Dance, Humanity, & The Power of Movement; With Global Dance Educator Alexandra Beller

In this episode of The Creating Victory Podcast,  Amy J sits down with long time dance friend and master dance educator Alexandra Beller.  Alexandra shares a lifetime of insights on the creative process, the power and importance of contradiction, and raising capable youth in a post Covid world. 

Alexandra’s career has impacted the arts community for over three decades.  Her choreographic works have been seen around the world and include the prestigious Helen Hayes Award, Lortel Nomination, RNE  for Best Choreography, 

Her international performance career includes 7 years with the Bill. T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company, projects with Martha Clarke, John Turturro, and others. Alexandra Beller/Dances formed in 2001, and she has created over 40 original Dance Theater works, for her own and other companies. Her choreography has been presented at theaters throughout the US and in Korea, Hong Kong, Oslo, Cyprus, St. Petersburg, and Poland.

Says Beller, "I am focused on working with movement as a way to access creative authority, embodied clarity, and deep personal voice. My work supports artists, teachers, activists, facilitators, and guides to strengthen their inner compass while leading, creating, and communicating."

Alexandra holds a BFA/Dance, MFA/Dance and CMA (Certified Movement Analyst) in Laban Movement Analysis/Bartenieff Fundamentals.  She is on faculty at Princeton University, Rutgers University, and The Laban/Bartenieff Institute for Movement Studies,. She also has a private Somatic Therapy practice, and has consulted with numerous institutions about curriculum planning, syllabus 

Alexandra has a book due for release soon. Check her website for updates. development, and pedagogy including the 92nd St Y, LIMS, and Dancio.com. 

More info at: www.alexandrabellerdances.org and www.alexandrabeller.com. 

https://www.instagram.com/alexandrabellerdances/

Alexandra's book-The Anatomy of Art-will be available this summer at:

https://www.anatomy-of-art.com/

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Today's episode of the Creating Victory Podcast welcomes global award winning choreographer and master dance educator Alexandra Beller. Join us as we explore the power of contradiction and working with movement as a way to access creative authority, embody clarity, and deep personal voice.

SPEAKER_01 0:18

Hey, hey, it's Amy Jay, and we are back with our newest episode of the Creating Victory Podcast. Thank you for listening, sharing, downloading, subscribing. We are here to make the impossible possible with the power of movement. And I have known today's guest for many decades. I'm not gonna say how many because we're still very youthful. Alexandra Beller is one of the world's leading dance educators, an amazing dancer, choreographer, teacher, motivator, advocate, inspirer, mother who's created programs and processes to help dancers internally and externally, and people and prove the power of art. So Alexandra, I haven't seen you in forever. You look exactly the same, as beautiful as ever. Thank you for taking some time and share a little bit about all the amazing things you've done. I know you danced with Bill T. Jones, and you just came back from a residency in Texas, and you've been all over the world, and you're literally creating victory.

SPEAKER_02 1:38

Thanks, Amy. It's great to see you after all this time. Oh 15, 16 years old when we were dancing together in these adult dance classes, open dance classes in you know, 80s New York. Oops, I aged us. So yeah, I had a professional career dancing with Bill T. Jones. I left to start my own company. I really wanted to choreograph. That company still exists, though it has morphed from a performance and devising company into an education company because I switched over to choreographing for theater. So now I mostly choreograph for plays off Broadway and off off Broadway in New York and regional theater. And then I developed a teaching practice many decades ago. Got a degree in something called Laban and Bartiniev, which is a way to look at the human body and be able to analyze every aspect of human movement towards meaning. And so that goes into both healing practices, which I do one-on-one with clients, and artistic practices, which I do both in my own art and helping other people to find their own artistic voice. And I'm just about to release a book in June called The Anatomy of Art, which is about unlocking the creative process for dance and theater.

SPEAKER_01 2:59

This is all just so encouraging and inspiring. And you're such an amazing example about how our lives as artists transform. Because you know, when we're young, we were at the height of the early MTV days, and we'd go hang out at Joe and Terry's house and watch class videos and eat pizza. And I remember that night. And things change. We grow, we evolve, our bodies change, we get injured, things happen. We have children. So share a little bit about that sort of transformational process for you and what you see with you know your own students and clients, and how to it doesn't mean, and I share this when I'm working with young people too, it doesn't mean that your artistic endeavors are over, they're just gonna evolve and transform and how you support people in that process.

