The Casual Dance Teacher's Podcast

Maia
Welcome to the Casual Dance Teacher's Podcast. I'm your host, Maia. No matter who, what, or when you teach, I'm here to share all my best tips and tools, along with real and practical conversations with fellow dance educators to help you be the very best dance teacher you can be.

Let's talk about it.

Hi everyone. Thanks so much for joining me for another episode today.

I mentioned at the beginning of this season, season two, that we would be getting into some more topics of identity and discernment within the world of being a dance teacher. It's something that I'm actively going through right now and kind of changing the way that I approach what my career looks like within this field. So it's, it's relevant to me.

And I wanted to have a lot of conversations around what I'm going through. So I'm just putting it out there and sharing it with all of you. I hope you guys are appreciating it.

So when today's guest reached out to me and pitched this particular topic, I was like, oh my gosh, you have to come talk about this with me as soon as possible, because this is so very relevant to my life. And I think a lot of us in the field of teaching dance, where we probably started out as dancers, I think we had to have started out as dancers, right? I hope you're not teaching dance if you haven't danced before. So we started out as dancers, and then we become dance teachers.

And I'm sure many of us are still performing, still working in the dance world. Some of us may have stepped out of that and gotten more into just teaching dance. And all of these questions arise, no matter how you're going about that of, do you identify as a dancer or as a dance educator? Does it have to be one or the other? What if you want to identify as one particular thing, but you feel like that world doesn't really have space for you? And what do you do once you've decided on the identity that looks best for you to make sure that you're not just settling into that and getting stagnant and not allowing for the opportunity for continued growth and development and change? All of these questions, I had no idea when I went into this conversation.

So that's why we have today's fabulous guest on the show. And that is Stephanie Case. You might also know her as Mind Coach Steph.

She's a mental wellness and peak performance coach who helps dancers, athletes, and high-achieving women strengthen their mindset, identity, and purpose, both on and off the stage. Stephanie has a background in dance leadership, years of coaching experience, and has trained as a clinical mental health counselor. And she bridges the gap between mental health and performance.

Steph is the founder of Inner Champion Coaching and the creator of C.H.A.M.P. Framework, empowering individuals and teams to lead from within and perform with presence. Through coaching, speaking, and team programs, Steph is on a mission to elevate mental strength in high-pressure spaces where it's often overlooked, which I think is really what we're going to be delving into today. So without further ado, let's chat with Steph.

Steph, thank you so much again for being here to talk about this really important and sometimes really intimidating and confusing topic today.

Stephanie
Yay! I'm so happy to connect and be here. I've loved listening to what you do, so I am thankful for the opportunity.

Maia
Yes, and we've tried to connect a couple times now and it finally is working out, so I am super excited to talk to you. Can we start by getting into your dance background a little bit? And then because we're talking about this shift and kind of identity of going from dancer to dance educator and the journey that we have to take as dance teachers within that, can you talk about how that worked for you and kind of where you are in that process?

Stephanie
For sure. So I basically, you know, every dance teacher's story, grew up dancing.

I started like at age three and I just did it for as long as I could do it. When you reach those like late teens, early twenties. And I actually did a little pivot into Latin dancing at that time because I felt like, you know, that's the only place that would accept me at my age where I can continue dancing and still doing what I love, but not being restricted by the age requirement.

So I continued doing that for several years. I still do that up to this point. I coach Latin dancers, co-own a Latin dance studio, and I've done it competitively, like all of the things.

But I started noticing one common trend with a lot of the dancers that I was working with. Because once you're working with that population, although I work from kids all the way to adults, a lot of that population is people like me who transitioned out of the traditional dance space into Latin. So they're at a pivotal point.

They're at a pivotal point where they're like, I want to keep dancing and I want to compete and still keep doing things. But there's like the shift in identity. So I started seeing this common trend with everybody.

And nine times out of 10, a lot of the block, a lot of the challenges leads to mental challenges, mental wellness challenges. I can talk about identity for days and days and days and days in different aspects within dance. But in the, what we're talking about now, just in that transition, put it in this form.

If you've grown up doing something your entire life, and this is how you define yourself. And then you're at a pivot point where you feel like you've reached the end of the tracks and your only option is to A, teach, because that's what everybody just knows. Like how do I keep doing dance as an adult? Or B, like start over and find something else.

So many people struggle at that pivot point. So a lot of the educators out there are just doing it because that's all they knew was the next step. And so you have a lot of educators who are not mentally resilient, not mentally strong, because they're just kind of going along and they're not making like real strategic plans for themselves.

