June 22, 2025 • 18 mins
Osher offers his reflections on his first dance - including what was really hardest about the process, why deliberately going into something you're not good at is so good for you, the power of habit and a way he reacted to the process that really surprised him.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Hello, Thank you so much for downloading the show. This
is Better than Yesterday. Useful tools and useful conversations to
make your day today better than yesterday every week since
twenty thirteen. I'm glad you're here. My name is Osha Ginsberg.
If you're listening to this show on the twenty third
of June and twenty twenty five, then this is the day.
This is the day. This is the day after I
(00:24):
danced on Dancing with the Stars. After I danced on
Dancing with the Stars. If you know that tune, I'm
sorry for you. It was bad for me too. It
was bad for me too. Now, if you haven't seen
that episode last night, there are some spoilers today. So
because I am going to talk to you a little
bit about that, because I learned a lot saying yes
(00:44):
to this show. I learned a lot about ego, a
lot about external validation, and I learned a lot about humility. Yeah,
there's a lot going on. I'll get to it after
the break. Hey, thanks for being here. Before I get
into the dancing stuff, I did want to remind you
(01:06):
that the story Club substack is powering along. I finally
figured out a system to get the full stories up there.
Subscribers get to watch full stories. Hannah Riiley's show Story
just went up recently and it's fun. Fantast Dick. If
you want to come to the next Story Club show,
it is on the sixth of the Julian and Merrickfield
links in the show notes. That is also where you
can pre order my new books. So what now what?
(01:27):
Which you'll hear me talk about a bit today, But
it would really be very, very wonderful if you could
do so. And if you do, screenshot me you know
when you buy it, and I'll send you something to
say thank you. Sandosh your email at gmail dot com.
Just shoot that there. A couple of months ago, I think,
you know, towards the end of last year, I've got
a phone call from someone I worked with quite a
(01:47):
long time ago, but now they have a job casting
reality TV shows. They do a very good job at it,
and they caught me and said, hey, do you want
to do Dancing with the Starts? Now? If you don't
know some of the background here, I've had three hip
replacement surgeries. I've only got two hips. There's a lot
of shit going on in my right hip at the
time when I took the phone call. My mobility is
(02:07):
pretty fucked. It's okay, I can walk from here to there,
but I live with about a two or three out
of ten level of pain on most days. That's just
what life is, and that's okay. I'm fine with that.
But when it comes to the amount of you know,
precision and rotational control over my right leg, there's no
physical way I could actually dance in a way that
(02:31):
is required on this TV show when they made that
phone call. Is not impossible, no way. I could barely
walk straight. So I said, yeah, absolutely, let me first
check with my wife. If you don't know this, it's
very important, ACBD. It's a great band. Always consult before deciding, ACBD.
So when Audi got back from work that day, we
(02:53):
had a chat and she said, fantastic because it's a
lot of commitment from her as well, like I'm gonna
be training every day sick, seven days a week for
weeks and then begone shooting until late at night, and
you're here over summer holidays with our son. So it
was a big commitment from her as well, and she said,
absolutely should do it. So I call this person back
and said, I'm in. I've known people who've done this
(03:15):
shight before, and they all say it's the best thing
you'll ever do, hardest thing you'll ever do. So I
had a feeling these idea what was in the running
for that it was going to be a pretty massive challenge.
And that's okay because it's I believe it's incredibly important
that as we get older we do things that are hard.
It's important to do things that are hard anyway, but
as we get older, particularly, it's important to put deliberately
(03:36):
put yourself in a position where you are stripped of
confidence and stripped of the power that you normally feel
in the situation. In the words of the man who
guides me on my sobriety adventures, it's important to find
humility before humility finds you. Because as we grow up,
as we get older, we tend to stick to things
that are familiar to us, things where we feel in control,
things where we feel safe. But what that means is
(03:57):
the world moves on. Our world just ends upting smaller
and smaller and smaller. Our ability to deal with things
that are new and different, where we don't have a
heap of control or we don't have a lot of familiarity,
these things just start to get more and more difficult
to deal with, and eventually, you know, we end up
living kind of a what's TikTok mart. You know, we
can get that that's trope exists for a reason, and
(04:19):
that can lead us to have some pretty strange ideas
about things are unfamiliar with and unfortunately lead us open
to manipulation, particularly when it comes to groups of people.