SPEAKER_02 3:54

Well, I think that accepting ourselves as we are at every juncture is a critical component to any kind of both our own happiness and our ability to grow and our ability to serve others. And so even for the you know, 19-year-old that feels quite able-bodied, able-minded, etc., there are always aspects of the self that require more radical acceptance in order to have more empathy, have more insight, et cetera. And so I think, of course, when we encounter trauma or aging or instability, crisis, obstacle, it forces us to some kind of crossroads where we do not accept uh ourselves as we are. I have had quite a few of those junctures. I was paralyzed on one side from a birthing injury and have had two hip replacements. And so lots of things have happened to my body, kind of from the outside, some from the inside. And then there's also been a lot of, you know, the expectation and assumption and stereotype and critique from the outside of my body as somebody that never had the typical body type for a dancer. And then I hit menopause and everything changed again. And I think I've just been on a slow roll journey to increase my own accepting what is in the moment. And the somatic practice that I teach the most often, which is called Bartania Fundamentals, is really about that, like listening to the structure, the physics, the ability, and the consent of the body as it is in this moment. And I think some people conflate accepting ourselves with a lack of change, like stasis or apathy. And I think it's really the opposite. Like until we're in, okay, this is what is right now. From this, I can go anywhere I want to go, or I can aim anywhere I want to aim. But until I'm really like with myself in this moment, I can't really go anywhere else because I'm not whole. I'm not bringing myself to the next thing. And I think it's a real failure in our narrative when we say, oh, if I accept myself, even heaven forbid, love myself as I am, it's a way of saying, I have no interest in changing. I'm not gonna change or I'm not gonna grow. And I think it's the exact opposite. And, you know, people will throw this at people with a larger body, like, oh, if you love yourself, then you're saying it's okay to be this way and you're not trying to get X, Y, Z healthier. You know, there are all kinds of stereotypes in there. We don't even need to break apart. But first of all, you can love yourself and be working vigorously towards change. Right. And you can love yourself and say, I love myself and I'm interested in this being myself, you know, for as long as it feels right. And I'm not suggesting any one or the other is right, just like what you want, but the conflating acceptance with stasis is a huge false thinking.

SPEAKER_01 7:31

You touched on so many important things, especially in this day and age in this social media culture and these park. We didn't have that. You know, we just got to work on our craft, we didn't go to class to get video. We didn't have to, it was about going to class and enjoying the community. And now it's so much about the external and how many followers and this we've completely the things that are supposed to be connecting us the most are actually pulling us apart from ourselves and everyone else, and what's really important, especially as artists, and one of the things I've respected about you most since the days of early that I've known you is you're just force of nature because you're an extraordinary dancer and an extraordinary human, and staying so grounded in that no matter what, is really a beautiful. I mean, I was caught up in that as well of I'm not this and I don't look like this, and I'm not that. I let it kind of derail me. So I think in this culture, and what are you finding as we're so deep in this divisive social media, everything what is it? Tamron Hall called it an optical illusion of how to stay grounded in yourself and focused on your work and improving. And like, isn't this the point of class? Is to become a better dancer and a better human and work on our skills, not worry about how many followers we're gonna get from the combo that we're filming at the end, if we get chosen or not. I don't know. Hi, crazy.

SPEAKER_02 9:22

And I don't even I haven't taken class in a long time, and I certainly don't do that kind of stuff in my class, like me neither to a detrimental point. I have zero footage of like most of the things that I've done probably could stand a film shoot sometime. You know, you using that term optical illusion is such an apt metaphor because the way that an optical illusion works is we have this blind spot in the center of our eyeball because that's where the eye connects to the brain. So the physical eyeball connects through the optic nerve to the brain, and where that optic nerve is, you actually have no vision. But our brain sees everything that's surrounding it and makes up what's in that blind spot, which is why somebody can craft something where they put something exactly in that blind spot. You cover one eye and you like don't see it, and then you cover the other one, you're like, oh, there's something there that I never saw. And so it's such a great metaphor that you chose because there is no reality. There's no one reality. We have perceptions, we all have perceptions. And just like this, the brain neurologically makes up what's in that blind spot by clocking every little bit of information that's in all the other spots that have vision. But like all those spots that have vision are directions of perception. So each of us has some direction of perception. And together, maybe theoretically, they do form some kind of picture, but we can't see it because we're fighting with each other. Imagine if your eyeball, if your brain fought with itself about like, well, this part of the eye sees this, and this part of the eye sees that. But it learns how to collaborate and coordinate, negotiate all of the different bits of perception it gets into a reality that becomes our individual reality. If we could figure out how to have, I mean, this is what hive mind would be, right? Like in the best possible world. Hive mind would be that we as a series of individuals had some kind of ability to allow all of our individual perceptions to be part of a whole. And just like in our individual bodies, we would learn to accept the whole of that reality with all of its contradiction. And I do think this is one of the things, and this is one of the things I talk about a lot in the book, is that we've really been conditioned out of not only accepting, but really celebrating contradiction as uh an elemental, fundamental part of the human experience. And we are always being shamed and coached and goaded out of contradiction as being part of every human being's reality. Many things are true for each person at the same time, and they can conflict with each other.

