M.I.N.D.ful Monday Musings #025
Current State Of Mind
Hello beautiful humans!
First newsletter or October, apologies for being a little late, my brain was having trouble focusing today.
I was looking back at the month and I had a really awesome September and in addition to that I also posted content daily on social media (IG & FB) for 26 of 30 days.
Posting online lead to some very nice moments of serendipity that I talked about in my last newsletter, and leaning into publicly sharing my authenticity has really increased my mood. Something about sharing ideas is just very uplifting to my soul.
Sometimes I worry about annoying people from posting too much but I wonder about the flipside of not potentially inspiring people for not sharing what could be helpful. There’s a cool video I watched earlier today about recognizing and being grateful for people who have served as lighthouses in your life during dark times, and also being mindful of who you can be lighthouses for during their dark times.
Many other successful content creators post daily, and the followers have to adjust their consuming accordingly to follow along. I also saw a meme that shared we consume like 3 terabytes of information daily. Here’s an article on how much content gets created daily!
If social media isn’t your thing, getting a weekly digest here from me can definitely be easier to digest than swimming through a sea of random notifications filtered through semi-accurate algorithms on the bigger platforms. Granted I’m sure our email inboxes can also be unruly lol.
All in all, I’ve been feeling thankful for being me and loving my brain, appreciating my own company and thoughts, while cultivating relationships where we can both bask in the glow of each others authenticity.
To build on the idea of the communication channels in a dance class I would also like to introduce the concept of time and two other communication channels.
The two new communication channels are the leaders talking to one another and the followers talking to one another, I’m not sure how often this happens in a class.
If we were to number the communication channels we would have 14:
- Lead Instructor to Follower Instructor
- Lead Instructor to leader students
- Lead Instructor to follower students
- Follower Instructor to Lead Instructor
- Follower Instructor to follower students
- Follower Instructor to leader students
- Leader students to Lead Instructor
- Leader students to Follower Instructor
- Leader students to follower students
- Leader students to other leader students
- Follower students to Leader Instructor
- Follower students to Follower Instructor
- Follower students to leader students
- Follower students to other follower students
Introducing the concept of time we have before the class, during the class, and after the class. So each of the 14 communication channels could be used across 3 different time frames giving us 42 communication opportunities, if that’s what to even call them.
Going to continue to “cook” this idea, open to any ideas this may spark.
Thanks for opening and reading another newsletter from me! Enjoy the rest of the newsletter and your week!
Song I'm Currently Jamming To
An afro inspired remix of a R&B class that includes the word candy that I saw dancing to in a dope video on IG.
The R&B classic song came out in 1995, 28 freaking years ago. For you youngins out there, and yes there’s so much nostalgic value that goes into the blog I wrote about the timeless nostalgic power of music.
It’s interesting to be of the age to talk about throwbacks, I kinda did a kiz remix project around the time of the project, check it out if that interests you.
Recent Content
- I got a student to fill out the 16 count phrase using the musicality worksheet during a private!
- A meme about work & dance events.
- A post that got decent traction about being efficient with my energy on the social dance floor.
- A post about raw thoughts on blaming oneself and/or blaming others on the social dance floor.
- A blog about step 1 of becoming a better dancer.
- A photo of scar resilience.
- A photo of me zooming out of my interests across 4 domains.
- A reel of BTS of building out the recurring events feature for WCWD.
Photo of the Week
I don’t know what it is about this photo, it came up in my FB memories from 2 years ago. Obviously, even if the T-Rex had hair, their arms are two shorts, I wonder how a T-Rex with hair would look like? I will use AI image generation to come up with something to share next week!
Dance Meme of the Week
Courtesy of @harriskizomba
Cool Video I'm Watching
A cool video I’m watching on the habit of journaling.
A Huberman video podcast on music & our brains.
Upcoming Travel
2023
10/26-30: Bailame Dance Festival - Minneapolis, MN
11/3-5: Neokiz Weekender New York - Warwick, NY
11/17-20: Neokiz Intensives - Atlanta, GA
12/1-4: Attending Elevation Zouk Festival - Denver, CO
2024
05/3-6: Neokiz Weekender in Edmonton - Edmonton, AB, Canada
05/17-20: Kizowna 2024 - Kelowna, BC, Canada
07/20-24: 8th Annual Neo Kizomba Festival - Austin, TX
Question Of the Week
What’s one thing you can focus on to improve your dancing this week?
Answer of the Week
I got this question in one of my comments on my post of being a better dancer:
Hi Charles, I don't know what to do about my Kiz journey going forward without have someone to practice with routinely. It's hard to practice all on your own and get much better.
I feel like the answer has to come from figuring out what percentage of your time is going to be focused on local efforts or traveling.
80% local vs 20% travel or maybe vice versa 20% local vs 80% travel
Obviously expendable income plays a factor into travel expenses.
If you are going to focus local this person could host a practica at his house, park, studio and see if anyone comes out. I know house parties are a low barrier way to garner interest.
As far as finding an actual practice partner, that’s more difficult as availability, skill levels, dance goals are more kinda need to align more or less and that’s hard, but not impossible. Sometimes it means dancing with someone less skilled than you.
If you can’t find anyone locally to have a group or a practice partner, then I feel this person will need to lean into figuring out how many travel they can afford and maybe there you kind find someone who is also willing to invest in their learning.
Instead of going to a festival someone to drive or fly in for a training weekend if someone can host and has the space to train to make it more affordable.
This is what initially comes to mind for me.
Past Newsletters
You can view past newsletters here.
Dope Dance Resources
- A cool project to create a global directory of dance events for dancers, artists, and organizers!
- Find out how you can thrive at your next dance event with the Ultimate Dance Event Survival Kit.
- Find out how you can organize your dance journey with the Dancer’s Training Journal 1.0.
- Level up your kiz online with Mr. Neokiz!
- Learn more about the Ultimate Musicality Course For Dancers to level up your musicality!
Thanks for reading!
Thoughts and feedback on the newsletter or on anything covered within are always welcome, just hit reply. The thing I love most about writing this newsletter is follow-up interactions with readers.
Charles