They're not really diving into their identity. They're not auditing their lives, they're just not doing all of these things that are necessary for the whole person. And then they end up battling more serious issues later on down the line.

Sorry, I was just ranting on there.

Maia
No, well, maybe, maybe you were. But in any case, it really resonated with me.

I guess I want to start because there's a lot of points I'd love to touch on there if we have time. But can you start by talking more about auditing their lives? Like, what is that all about? Can you tell me more about that?

Stephanie
Absolutely. I am very much a believer that the best fulfilling lives that you live is if you're doing something that's purpose driven.

It doesn't mean that you have to have like a bullet point for every day, every month of your life to put that stress on yourself. But you do, you should align yourself with some type of purpose. And just loving what you do, that purpose will only take you so far.

As educators, I asked this to a lot of instructors, I said, OK, so you love dance, but what is your purpose as an educator? Just to teach steps? What do you want to be remembered as by your students in 10 years? What are they going to remember you as? Just a good teacher? So that personal mission statement is super important. What do you want to put down on paper as the legacy that you're leaving behind as a dance educator? That question is so hard for so many people to answer.

Maia
Do you think that's because a lot of dance educators are still kind of trying to cling more to their identity as a dancer than as a dance educator?

Stephanie
Absolutely.

You hit it right spot on. They're also afraid to leave that identity because they don't know anything else. So that's where a lot of that self-discovery comes in.

I always joke around and say, hey, you know, people say dance is therapy, but dance is a form of therapy. Maybe it should not replace the work that you have to do for yourself, that inner work. Because once you get off the dance floor, once you leave what you're doing, you still have to, you know, lay in bed and think about what is it that you're doing the next day? What is it that you're doing with your life? So that, oh my gosh, I can go on and on. Reel me back in here.

Maia
Okay. Yeah. So what we've talked about, like those two identities kind of and grappling with that, but I also want to talk about the interplay between them. Using myself as an example, I graduated college with a degree in dance. And at that point in time, I still wanted to have dance in my life, but I was pretty burnt out from the daily class and the performing that happened in my dance program.

And so I, I personally wanted to shift my focus. And when I started teaching regularly, that was something that I really latched onto and felt that I was very competent and really excelled in the area actually of education and have continued to kind of hone those skills. But I also moved to a very rural area where there's not a lot of opportunities for me to take class and perform myself.

So throughout this whole journey of feeling like I'm becoming a better and better dance educator, I also have been questioning myself of like, well, can I really say I'm a good dance educator if I'm not frequently continuing my own education and being a student and a performer myself? Because I know so many accomplished dance teachers have these really rich performing careers prior to that as well. So I don't actually know what my question is. Hold on.

Can you just maybe talk a little bit about the interplay between dancer and dance educator? Do you think you have to have both at all times? Do you think there's a shift that happens at some point? What does that look like to you?

Stephanie
Absolutely not. And that's a question that many, many dancers and educators kind of face. Yeah.

It's almost a sense of imposter syndrome that you kind of feel because you're not doing all the things that you did before. And honestly, some of the best educators are no longer actively dancing. It's I don't know.

It's a myth. It's fictional that people believe that they have to be doing these things. Yeah.

You have to redefine yourself. You have to say, OK, I am not a dancer. It's hard for a dancer to tell themselves.

I am not a dancer. I came to that realization a while back where it was hard for me to let go. Right.

But I put that in clarity. I'm not a dancer, but I'm a mentor. I'm a leader.

I'm a vessel. I am a storyteller. I'm a healer.

I'm all of these other things. And so once I learned how to redefine my purpose within dance, it was a lot easier to let go of the dancer title and label, because I'm like now I see myself as so much more than a dancer. I have so much more to offer in this space and I can help so many other dancers.

So it's really about making that shift in your mindset as to what you're defining as a dancer.

Maia
Yeah. Do you have any tips on how to start that process? Practices that people can do if they're grappling with their identity within the dance world?

Stephanie
For sure. I mean, the first thing is that there has to be more work on your own mental wellness. And when people think mental wellness, they just automatically think like a mental illness, which is very different. So those affirmations, that self-talk, that boundary setting, how you're supposed to be laying out this path for yourself is a practice.

There's no magic wand for it. There is actual work and practice. There's so many grounding techniques that ground you to remind you of like who you are at your core.

I always start with like a burnout prevention type of plan because there's so many dance educators out there who are just at the brink of burnout and don't even realize it. And it's not what they're doing. It's just that they're not taking care of themselves in different ways, different rituals that can be done to kind of get you in that headspace and ready.

Because honestly, who you are is up here. Your body is just your vessel. Everything is up here.