Sometimes they're politicians. Sometimes they're not saying, oh, look, the
reason you feel scared is because those people over there,
and you know where it goes from that. Not long
after I've got sober, I was living in America at
the time. I've always enjoyed being in the mountains, being
(04:42):
in the snow. Not long after I've got sober, I
was on a weekend in Colorado visiting a friend, and
I just decided to go skiing that day. This is
after a good twelve years of really dedicating myself to
being the best snowboarder I could possibly be shy of
hitting a half pipe or going over the eighty footer.
I was really proud of how well I could snow,
but sometimes it was getting to the point where I
(05:02):
wouldn't feel very challenged. I'd sometimes I'd go down the
mountain backwards with one foot out of my bindings. The
snowboarding had been amazing to me, taking me all over
the world, connected me with brilliant people, made incredible memories
with family and friends. I'd hike through distant peaks and
dropped into powder as deep as my hip, jumped off cliffs,
all kinds of wild shit broke a hand. So why
(05:22):
would I deliberately choose to go back to skiing, which
is something I hadn't done since I was nineteen and
even they're not very well Like I said, because as
an adult, it's important to find humility before it finds you.
And trust me, that first day of skiing, it was
infuriating what that did for me. Really, it helped me
learn at that late stage in my life, when I
(05:44):
fall over, no one actually cares nobody. It really helped
me work on this kind of real, weird, internalized embarrassment
and shame that I'd had around that I fell over
in front of the lift lines of hundreds of people.
No one gave a shit at all. I've got a
light out of deliberately choosing that humble path of investing
time and let's be honest, money into going to the mountain,
(06:06):
all the way to the mountains, just so I could
have a really frustrating day in the blizzardy, freezing, icing snow,
with snowwelled down my back and all it. But being
willing to do that again and again and again. Not
only did I eventually become a very good skier, but
I also became pretty good at being okay with not
being very good at things. A couple months back, Danny
(06:29):
Mano came on the podcast and she has this great line,
failure is what learning looks like. But to be honest
with you, even though work has shifted a lot for
me in the last couple of years, I hadn't deliberately
sought out humility. Right, There's a lot of humility has
come to visit me since then, but I haven't deliberately
sought it out. I was dealing with a lot of it.
(06:50):
So when this GID came up, it was like boom, Yes,
I'm in. It's important to understand that recovery from any
kind of surgery or injury is difficult, particularly what it
evolves a limb more mobility kind of thing, whether it's
on your arm or your shoulder or your leg or whatever.
Because and we just explored this in the documentary that
I did about chronic and resistant pain, you can get
(07:10):
caught in a loop where, oh, it hurts if I
moved this way, so I know, I'll just stop moving
this way. Hopefully then it won't hurt. But what happens
is that the less you move, the more it hurts,
and eventually you stop moving all together and it just
hurts heaps. It is inconcruent, but you have to be
willing to be with the discomfort of that movement to
(07:33):
train your body. It's okay to move this way again.
It's safe to move in this path. This plane of
motion is safe. I can hold a load in my
arm or my leg moving like this, it is okay.
And eventually your body lets go of that pain response
and you can start to move more properly. Again. I've
done that a bit through rehab, but nothing like this.
(07:54):
The first couple of weeks of training were incredibly difficult. Srianni,
who is my dad's teach. Ballroom is really strict. You've
got to hold your body in a particular way, You've
got to walk in a particular way. It's really, really,
really strict a strictly ballroom, if you will. I said, okay,
that's really good, Asha. Can you just make sure both
of your feet are pointing forwards? Well they are, No,
(08:16):
they're not. Look in the mirror. And it's a dance studio,
so there's mirrors in every wall. And sure enough, as
I walk left fot twelve o'clock, right foot eleven left
fot twelve o'clock, right foot one, left foot twelve o'clock
ten thirty one one point thirty ten two on the right,
just flapping around like I'm a kid with flippers on
a pool deck. Giranni was really patient with me because
(08:37):
I have a brain that can get sidetracked. I can
get very focused and very sidetracked. And I did have
to explain to her after a little while, Oh, if
I just start talking at you without listening about something
that's got nothing to do with what we're talking about,
you are fine to stop me. I don't realize sometimes
when I got caught in those moments, particularly if I'm
(08:57):
quite excited and you know, passionate, because we're I got
to dance and talk about music the whole time. It
was fucking good. I wanted to tell stories and all
kinds of things. And there was one particular moment I
think I'd spend a good twelve minutes just on and improvised,
and let me tell you very informative lecture about the
difference between the lind drum machine and the Rollin eight
oh eight drum machine, and how those two instruments really
(09:20):
changed popular music forever. Oh my gosh, here's some examples
on Spotify. Here's a print song. He had a lin drum.