SPEAKER_01 12:21

I mean, it's the state of the world today, right? Like I am this, I have some big things happening I can't discuss right now. But as I'm looking at this next phase, it's like nothing is all good or all bad. So for suddenly, like, well, I'm this, and I'm not even gonna look at that because it's and it's uh intended thing by the powers that be to keep us at each other, which is a podcast for another day. So, how to get back to that place of like nothing is all good, you know, exactly what you said, there's contradiction is in everything, and that's actually a good thing because it forces us to kind of critically think, which we're learning less and less to do.

SPEAKER_02 13:03

So and if we think about how the body is actually built, which is not on a system of simplistic levers or stacking the weight of body parts, you know, they used to think that we were kind of like a stack of blocks and there's your feet, and then your legs sit on top of it, and your pelvis sits on top of it, and they finally realized, well, that's not possible. Your feet would break in about uh five seconds with that weight on it, right? So obviously the weight is pulled in all of these really complex torques called biotinsegrity, and that's the way the world works, and that's the way our lives are sculpted as well. The biotinsecrity of our life means, you know, I'm pulled in this backwards direction, but I'm also pulled in this downward direction, and I'm also pulled in this side with, and the accumulation of those, of course, it they can get too strong and they can pull us apart. But in the best scenario, that's what actually keeps us standing and moving and whole, is that we have these various tensions and they are pulling against each other, countertension, counterbalance, any dancer will tell you, is essential for being able to do anything you want, right? And anything virtuosic requires that there are things pulling in opposite directions, nothing's just ever going in one direction, or we would collapse. And the same is true for us emotionally, socially, psychologically, intellectually, politically, right? Nothing's ever pulling in just one direction. And until I think we can really celebrate not only our contradiction, but our general fundamental complexity, really accepting ourselves.

SPEAKER_01 14:45

I love that. I have to really wrap my brain around that for a little bit. I love that these are ideas that we get to talk about and think about. And so share a little bit. I know you just finished a book that will be out in June. How did that come about? What was that process like? What do you want people to gain from it? I think your voice and all of this is so relevant and important right now. The more people we have sharing these ideas that nothing's all good or all bad, basically, in simple terms, the better off we are. So already it was a long it was a long process.