So once we work on that, there's so many dancers I work with that have aha moments like, oh my gosh, some of the stories I can tell you where they thought that this is what they wanted to do or they thought that they wanted to be a dance teacher. And then they turn around and realize, like, I honestly don't want to do this. Like, I just don't have a sense of any other sense of purpose.

Again, there's several techniques that kind of lead you to really discover that inner self, that inner champion within yourself that can be worked on. It's really tough when you don't trust your own brain, I think, and you don't know how to allow your brain to tell you what you actually want and need.

Maia
I definitely see the application for dance teachers. And I love that you shared that. I'm curious if you think as dance teachers, we should also be bringing this up to our students. I think that might be a tough step for some dance teachers, especially if you're in a rigorous program and you're pushing your students.

But if you see them start to maybe be losing themselves a little bit where you feel, oh, this student clearly is like identifying very strongly just with her success in the dance field, for example. Do you think that would be a time to potentially intervene and maybe bring up trying to do some practices to allow the dancer to explore what other components of her identity might fulfill her as well?

Stephanie
A hundred percent. So I honestly believe that this is not something that has been prevalent, at least when I was growing up in dance.

Yeah. I almost feel like it's something that should start when you're working with young dancers, because once you develop that discipline, once they're younger, they won't come up with the same issues that we have later on as educators. I think it's a responsibility that dance teachers have now.

Like, again, before it was not talked about. Now it's more prevalent. So now, like, you know, with great power comes great responsibility.

And focusing on what's going on as a whole person for your dancers is going to have them perform better for you, period. The confident dancer doesn't come from telling someone to be confident. It comes from them having a strong inner purpose.

It comes from them having a strong understanding of who they are so that they're unshakable. And so if educators are trained more in this for themselves, they can pass it on to their students.

Maia
Yeah. I'm going to circle back a little bit, and I might be opening a can of worms here, but I have to talk about it, especially because we did later get into imposter syndrome, which I think is very accurate for how I felt throughout my career. But one of the very early things that you said was that you turned to Latin dance as an adult because you felt that that was the only place that would accept you. Can you talk a little bit more about that? Do you think that that was a result of maybe like your own internal bias and feeling imposter syndrome? Or is that a reflection of the dance community and sort of the identity politics within the dance community as a whole or probably some of each, I would assume?

Stephanie
Oh, absolutely. I'm actually glad you're asking that because it's something I'm super passionate about. So I am the first one to admit that coming up in dance, I struggled with identity the whole entire time and it just reached a higher peak, a higher mountain once I did not have the traditional dance path to follow. So I already was shaky, to say the least.

So when I got to that point where it's like your body's not doing the things that it used to be able to do, everyone is faster, quicker, like all of these things that you work so hard at for so long. When I got to that point where it's just like, oh, so what is next for me? I just looked and jumped into the first. I'm like, hey, I like my family has Latin background.

I was like, I like it. So let me go into that. And I held on to it because I felt it was the only place that would allow me to keep doing what I was passionate about.

And I did it for a very long time. But honestly, I never took the time to really say like, is this what I really want to do? I did it because it was the only place that I could do or I could be, you know, could continue to dance. And that is so unfair, you know, that's very unfair.

And at least I had that outlet. I see so many people who go through school, kind of like your story, go to high school, they graduate and all of these things. I had someone tell me, like, I've done all of these things and I continue to do it because of what my family invested in me.

And so now I'm an adult and I feel like I've wasted so much because they invested in me and this is not what I want to continue to do. Do you know what kind of pressure that is on a person? So that imposter syndrome comes in because you feel like you're just faking it to make it like, let me just keep doing this. It's like, yeah, this sounds really good.

I'll teach this because I don't want people to see me as a failure. I did this my whole life. I can't just say, hey, now I want to just turn around and do something else.

Yeah. Imposter syndrome is so closely related to identity because if you don't know who exactly you are and want to be at your core, you are basically, I say, cheating on yourself.

Maia
Have you worked with people who maybe were kind of clinging to that identity of being a dancer and then through some work maybe found that it wasn't the dance component that they really needed in their lives at all, but they were able to apply those same skills and parts of it that they enjoyed to something totally different?

Stephanie
Absolutely. I am, and if she's listening to this, shout out to you, but I'm currently working with someone who really continues to dance up until this point. Now that she's been doing a lot of the work, she realizes that where her passion truly is, is in production, like actually creating opportunities in the back end. Like she really has no desire and passion to continue to do this.