Oh I got to here's the eight. Oh wait, isn't
this incredible? You could tune the drum on the out
of wait it turned into house music. D da da da,
And she just kind of look at me like I
don't know how to stop him. After all while I realized,
oh fuck, I'm doing that. Okay, when I work with you,
you should just put a hand up, so if you do,
if you need to just put your hand up, I
(09:41):
won't take offense. And sure enough she did. It was great.
So there was a lot. My brain was really stimulated
by learning all this stuff. If anything, I wasn't physically
tired at the end of training. I could get about
four hours every day and at the end of four hours,
my brain would just fill up. I wasn't physically pooped. Generally,
I just cognie was unable to remember or I would
(10:02):
start to just get it wrong. And I know enough
about learning that if I start to get it wrong,
it's important to go do something else, because you don't
want to lay down memory of an incorrect move. You
want to get it right. And so we would stop
and we'd do something else. Strownie was very good with that. Also,
she let me remember it in my own way because
she had all the borroom names for it, but I
didn't know what they were, so I just called them
what they standed like. Okay, so this one is this
(10:25):
four happy Days into two Helen Mirren's and then rotating
Michael Flatley, Yes it is. That's how I remembered it,
Helen Maren, Helen Mirren, Michael Flatley, Michael Flatley. That's what
I would do. But that was rehearsal when we got
to the studio. That's another thing altogether, because I did
not expect how much my subconscious subroutines from my brain.
(10:46):
Having worked in a live television for so long, I
didn't realize how many of them I would need to overcome,
and I'll tell you about that after the break. Thank
you so much for listening to the show. We're just
talking a bit about Dancing with the Stars. The first
episode that I was on last night, if you watched it,
(11:06):
you would have seen the dance we did. It was
called the slow Foxtrot. Nothing slow or foxy about it,
very hard. It started with me coming out of a
pretender door and turning around finding Trianni and we're heading off.
Now that day when we first rehearsed it. On that day,
a couple of strange things really happened to me and
I just exploded the rehearsal. Rehearsal blew up as soon
as I came through the door. It takes Frianni in
(11:28):
my dancing frame, which is really weird. Do not look
at them, Never look at them. This is badroom dancing.
We don't look at that. I don't know why we
got a couple of steps in. She's like, what are
we doing over here? Because we were supposed to go
in a straight line. It ended up we ended up
way over in the corner. I'm like, I don't know,
were suddenly over here? She's like, well, what happens like
I don't know, let me think about it. Let me
think about it. I figured out that there was actually
(11:49):
two things in the same way that you probably haven't
thought about turning on the indicator when you're driving since
you passed your driving test, yet it still happens. I
didn't realize that I had all these tiny little adjustments
and subroutiness going on in my head from years of
live television. For example, one of the wild because he
was in the room, the guy who was on camera
the first day I was everyone Channel V. He was
(12:09):
on camera for Dancing with the Stars Peter, and he
told me, if you can't see a key light, I
can't see you. You know, this is important in live
TV moment because you want to go with the flow
and you want to grab someone in an audience. If
someone's having a big reaction and a reality show and
you want to make oh, there's incredible, you can just
shepherd them slightly two steps to the left so you're
both lit and then you can have this emotional response
(12:31):
and be on camera rather than stopping it. And it's
really important to do this kind of stuff. And when
Serannie said, what are we doing over hairs. I only
afterwards I was like, oh shit, I'd lost a key light.
I kept trying to get us back to where I
knew there was a light. Another thing that was really
weird is that if you watch the shot as soon
(12:51):
as we come through the door, it's a steady cam shot,
which is the one you see sometimes on the sidelines
of the footy, but a big thing. They wear a
metallic kind of clear bond vest and it's very heavily sprung.
It weighs twenty or thirty kiloers. It's a very hard
job to do, but it's an amazing subjective camera shot.
There's two people that operate at One person holds the camera.
