Dancing To Your Own Tune?

Last Updated On: 21 September 2025

Let’s look at the importance of finding your own clarity in order to live life on your terms, and connect with your talents authentically. Easy to say.

As a talented women performer you have talents, it’s a given, but are they as highly valued as they ought to be? Is there a struggle between wanting to work, developing your skill through experience, while simultaneously attracting equality in your field, alongside male counterparts who’ve traditionally been awarded higher pay at lower rank.

While updating this post I’ve learned that HBO have committed to equal pay for women actors, it’s a start!

Who do you think you are

Corny question because it resorts to the title of a well-known TV show but…

• Who do you think you are?
• What makes you who you are?

Can you see that as you grew-up you were strongly influenced by the beliefs of your caregivers, when you look at the beliefs and values that are influencing you now, to a greater or lesser extent, until you reframe them.

As a kid and adolescent when you start meeting other people from different family, social and cultural backgrounds you realise that other people do many things differently, as your beliefs bump into theirs. The influencers you meet come through; friends, hobbies, mentors, passions, relationships, career choices, teachers and lucky break opportunities.

How do you deal with these where they clash with fulfilling your true potential, rather than a mini-me version of your parent/s?

In other words everyone carries out-of-date understandings about who we think we are, what you’ve achieved or not, because these are strong factors that can deeply affect your sense of place.

All of this factors into where negative experiences impact through unhelpful coping strategies and how you treat yourself away from the glare of the spotlight, home alone, in a loveless relationship, fending off poor coping strategies for letting off steam, and health symptoms.

Whose tune are you dancing to

During the seventies I was enthralled by all things modern dance; The Ballet Rambert, Isadora, Nijinsky, The Ballet Russe, Nureyev, Fontaine, Pavlova, Nijinsky. In a 2016 BBC documentary on the history of dance, Isadora Duncan is credited as it’s founder, as demonstrated by what claims to be the only surviving clip of her in action.

What experiences influenced her?

One aspect that drove Isadora Duncan was the poverty that overwhelmed her family when her parents separated, where from the age of six she and her two sisters taught dance lessons to other kids to bring in extra money.

My dance style was likely indirectly influenced by her because back-in-the-day I’d take to the floor barefoot, so that my feet could express themselves, along with my dance posse when we tore up many a Urmston / Stretford dance floor. We lived to dance to anything from pop to hard rock, and this collaboration between Peter Green and Carlos Santana was typical of the pace that invited some pretty serious arm wafting.

Being in your talents

Isadora’s style has a dream-child-like quality that that dances like no-one is watching as would a child at play.

Do you relate to the hardship from how her dance muse evolved, especially if you discovered yours during an especially challenging time where your talents provided an escape hatch that on some level saved you.

If you were hanging out in The Village / Hardrock in Stretford around the same time we’d no doubt have crossed paths.

I was an exhibitionist under the influence… which helped fuel my absolute need to dance, because I was so incredibly shy and socially awkward

If the type of support that’s around now had been available then I might have achieved more and known the value of what I bring to the table much sooner. We have to know it in order to develop the self-belief that focuses us on making it count for the real-life-experiences that drive yours.

I’m underlining my former experience – unfocused as it was – specifically because I was flaying around in the dark, without guidance nor any sense of value:

It’s taken so much longer than it needed to create better boundaries and I’m still in the throws of developing healthier habits of self-care that if I’d started earlier would have been easier… An even bigger reason for urging you to do things differently

The blame game

When I work with clients overwhelmed by passion, especially where they turn anger in on themselves, which is what poor boundaries flag up through self-deprecating over-indulgent or addictive habits and behaviours it needs unpacking in order to develop better self-love. As RuPaul says

If you can’t love yourself
How in the hell you gonna love somebody else?

Learning what your tune is is one thing, learning to dance it another. These days I identify as a dancer, because I feel it’s an innate ability (inherited from my mum) where I can’t help but feel the rhythm in music, words, the sound of a spoken voice.

I have no say in that one, and it confused me for a long time, I carried on drinking for longer than was helpful because of it i.e. I was too shy to dance in public without a drink.

I’ve since found that stopping drinking has freed me up on the dance floor because it turns out I was self-conscious about dancing when I’d had a drink. Who knew? I’m auditory, i.e. my memory is predominantly formed through sound, what’s said, tone of voice. I can throw out a regional accent as can my family, which has us laughing at each other’s whenever we get round the table for a game of murder mystery. Although we are a mix of the following there’s usually one that leads, what’s yours:

• auditory – hearing?
• kinesthetic – feeling?
• smelling?
• tasting?
• visual – seeing?

I mention these to demonstrate that as a person we are all a work of joined-up writing and finding, acknowledging and celebrating all those layers in you gives you a stronger sense of who you are. Otherwise this stuff has a habit of rising up and working against. Be out and proud of ALL your talents so that you can discover what they bring to the party of what is your uniqueness.

How can we embrace all that we are

The biggest difference you can start making today that tells your subconscious you’re serious about showing up and committing to changing how you feel is to:

Stop playing the blame game

When you’re on the hamster-wheel of over-thinking and wondering what caused what, like an unrelenting maze of Ground Hog Days and red herrings. But by switching this and get more clarity by putting your focus on changing what isn’t working rather than if only’s it leads you to recognising the part you’re playing in the issue, i.e because this is your dance! And staying in the blame-game harks back to influences that are still pulling your strings from the dim and distant:

• Children, family, friends
• Education and academia
• Health yours and others
• Lovers
• Stress and pressures
• The system
• Work and career
• You can name yours now

Does it make sense? Perhaps you’re tangled up in a similar choreographed piece, I was for decades, until I found better ways to unravel it. And what a relief to be out of playing the blame game now, because I was engulfed by it for too long, and this is why I’m so passionate about helping others change it sooner.

It’s a time sap
And takes you no nearer to finding effective solutions
What would you prefer to feel instead?

Stopping the shenanigans of that allows you the necessary breathing space to start noticing more of the practical steps you can take to reclaim control over your own destiny.

This leads to making better lifestyle choices, which bring more understanding of what drives an issue, and finding the right solutions for you. We are our own choreographers, which is empowering in of itself, especially once you start to make sense of where the story starts and ends because the next chapter sits so firmly in your own hands.

What hidden talents are you sitting on?
What are you denying yourself of by not fulfilling them?
What’s the worst that can happen?
What value will others get from your unique take?
What stops you?

Jane

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Step up to the mark

PS – Directing your own destiny begins by arranging a quick 15-min chat which kick-starts having more energy to develop what you really, really want.

Lights! Camera! Action!