And she was going almost into a depression because she just felt like, not to put too much out there, but she even like owns a studio, she does all of this stuff and she did not, she was not happy. She was so unhappy. Through doing some of this work and self-discovery work, she found another avenue to kind of produce things that got an artistic theater sense where she is just producing.

Like that's what she is passionate about. I even have some people that I've worked with where they are not interested in anything in the arts whatsoever. They want to work in education in another sense.

So just translating some of their strengths and their abilities into other areas and helping them find that pathway is just something else that has really, I've enjoyed the evolution and that's why I say the program that I work with educators is called Inner Champion, because we relate our championship to like trophies and medals and things and awards and acknowledgments. But there's so much more inside, so much more that we can attribute our value to.

Maia
Yeah, I love that. So Inner Champion, you mentioned that I know you offer a lot of services. Some of them are around this idea of like identity and taking care of your mental health and abilities. And then you also offer some other services as well. So can you talk us through some of the different things that you offer and the best way to connect with you? Y

Stephanie
es. So I offer quite a bit, but it all starts and progresses. So the first thing we work on is that inner self-discovery, igniting yourself from within.

So your clarity, because you should be able to tell anybody what your purpose is, what your mission statement is, what is your, why do you do what you do and what is the legacy that you're going to leave behind. You should be able to just run that off. And that's a struggle for some people.

So we start with that, defining our purpose and our core values. Then you graduate into Inner Champion, which is typically educators working with teams or classes and groups, people who are pouring into other people. So now you're learning how to help apply that to your teams for peak performance.

Right. So there's that's the level two of it. And then I have what's called Pivot, which is, OK, all of that sounds great, but I am at my wits end.

I'm at the edge of the cliff. I just want to completely change. I want to do something else.

I want to figure out what that thing is. And I want the path on how to get there. And that is the Pivot program.

You're just completely pivoting where you are in life right now and trying to find a new path before you feel like, hey, I've wasted two decades of my life doing something I hate doing. So that's the coaching that I offer. And if you are in the Maryland area, I also offer mental wellness therapy for those who are maybe struggling with different mental issues as a dancer or as a dance educator.

Maia
Awesome. So if folks want to get more information, reach out to you. I know we've connected via some socials. Can you share those with us?

Stephanie
Yes. So the best way to reach out or to connect is through Instagram. Honestly, that's like my platform of choice.
I'm on many things, but that's the one. And it's at Dancing Mind Coach. So you just find me on there or www.mindcoachsteff.com.

Maia
Perfect. Thank you so much. Before I bring it to a close like I normally do, I kind of had mentioned like I'm going through a lot of changes right now myself and struggling with all of these things. So not only is this like personally just so nice to talk to you, but to hear that I'm not alone in it and some of your tools that you recommend, I'm definitely going to be applying. So thank you so much. I really appreciate it.

Stephanie
Thank you so much. Like, I'm grateful to be able to offer this space because I know that it's not as talked about as it should be. So there's a lot of us out there.

Maia
Yeah. So do you have a favorite quote pertaining to dance in general or to any of the subjects that we talked about today to share with us?

Stephanie
Yes. I don't say this all the time. You actually triggered me to have a quote.

"Your role may change, but your purpose does not vanish. It evolves. The dancer in you is still leading."

Maia
Hello again, this is Maia with our episode wrap up, and I wanted to start not only by saying thank you again to Steph for really delving into this complex subject with me, but I also wanted to give one more little plug, I guess, for Steph and you can find this information in the show notes for this episode as well. But after we recorded this episode, Steph shared with me that she had a book come out called Be You Brand, Your Story, Your Business, Your Way. And in that book, Steph shares a little bit about her own personal journey and identity struggles.

So if you're interested in learning more about her story that she just kind of touched upon in this episode, you can check out the book. Again, I have linked it in the show notes, and I will also link to Steph's website where it has links to the book as well as her socials, all of the different services that she offers that she talked about on the show, etc. So you can certainly connect with her that way.

Thank you again to Steph. Thank you as always to GB Mystical for our theme music for the show. And thank you to everyone who continues to connect and share on the Casual Dance Teachers Network Facebook page, the Casual Dance Teachers Podcast Instagram page, and just among your own studio spaces, friend groups, networks, etc.

I appreciate it so much. I often ask for reviews, which if you haven't left a review, I would certainly love it if you would do that now. But I very seldom remind you guys to subscribe to the show.

So we do put out new episodes every Friday. If you're finding every once in a while you get behind and then you're like, oh, yeah, I have to catch up on episodes. Go ahead and subscribe to the podcast on whatever platform you typically listen on, and then you'll be sure never to get behind or miss an episode that could be really helpful to you.

Thanks again, everybody. See you on the next one.