The other person basically has their back and because they're
(13:12):
looking down, they operators headed looking down and the other
person just helps keep other things out of the way
because they're often running and they are as choreographed as
we are. So John O, who's an amazing operator. As
I come through the door, JOHNO is coming towards me,
and in the back of my head, my TV brain
is going Steady's trying to get a shot. I should
(13:32):
get out of the way, because if you're in a
TV studio and a camera is moving towards you from
the peripheral. With me, the camera is always in front
of me, so if the camera is ever to the side, well,
I'm not at the shot. So i have to get
out of the way because Steady's taking a shot of
something else. So I'm trying to move as fast as
I can to get out of the way Steady. Steady
is trying to keep me in frame and so running
(13:54):
towards me. It wasn't only until afterwards that I realized
that was going on. I was like, oh shit, I'm
trying to get out of the way Steady taking this shot.
But Steady's taking the shot of me, and suddenly I'm
in the wrong spot, doing the wrong thing. And it
was only afterwards that I realized this. But what was
sweet The next time we rehearsed, Audrey and Wolfgang actually
came to visit the studio a few times during rehearsals
(14:15):
because it was school holidays and it was nice to
come and hang out, and he was hanging out with
Strianni's daughter. It was really fun. But when they showed up,
wolf and Georgia and Audrey had come and seen me
dance and the show you saw last night and Wolfe, Yeah, Dad,
you dance. That's great. Whose job is it to run
around you with the camera? So that's John O. He
was like, that is awesome. So he'd made out of
(14:35):
his little soccer cones, you know those little cones that
you know, you've set up a little soccer game with
two little cones. As he got, he brought two of them,
strapped it together with the rehab rubber band, put some
sticky tape on it and they said, this is my
steady cams. Great. So when he came to the studio,
the rehearsal studio, as Srinani and I took off on
our next dance, we were rehearsing, Wolfe just came out
(14:55):
and he started just running circles around us. And it
was really good because I had never when we're rehearsing,
no one had ever been near me and I would
kind of lose my bearings, but really helped having Wolfe there.
It was really sweet. I'll try and put some video
of that because it was super cute. I've been reflecting
a lot about what happened as a part of that show.
All I could control was how much effort I put
(15:15):
into this when we finish that dance, then the other
part of the show comes on, and as a TV person,
I'm like, yes, this is a part of me. And
I even said to the producers, I just want it
to be a great show. I want to be a
part of making a great show, and I want to
make sure that the judges have we get to make
a great moment together. And so I'd like to think
that I gave the judges a good reason to have
a great moment together. All I can control is the
(15:37):
amount of effort I put into something. I can't control
what another person thinks about it. I know I'm on
a reality TV show. I know how these things work.
Here comes the judging moment. I'm going to do the part,
and there's the moment. There it is. Even though I
was willingly playing with it, I did not realize that
I actually needed a lot more external validation than I
(15:59):
thought I did. I truly believe that I am translndent
and I'm fine and I don't care what other people
think about me. Not exactly true. I had to face that, like,
oh man, I'm actually I feel a bit sad that
they didn't say I was amazing at this I mean,
I wasn't and it's fine, but a small part of me,
(16:22):
maybe twenty five thirty percent of me, was like nah,
I was like, this isn't that interesting? And I've got
to really look at that and own it. And I
was sitting in my sauna every night, going, well, look
at that. Tell me, let's explore this. This is really fascinating.
What part of you hurts, what part of me hurts,
and just kind of noticing those thoughts and feelings, replaying
those moments in my mind. And like I said, it
(16:43):
really helped editing the final version of So What Now What,
because I was utilizing every one of the things in
that book. Every day I'm rehearsing and in the nighttime
I'm editing and sketching things with Cam and building the
rest of this book, and I'm using all the techniques
that we talked about. Because I was a it was
as much work to keep my head screwed on as
(17:03):
it was to keep my body working. There's just a
couple of thoughts. There's more to come. There's more dancing
to come, but I don't want to. I'll tell you
about it that next time. I think it's about another
two weeks or so before I dance again. Because it
was a group and B group. I was in a
B group. I don't want to spoil anything. It's a
very fun adventure this show. But the lesson that I
could share with you out of it today was that
(17:24):
I was really proud of saying yes to it, and
I'll encourage you to do the same, because, like I said,
it's important to do things that are hard. It's important
to find humility. It was frustrating to not be able
to do it as well as I wanted to do it,
but that's the show, and that's the moments they capture
(17:47):
on camera. It was really fascinating watching that part of
my brain that wanted other people to like me really
fire up. I'll talk to you about it more after
the next time that we have a dancing show. I
will say, though, if you do want to hear me
tell a story, you want to come to the live show.