SPEAKER_02 15:28

It it will have been by the time it's published, it will have been about a decade since I started it. But there were definitely really long fallow periods where I didn't pick it up for, I mean, during part of the pandemic, I don't think I picked it up for a year and a half. So it wasn't 10 years of just straight working on it, but I do think it's significant to me that it took a decade because I feel like I finally came to the voice, and it took me a long time to really accept what some of the book really wanted to be, which is I thought I was writing more of a workbook help book that was supposed to be a mentor for choreographers and directors to make their work, and it is that is what it is. But I thought it would be more technical than it is, and all that technical stuff is still in there. I'm give you plenty of tips about using time in different ways and breaking habits. But what really started to develop as I stuck with the book over a longer period of time is that I started to defy the mythology around art and healing as being siloed. And I think we have this myth that once you say the word healing in an artistic context, people who are artists will roll their eyes or scoff or snort and be like, oh, so like therapy, that's not gonna be like good art. Like, I'm not gonna want to go to the theater and see that. Like maybe I'll come to your fundraiser because you're doing good things in the world and I'll like clap for you because you deserve applause, but you're not gonna make something I would actually want to go out and watch or bring my friends to, right? And I think that's utterly false. I think some of the greatest art in the world is healing for the people making it, the people creating it, and the people watching it. And I absolutely do not think that there is a separation between art and healing or that there needs to be. And I really hate that this is the stereotype or myth that like when you say art is healing, you suddenly imagine a bunch of like white ladies in white, long white dresses down by the river, like doing some really cheesy, cheesy like a walk, yeah. Pray to the sky and pray to the water and hold our hearts and cover our faces, and like that's great, that's wonderful. I'm super happy they're doing that for themselves. To me, it's not that art can't be healing, it's that healing is not necessarily art. And I think that's where we start to get this weird mythology. And people look at the ladies down by the river, and they're identifying what they're doing as art and they want an audience for it, and they want that to be treated like high art, and people accept that definition and then say healing doesn't belong in art, right? And I feel like, no, maybe art doesn't really belong in healing, that healing is not a process that really requires an audience. It may require a witness, it might require celebration from the outside, it could require a community, support, but it doesn't require an audience in the sense that, like when you're making art, you're making it for the sake of an audience. I'm gonna offer something to you in order to help stimulate something for you, an idea, feeling, an embodiment. And I'm condensing and saturating and compressing the human experience into metaphor and imagery the way that dreams do. Neurologically, dreams do the same thing. They take facts from your life and they compress it down in a similar way that AI, large language models like compress into their coding so that they can capture like copious amounts of information, which is why they go off sometimes because they're really using this like compression method. I think art does the same thing, it compresses the lived experience into images and metaphors and weight sharing in a way that we as other animals can like receive it in an almost enteric neurological way. And that is a very particular thing. Making art is a very particular thing, and it is in large part, yes, it's about you expressing yourself, but in large part, it's also about crafting for the service of an audience. And I don't think that healing should do that. I don't think that healing is at the service of somebody beyond us. And so it's never healing is never, maybe not never, but it's rarely gonna be a crafted artistic experience. And I think we should stop putting it out that way and let it be like I'm doing this women's healing circle down by the river. If you'd like to either witness or do it, come join us. It's a healing adventure journey. Great, wonderful. And if you would like witnesses, make a call for witnesses, absolutely, but it's not a performance. Yeah, and the minute we start making it a performance, we start to dilute that word healing that absolutely has a place in art. And I think that's probably something that people who are doing healing work as art won't enjoy hearing. And I understand that that probably could feel erasing or uncomfortable. Maybe it's a controversial opinion, but I feel like there does need to be some separation between art and healing, but we didn't create the separation at the right juncture.

SPEAKER_01 21:16

Right. And everything in this current moment in time is about marketing and audience. And I know as a choreographer, we have what, 90 minutes maybe, and my goal is always to have an experience for the dancers in the audience to give them a moment to think about something or feel something, but then anything from there is their own experience, interpretation. Like you said, not for an audience. If it sparks something, then great. And sometimes and we've really lost this, I feel just art for dance because you want to dance. It doesn't always have to, you know, these big TV shows and competitions and the bat and it's all great and it's inspiring and all that. And I don't want to diminish it, but sometimes when we were in we would just dance because we love to dance. And that's it.

SPEAKER_02 22:18

There didn't have to be a big context about well, and also, you know, if you really start thinking more archaeologically about like where dance originated in culture, yeah. It was always about community, expression, joy, relating to the divine, processing feeling, being authentic, being authentic together, being authentic together with witnesses, being authentic together with witnesses in a way that you served the witnesses and their witnessing served you in this symbiotic way. And when the scale of who we're thinking about gets too skewed, and you're talking about like the likes and the follows, or the money, or the marketing, like it's a way of skewing who is being served. When it gets so skewed, we lose contact with the deeper why of dance, which I do think is one of the most healing activities we can engage in because no matter where you were born, what skin color, what religion you were born into, if any, what political ideal, etc., movement is everybody's native language. There is no human being on the planet for whom movement is not their native language. We learn a verbal language second. And our native language is movement. And when we engage with it, we are speaking to the whole human species. That sounds hyperbolic, but if you think of it, reposition that and say, imagine that we had a native tongue, like a native spoken language, and from years zero to like three or four, we all spoke, every human on the planet spoke just this one language. We go like science fiction thought experiment. And then from there, depending on what country, geography, whatever, you start learning separate languages. If everybody remembered that native language, we would all be able to communicate with each other, regardless of our country of origin. And movement is that language. And at some level, we could communicate with each other if we spoke the language, but a lot of people have forgotten that language. They learn zero to three. So if it were like a verbal language and we did all remember it, we could all speak to each other. If not, the people that did remember it could speak to each other, and they still wouldn't be able to communicate with others that had forgotten that language. And we're coached into forgetting that language or devaluing it when we go to school and they tell us to now sit in the chair, look straight, don't talk, don't move, right? And we're not given artistic aspects of our education. They're barely given physical aspects to their education. When it is, it's this ableist, you know, gym class, which, you know, nowadays is still like, well, oh wow, you have gym twice a week. Great. As opposed to like you should be having some kind of movement thing every single day. Honestly, I think in pretty much every subject, there should be a way of engaging the body, including in math and in science and in history. It's like figure out how to engage the body. It would be a radical restructuring of the education system and pedagogy, but I think it would create incredibly more well-rounded critical thinking, but also the embodiment of the thinker is going to lead to individual thinking. So not sheep thinking or brainwashed thinking, but like, well, but my body did this or my body said that. And that's not necessarily what your parents would say or your whatever your pastor or your, you know, whatever would say.

