to store away, no paintings to show on walls and maybe hang in museums, no poems to be printed and sold, nothing but that single fleeting moment when you feel alive.” — Merce Cunningham
The search for that feeling of aliveness is true. Even though I’ve been more outgoing, I also believe that the more I dance, the more I become a person who seeks meaningful moments. Both in and out of the dance floor, I’ve started seeking and won’t settle for less.