We've got the next Story Club show on the sixth
of July with Marley silver Merrick Watts, Phil O'Neil, Nadia Townsend,
(18:10):
Zoet Lodging myself, the femas. Everybody needs good neighbors. You
can get the tickets in the show notes, as well
as where the substack is, which has a couple of
full length stories. Larry's is up there, Duncan Fellows, Hannah Riley,
they're all there, the full stories there for subscribers. Have
a fantastic week. I'll see you back here on Wednesday.
Thanks Adam a bunch of for producing this show. I'm
(18:33):
off to drink the rest of this year, but Marte bye.
Hello, Thank you so much for downloading the show. This
is Better than Yesterday. Useful tools and useful conversations to
make your day today better than yesterday every week since
twenty thirteen. I'm glad you're here. My name is Osha Ginsberg.
If you're listening to this show on the twenty third
of June and twenty twenty five, then this is the day.
This is the day. This is the day after I
(00:24):
danced on Dancing with the Stars. After I danced on
Dancing with the Stars. If you know that tune, I'm
sorry for you. It was bad for me too. It
was bad for me too. Now, if you haven't seen
that episode last night, there are some spoilers today. So
because I am going to talk to you a little
bit about that, because I learned a lot saying yes
(00:44):
to this show. I learned a lot about ego, a
lot about external validation, and I learned a lot about humility. Yeah,
there's a lot going on. I'll get to it after
the break. Hey, thanks for being here. Before I get
into the dancing stuff, I did want to remind you
(01:06):
that the story Club substack is powering along. I finally
figured out a system to get the full stories up there.
Subscribers get to watch full stories. Hannah Riiley's show Story
just went up recently and it's fun. Fantast Dick. If
you want to come to the next Story Club show,
it is on the sixth of the Julian and Merrickfield
links in the show notes. That is also where you
can pre order my new books. So what now what?
(01:27):
Which you'll hear me talk about a bit today, But
it would really be very, very wonderful if you could
do so. And if you do, screenshot me you know
when you buy it, and I'll send you something to
say thank you. Sandosh your email at gmail dot com.
Just shoot that there. A couple of months ago, I think,
you know, towards the end of last year, I've got
a phone call from someone I worked with quite a
(01:47):
long time ago, but now they have a job casting
reality TV shows. They do a very good job at it,
and they caught me and said, hey, do you want
to do Dancing with the Starts? Now? If you don't
know some of the background here, I've had three hip
replacement surgeries. I've only got two hips. There's a lot
of shit going on in my right hip at the
time when I took the phone call. My mobility is
(02:07):
pretty fucked. It's okay, I can walk from here to there,
but I live with about a two or three out
of ten level of pain on most days. That's just
what life is, and that's okay. I'm fine with that.
But when it comes to the amount of you know,
precision and rotational control over my right leg, there's no
physical way I could actually dance in a way that
(02:31):
is required on this TV show when they made that
phone call. Is not impossible, no way. I could barely
walk straight. So I said, yeah, absolutely, let me first
check with my wife. If you don't know this, it's
very important, ACBD. It's a great band. Always consult before deciding, ACBD.
So when Audi got back from work that day, we
(02:53):
had a chat and she said, fantastic because it's a
lot of commitment from her as well, like I'm gonna
be training every day sick, seven days a week for
weeks and then begone shooting until late at night, and
you're here over summer holidays with our son. So it
was a big commitment from her as well, and she said,
absolutely should do it. So I call this person back
and said, I'm in. I've known people who've done this
(03:15):
shight before, and they all say it's the best thing
you'll ever do, hardest thing you'll ever do. So I
had a feeling these idea what was in the running
for that it was going to be a pretty massive challenge.
And that's okay because it's I believe it's incredibly important
that as we get older we do things that are hard.