SPEAKER_01 26:32

And it would also bring us back to our trusting ourselves because when you're working in movement from your own body, then you're gonna trust your reactions. And we could go on all day about the arts and education. Hopefully, I will soon be able to speak to that. But it's high on my list of priorities of things that need to come back, transform for obvious reasons and health reasons. You know, we're seeing so much chronic illness, which is a whole other thing. But so thank you for that because you know, and like you said, music helps mathematical skills and helps us learn rhythm, and it's no accident that our education system is where it is, and we don't really have time to get into that. But art brings us together, it's a universal language and helps so, of course, it's gonna be under attack.

SPEAKER_02 27:34

But anyway, there's a great YouTube video. I think the it might be Jonathan Bokhauer. I could be wrong about that, but I think it's called the Modest Proposal and it's a TED talk. And the person's giving a physics lecture, but they hired a dance company to essentially do a visualization through dance of the physics, and it's so beautiful. And the proposal is basically like movement should be part of every part of education, right? Like we it literally is our native language, and if we start speaking it again, we will all start having a way to relate to each other.

SPEAKER_01 28:16

Yes, which would be amazing.

SPEAKER_02 28:18

And then I also think that if people were really in their bodies, they wouldn't be trying to be so cruel to other people's bodies, they wouldn't be trying to take away their rights, they wouldn't be judging them based on their skin color, and they wouldn't be judging them based on their access to their body and their access to limbs or their nervous system or you know, uprightness or whatever. Because if you're really in touch with your body, you're also in touch with, as we were talking about before, the contradiction and the limitations and the lack of access that you have in whatever way it is, whether it's social or neurological or emotional or physical, spatial. And if you were really in touch with those, you'd have more empathy for others and you wouldn't be trying to take away other people's rights or rights to, you know, heal themselves in the ways rights to adapt the world to their needs rather than always adapting their needs to the world.

SPEAKER_01 29:15

Yes, and yes, I have to say to that, and I can't wait to share what's coming in my world. But I know you also have two, I think now college age, both of them.

SPEAKER_02 29:27

One in college, one just started high school.

SPEAKER_01 29:29

Boys amazing. And just share with everything you know. Like, I just feel like the process of raising children in our current culture is I have mad respect because I could barely manage a cat. So, how do you help them evolve as capable, competent? Did you send them to school? Did you homeschool?

