Get The Most From Online Courses

This was professionally transcribed, but it probably still has some errors. If you catch any, drop me a line at info@bellydancegeek.com. I’d love to hear from you!

Nadira: Hello everybody, I am Nadira Jamal from Belly Dance Geek and today I am joined by my guest, Heather Wayman. So heather is a second generation professional dancer who classically trained in Western dance and then discovered classic Egyptian, Oriental and folkloric dance in 2007. She’s trained with dance masters from Egypt, to Russia, and the United States and placed and also won multiple competitions including professional live music improvisation categories. Most recently, she won the first runner up in the Belly Dance Off at Seattle’s fame, Teatro ZinZanni theater dancing to live music chosen on the spot. If you know anything about me, you know I’m all about improv, so I was super proud of her. Nadira: She’s captivated audiences from Okinawa, Japan to Dallas, Texas, and now runs her own dedicated home studio in Selah, Washington, where she trains intermediate students as well as teaching beginners in local commercial studios. You can find more information about her at bellybyheather.com and on YouTube where she’s known as Oki Belly, O-K-I B-E-L-L-Y. Welcome, Heather.

Heather: Hi.

Nadira: All right. Now, the reason I’m inviting Heather today is that we have something interesting to announce and that is that Heather is going to be joining us at Belly Dance Geek. So how we’re going to begin by having her assistant teach in our summer program, Rock the Routine and she’s also going be doing some guest posting and helping us out with some of our other content like our podcasts and articles. So I am so excited to have Heather here, in no small part because she’s awesome but also because Heather and I go way back. So if we go back to, what was it, like 2011.

Heather: I can’t believe it’s been that long.

Nadira: It must have been 2011. She was my Guinea pig in a three-month improvisation intensive coaching program. So she was working a good 90 minutes every day for three months and made the most tremendous progress improvisational dancing and has been dancing with live music ever since. So I love this lady. I love the way she thinks about the dance and about improv. She also, like me, even though we have slightly different dance styles, I feel like we both understand the value of improv, of live music and in understanding how the dance works, not just copying and pasting what your teacher teaches you. So I’m so thrilled to have you here, Heather.

Heather: Thank you for having me.

Nadira: All right. And the reason I invited Heather to stick around rather than just making a little announcement is that we wanted to jump right in and allow you to start benefiting from what she has to share. So as I mentioned, Heather is going to be assistant teaching during Rock the Routine this summer and so she’s agreed to help us out before we get started with some tips for how to get the most out of an online class. Heather, you’ve taken almost everything I’ve offered which includes several online classes and I know you’ve studied with a lot of other folks, not just in person but also online. So I can give you tips on taking online classes as the teacher, but it means a lot more from somebody with a lot of experience both on the student end and on the teaching end. So Heather, what’s your first tip for us?

Heather: The first tip would be to … What I did was look at all of the assignments that came in at the beginning of the week so that I could plan whether or not I was going to be able to do one every day that it was scheduled for or if I had something, I was going to be out of the house on Thursday that week, I would double up on one of the days or something like that. I think that it also really helped me to kind of start digesting the subject matter at the beginning. I wasn’t necessarily working with it at the beginning like that, but I had a chance to kind of meditate on it and be a little organic in there. So, that helped too.

Nadira: Excellent. One of the things that I love about this tip is that there are so many angles that it touches on, right? One is the be prepared part. All right. Be honest about what’s in your schedule, plan ahead for things that are not going to go according to the official schedule of the course. It also has an element of be flexible in it, right? So just because you’re getting homework everyday doesn’t mean you necessarily have to do it everyday and then certainly in my courses we do have a lot of flexibility around that. But also, those two things together, being prepared and being flexible, we don’t associate them with each other, but I think together they really play into your success in learning.

Heather: True.

Nadira: All right, now, what was your next step?

Heather: Try not to overthink every little thing.

Nadira: Easier said than done.

Heather: I am a huge over thinker. I think that oftentimes the pressure, the self-imposed pressure that we put on ourselves to get it right, it can be paralyzing. I think it happens to a lot of people. So, just don’t overthink everything, for goodness sakes. Just look at what you’ve got to do and if it doesn’t … Most of the time the first thing that comes to you is going to be what you need to run with anyway and then you can expand out from that and it’s amazing when you just take that first little thing that comes to you, you feel successful, and then you’re like, “Okay, yeah, let me see what else I can come up with.” Then things do start to flow. It’s really easy to have a block if you’re overthinking it, but if you try not to let that happen to you, your thoughts can start to flow a little more easily, a lot more easily actually. When the thoughts flow, the movement begins to flow too, so.