It's important to do things that are hard anyway, but
as we get older, particularly, it's important to put deliberately
(03:36):
put yourself in a position where you are stripped of
confidence and stripped of the power that you normally feel
in the situation. In the words of the man who
guides me on my sobriety adventures, it's important to find
humility before humility finds you. Because as we grow up,
as we get older, we tend to stick to things
that are familiar to us, things where we feel in control,
things where we feel safe. But what that means is
(03:57):
the world moves on. Our world just ends upting smaller
and smaller and smaller. Our ability to deal with things
that are new and different, where we don't have a
heap of control or we don't have a lot of familiarity,
these things just start to get more and more difficult
to deal with, and eventually, you know, we end up
living kind of a what's TikTok mart. You know, we
can get that that's trope exists for a reason, and
(04:19):
that can lead us to have some pretty strange ideas
about things are unfamiliar with and unfortunately lead us open
to manipulation, particularly when it comes to groups of people.
Sometimes they're politicians. Sometimes they're not saying, oh, look, the
reason you feel scared is because those people over there,
and you know where it goes from that. Not long
after I've got sober, I was living in America at
the time. I've always enjoyed being in the mountains, being
(04:42):
in the snow. Not long after I've got sober, I
was on a weekend in Colorado visiting a friend, and
I just decided to go skiing that day. This is
after a good twelve years of really dedicating myself to
being the best snowboarder I could possibly be shy of
hitting a half pipe or going over the eighty footer.
I was really proud of how well I could snow,
but sometimes it was getting to the point where I
(05:02):
wouldn't feel very challenged. I'd sometimes I'd go down the
mountain backwards with one foot out of my bindings. The
snowboarding had been amazing to me, taking me all over
the world, connected me with brilliant people, made incredible memories
with family and friends. I'd hike through distant peaks and
dropped into powder as deep as my hip, jumped off cliffs,
all kinds of wild shit broke a hand. So why
(05:22):
would I deliberately choose to go back to skiing, which
is something I hadn't done since I was nineteen and
even they're not very well Like I said, because as
an adult, it's important to find humility before it finds you.
And trust me, that first day of skiing, it was
infuriating what that did for me. Really, it helped me
learn at that late stage in my life, when I
(05:44):
fall over, no one actually cares nobody. It really helped
me work on this kind of real, weird, internalized embarrassment
and shame that I'd had around that I fell over
in front of the lift lines of hundreds of people.
No one gave a shit at all. I've got a
light out of deliberately choosing that humble path of investing
time and let's be honest, money into going to the mountain,
(06:06):
all the way to the mountains, just so I could
have a really frustrating day in the blizzardy, freezing, icing snow,
with snowwelled down my back and all it. But being
willing to do that again and again and again. Not
only did I eventually become a very good skier, but
I also became pretty good at being okay with not
being very good at things. A couple months back, Danny
(06:29):
Mano came on the podcast and she has this great line,
failure is what learning looks like. But to be honest
with you, even though work has shifted a lot for
me in the last couple of years, I hadn't deliberately
sought out humility. Right, There's a lot of humility has
come to visit me since then, but I haven't deliberately
sought it out. I was dealing with a lot of it.
(06:50):
So when this GID came up, it was like boom, Yes,
I'm in. It's important to understand that recovery from any
kind of surgery or injury is difficult, particularly what it
evolves a limb more mobility kind of thing, whether it's
on your arm or your shoulder or your leg or whatever.
Because and we just explored this in the documentary that
I did about chronic and resistant pain, you can get
(07:10):
caught in a loop where, oh, it hurts if I
moved this way, so I know, I'll just stop moving
this way. Hopefully then it won't hurt. But what happens
is that the less you move, the more it hurts,
and eventually you stop moving all together and it just
hurts heaps. It is inconcruent, but you have to be
willing to be with the discomfort of that movement to
(07:33):
train your body. It's okay to move this way again.
It's safe to move in this path. This plane of
motion is safe. I can hold a load in my
arm or my leg moving like this, it is okay.
And eventually your body lets go of that pain response
and you can start to move more properly. Again. I've
done that a bit through rehab, but nothing like this.