SPEAKER_02 29:53

Yeah, no, I was not in a position to homeschool, and I don't think I really have the personality type to homeschool. I wouldn't have had the patience for that. And I was lucky enough in Brooklyn to have, you know, even within the public education system to have some pretty like liberal, progressive, inclusive schools, and of course, lots of issues still with them. It's not easy. And, you know, bringing two kids through the pandemic and through this political era of really like fascism, the level of classism that's coming back, and really facing the levels of racism and xenophobia and misogyny that we're facing right now is heavy. And there's a lot of failure in that I feel like I can't really prepare them. I can't really protect them. I can tell them my beliefs about caring about other people, about leading with love, about being an authentic person, about the power of vulnerability. I can teach them about how much it serves you to help other people. I can teach them to try to use a scientific level of logic to check in with their ideologies. So try to dismantle it. Like try to figure out what would make this come apart. So if I'm like caring about other people is always gonna be a better outcome as long as you're also protecting your safety and yourself and your energy, and you're not letting yourself accused or abused, right? But can you tear that argument down? And I feel like try to tear it down. I think it's a good practice to try to tear it down. I've not been able to tear that one down. I can tear down ones that are about discrimination or, you know, ways in which we stereotype people and then make assessments about them without their collaboration. I can pretty much always find a way to tear that down. So I'm like, try to tear down your own ideologies. Yeah. See if they'll come apart. And if they do, figure out what those weakness are. Yeah. What did you leave behind, or who did you leave behind? So I can teach them that, or I can share that with them. And you know, they'll pick up what they will. And there are many places where I've fallen down on the job. I've absolutely let them have fairly unfettered access to social media and screens and internet. And I've done what I could do, and I have been far from the parent that I imagine in in my head. And they are both very loving humans, and they both are currently identifying as male and straight, and we're white, so like I've raised two straight white men. And they're for the most part doing a pretty good job, you know. There's always more to unpack, but I do feel like they see it, they see the system, they see their uh responsibility to uh shift uh their entitlement in the world and to step back and to listen to other people and to let other voices in the room and to not always be first. And I'm trying to share that those ideas with them without making them feel like their existence is wrong or flawed while still saying you are a precious, glorious creature and you are valuable and you're worthy, and you have every right to exist and to have a voice and to take up space. And traditionally, people that look like you when they come into a room, they take up more than their share of space. Yeah. So I want you to take up space, but I want you to also like take some responsibility for trying to rebalance. And so sometimes maybe you don't take up as much space, even as some other people in the room, because you're gonna try to repattern something that has been unfairly patterned, and you're gonna try to make a little gesture towards giving a little extra space to somebody, or using your space to afford somebody more space or the microphone. Yeah. And it is a hard balance to strike when you're raising white boys to say, and I think I overshot it for a little period of time, and my eldest was like, Sometimes I just feel like I'm not really supposed to be, or I'm like, I feel just bad all the time. Like, oh, white men are the worst, and so am I the worst? And I was like, okay, I have to also continue to celebrate you. Yes, but I'm trying to celebrate the things that I I hope they will celebrate, which is like, I'm celebrating how well you can read a room, and I'm celebrating how big your heart is and how generous you are, and I'm celebrating this amazing, like goofy dancing that you do and how much joy it can bring to people. And I'm not celebrating you for like a grade or your six-pack or a you know, a trophy or like I don't care about those things that much.

SPEAKER_01 35:34

That's amazing and inspiring. And maybe someday you'll write a book about gracious parenting and you know, transforming one literal step at a time. I know we're a bit out of time. Is there anything closing you want to share to our youth, to our culture? Where can we find you? I know you work with private clients. I know you have a class at Gibney for all people, everything. Yes.

SPEAKER_02 36:05

All people at all stages of humans, yes. Yeah, all humans. And I have like really seasoned professionals that come in that class, and I've had people with braces on their legs that you know you use crutches, and I've had 70-year-olds and 16-year-olds. So it really is a class about being in the body that you're in and finding flow within that body. Yeah, the best way to find me is just through my website, alexandrabeller dances.org. And I think if I wanted to leave with like a closing idea, it's that starting to release embarrassment as a driver for our choices is something that I think we find way too late in life. And I would really invite younger people, when they feel the discomfort of embarrassment, which usually means you're trying something new or you're being vulnerable or you're taking a risk, to notice that feeling and reframe it. Say, ooh, embarrassment. I'm on to something. Okay, how do I need to take care of myself inside to be able to stick with this embarrassment? How do I need to take care of myself? Right. And it's not about sharing less or doing less or being less, taking less of a risk. But maybe it's about finding a way to take care of yourself after or get some validation for it or modulate it a little. Like maybe I'm gonna dance my butt off in this class and feel like I might make a fool of myself, but I'm not gonna choose a place in the front of the room. I'm gonna do it in the back of the room. Maybe I'm going to take all those risks, but then I needed to go do something really safe. And I need to go like be eight years old and like go have a chat with somebody that really nurtures me and feel like I'm not on display now. So I just would say trying to reframe embarrassment as a metric of success. Like, I'm on to something. This is the feeling that lets me know I'm taking a risk. That risk is gonna grow me. I'm facing a challenge, I'm feeling uncomfortable because I haven't been here before, because I'm growing and changing, rather than, oh, embarrassment, I better back off. And I wish that I hadn't taken quite so long to learn that. And I would love it if I could see younger people just embracing embarrassment as a really good sign.

SPEAKER_01 38:43

Because it is my gosh, thank you. So many things that I'm gonna just really wrap my brain around in the coming days and weeks, which I always appreciate. Friends, the amazing Alexandra Bellar dances. I've known her for a long time. So, again, thank you guys for downloading, sharing, subscribing. Our whole goal is to create value and inspire people to just do their things. So thank you all, and we'll catch you next week.