Nadira: Excellent. I know for me, I’m also an over thinker and when I … For me, getting started is the hardest part, right? So I can stress about something and worry about something and just go in circles. But if I actually get up and try it, sometimes my body has information or unlock something that doesn’t happen when I’m sitting in a chair mulling over it or thinking about at 3 in the morning. If you actually just get up and start, sometimes you just fix your own problems and even if you don’t, then you can get more information about where your uncertainty is and that puts you in a place where you can ask questions that are going to be productive when you go to say, Heather or me in the forum on Rock the Routine, you’ll have a better question to ask if you actually give it a try first and then you can be more specific about your challenges.

Heather: Right. So true.

Nadira: Excellent. Your third tip, why don’t you tell us about that one?

Heather: The third tip that I have is to be kind to yourself in your learning. There’s a lot of little things that you could associate with that. If you get behind to start again where you left off is, it’s not rocket science. It’s not brain surgery. No one’s going to die if you miss a day or whatever, or even a week, just start. Because if you don’t start then you quit and that’s not … Then you’re not growing that way. If you get stuck, take a break and start again. Kind of feeds off of the first tip, the first sub-tip there. Noodle, goodness sakes, noodle, don’t hate the noodling.

Nadira: So I don’t think most people listening to this know what noodling is, unless they’ve seen the improvisation toolkit DVD. Can you tell us about that exercise?

Heather: The noodling was something that, and I still struggle with it, it was something that I absolutely hated. Basically, it’s when you just put on music and you just start moving in all sorts of directions and shapes and levels and just … It’s stupid but it’s so useful because things will come out when you’re doing that crazy stuff that would not have come out and then you can use those things in your dance. It’s another way of helping to break the block that you might find yourself in. So yeah, don’t hate the noodling.

Nadira: Excellent. Since you brought that up, why don’t I actually include a link in the episode notes for this video? I’ll include a link to where folks can get just the noodling exercise for free on my website.

Heather: Oh, nice.

Nadira: Excellent.

Heather: inaudible

Nadira: All right. Well thank you for these tips, Heather. These are really good ones. I think especially, everything is good, but I think the being kind to yourself part is the most important. I think that there are a lot of dancers like us who are really conscientious, right? We’re in this dance because we love it, not just because we like to be pretty onstage and we feel really strongly that it’s important to be respectful of the dance and dance in integrity and sometimes that turns into really destructive perfectionism, right? Where we beat ourselves up over everything that’s not perfect instead of valuing everything that’s worthwhile. Everybody always has room to improve. That’s always true. Even the top dancers in the world have things that they can improve but that doesn’t mean that what you have to offer isn’t good and so it’s much easier to get to that better place if you’re nice to yourself along the way.

Heather: Yeah, and if I could just add one more thing to that.

Nadira: Please.

Heather: About perfection. There is no such thing as perfect. Trying to be perfect also creates paralysis. What you need to do, and I learned this from you and I’ll paraphrase, just be good enough right now today because tomorrow’s another day. You’re your own best competition.

Nadira: Absolutely. So thank you so much, Heather.

Heather: Thanks for having me.

Nadira: So it has been great to introduce you to all my folks and we are looking forward to hearing more from you. So as I mentioned, Heather will be sharing some more content on the Belly Dance Geek blog as part of our team. She’ll also be assistant teaching us on Rock the Routine. That is starting on Sunday, July 8th. But really you don’t have to do anything until Monday, July 9th. Sunday is just getting ready exercise. But we are closing registration on Sunday night at 8:00 Eastern Time.

So if you haven’t already and you want to join us, please go ahead and do that. You can find that at bellydancegeek.com/rocktheroutine. Besides teaching you how to improvise to the classic six-part routine, we are also going to be available to you in our Facebook group. So if you need Heather or me to tell you, stop beating yourself up and here’s how to be nicer to yourself, that’s one of the things we can help you out with. So I hope you’ll join us the summer. In the meantime, keep your eyes peeled for some more great content from both of us. Happy dancing.