(07:54):
The first couple of weeks of training were incredibly difficult. Srianni,
who is my dad's teach. Ballroom is really strict. You've
got to hold your body in a particular way, You've
got to walk in a particular way. It's really, really,
really strict a strictly ballroom, if you will. I said, okay,
that's really good, Asha. Can you just make sure both
of your feet are pointing forwards? Well they are, No,
(08:16):
they're not. Look in the mirror. And it's a dance studio,
so there's mirrors in every wall. And sure enough, as
I walk left fot twelve o'clock, right foot eleven left
fot twelve o'clock, right foot one, left foot twelve o'clock
ten thirty one one point thirty ten two on the right,
just flapping around like I'm a kid with flippers on
a pool deck. Giranni was really patient with me because
(08:37):
I have a brain that can get sidetracked. I can
get very focused and very sidetracked. And I did have
to explain to her after a little while, Oh, if
I just start talking at you without listening about something
that's got nothing to do with what we're talking about,
you are fine to stop me. I don't realize sometimes
when I got caught in those moments, particularly if I'm
(08:57):
quite excited and you know, passionate, because we're I got
to dance and talk about music the whole time. It
was fucking good. I wanted to tell stories and all
kinds of things. And there was one particular moment I
think I'd spend a good twelve minutes just on and improvised,
and let me tell you very informative lecture about the
difference between the lind drum machine and the Rollin eight
oh eight drum machine, and how those two instruments really
(09:20):
changed popular music forever. Oh my gosh, here's some examples
on Spotify. Here's a print song. He had a lin drum.
Oh I got to here's the eight. Oh wait, isn't
this incredible? You could tune the drum on the out
of wait it turned into house music. D da da da,
And she just kind of look at me like I
don't know how to stop him. After all while I realized,
oh fuck, I'm doing that. Okay, when I work with you,
you should just put a hand up, so if you do,
if you need to just put your hand up, I
(09:41):
won't take offense. And sure enough she did. It was great.
So there was a lot. My brain was really stimulated
by learning all this stuff. If anything, I wasn't physically
tired at the end of training. I could get about
four hours every day and at the end of four hours,
my brain would just fill up. I wasn't physically pooped. Generally,
I just cognie was unable to remember or I would
(10:02):
start to just get it wrong. And I know enough
about learning that if I start to get it wrong,
it's important to go do something else, because you don't
want to lay down memory of an incorrect move. You
want to get it right. And so we would stop
and we'd do something else. Strownie was very good with that. Also,
she let me remember it in my own way because
she had all the borroom names for it, but I
didn't know what they were, so I just called them
what they standed like. Okay, so this one is this
(10:25):
four happy Days into two Helen Mirren's and then rotating
Michael Flatley, Yes it is. That's how I remembered it,
Helen Maren, Helen Mirren, Michael Flatley, Michael Flatley. That's what
I would do. But that was rehearsal when we got
to the studio. That's another thing altogether, because I did
not expect how much my subconscious subroutines from my brain.
(10:46):
Having worked in a live television for so long, I
didn't realize how many of them I would need to overcome,
and I'll tell you about that after the break. Thank
you so much for listening to the show. We're just
talking a bit about Dancing with the Stars. The first
episode that I was on last night, if you watched it,
(11:06):
you would have seen the dance we did. It was
called the slow Foxtrot. Nothing slow or foxy about it,
very hard. It started with me coming out of a
pretender door and turning around finding Trianni and we're heading off.
Now that day when we first rehearsed it. On that day,
a couple of strange things really happened to me and
I just exploded the rehearsal. Rehearsal blew up as soon
as I came through the door. It takes Frianni in
(11:28):
my dancing frame, which is really weird. Do not look
at them, Never look at them. This is badroom dancing.
We don't look at that. I don't know why we
got a couple of steps in. She's like, what are
we doing over here? Because we were supposed to go
in a straight line. It ended up we ended up
way over in the corner. I'm like, I don't know,
were suddenly over here? She's like, well, what happens like
I don't know, let me think about it. Let me
think about it. I figured out that there was actually
(11:49):
two things in the same way that you probably haven't
thought about turning on the indicator when you're driving since
you passed your driving test, yet it still happens. I
didn't realize that I had all these tiny little adjustments
and subroutiness going on in my head from years of
live television. For example, one of the wild because he
was in the room, the guy who was on camera
the first day I was everyone Channel V. He was
(12:09):
on camera for Dancing with the Stars Peter, and he
told me, if you can't see a key light, I
can't see you. You know, this is important in live
TV moment because you want to go with the flow
and you want to grab someone in an audience. If
someone's having a big reaction and a reality show and
you want to make oh, there's incredible, you can just
shepherd them slightly two steps to the left so you're
both lit and then you can have this emotional response
(12:31):
and be on camera rather than stopping it. And it's
really important to do this kind of stuff. And when
Serannie said, what are we doing over hairs. I only
afterwards I was like, oh shit, I'd lost a key light.
I kept trying to get us back to where I
knew there was a light. Another thing that was really
weird is that if you watch the shot as soon
(12:51):
as we come through the door, it's a steady cam shot,
which is the one you see sometimes on the sidelines
of the footy, but a big thing. They wear a
metallic kind of clear bond vest and it's very heavily sprung.
It weighs twenty or thirty kiloers. It's a very hard
job to do, but it's an amazing subjective camera shot.
There's two people that operate at One person holds the camera.
The other person basically has their back and because they're
(13:12):
looking down, they operators headed looking down and the other
person just helps keep other things out of the way
because they're often running and they are as choreographed as
we are. So John O, who's an amazing operator. As
I come through the door, JOHNO is coming towards me,
and in the back of my head, my TV brain
is going Steady's trying to get a shot. I should
(13:32):
get out of the way, because if you're in a
TV studio and a camera is moving towards you from
the peripheral. With me, the camera is always in front
of me, so if the camera is ever to the side, well,
I'm not at the shot. So i have to get
out of the way because Steady's taking a shot of
something else. So I'm trying to move as fast as
I can to get out of the way Steady. Steady
is trying to keep me in frame and so running
(13:54):
towards me. It wasn't only until afterwards that I realized
that was going on. I was like, oh shit, I'm
trying to get out of the way Steady taking this shot.
But Steady's taking the shot of me, and suddenly I'm
in the wrong spot, doing the wrong thing. And it
was only afterwards that I realized this. But what was
sweet The next time we rehearsed, Audrey and Wolfgang actually
came to visit the studio a few times during rehearsals
(14:15):
because it was school holidays and it was nice to
come and hang out, and he was hanging out with
Strianni's daughter. It was really fun. But when they showed up,
wolf and Georgia and Audrey had come and seen me
dance and the show you saw last night and Wolfe, Yeah, Dad,
you dance. That's great. Whose job is it to run
around you with the camera? So that's John O. He
was like, that is awesome. So he'd made out of
(14:35):
his little soccer cones, you know those little cones that
you know, you've set up a little soccer game with
two little cones. As he got, he brought two of them,
strapped it together with the rehab rubber band, put some
sticky tape on it and they said, this is my
steady cams. Great. So when he came to the studio,
the rehearsal studio, as Srinani and I took off on
our next dance, we were rehearsing, Wolfe just came out
(14:55):
and he started just running circles around us. And it
was really good because I had never when we're rehearsing,
no one had ever been near me and I would
kind of lose my bearings, but really helped having Wolfe there.
It was really sweet. I'll try and put some video
of that because it was super cute. I've been reflecting
a lot about what happened as a part of that show.
All I could control was how much effort I put
(15:15):
into this when we finish that dance, then the other
part of the show comes on, and as a TV person,
I'm like, yes, this is a part of me. And
I even said to the producers, I just want it
to be a great show. I want to be a
part of making a great show, and I want to
make sure that the judges have we get to make
a great moment together. And so I'd like to think
that I gave the judges a good reason to have
a great moment together. All I can control is the
(15:37):
amount of effort I put into something. I can't control
what another person thinks about it. I know I'm on
a reality TV show. I know how these things work.
Here comes the judging moment. I'm going to do the part,
and there's the moment. There it is. Even though I
was willingly playing with it, I did not realize that
I actually needed a lot more external validation than I
(15:59):
thought I did. I truly believe that I am translndent
and I'm fine and I don't care what other people
think about me. Not exactly true. I had to face that, like,
oh man, I'm actually I feel a bit sad that
they didn't say I was amazing at this I mean,
I wasn't and it's fine, but a small part of me,
(16:22):
maybe twenty five thirty percent of me, was like nah,
I was like, this isn't that interesting? And I've got
to really look at that and own it. And I
was sitting in my sauna every night, going, well, look
at that. Tell me, let's explore this. This is really fascinating.
What part of you hurts, what part of me hurts,
and just kind of noticing those thoughts and feelings, replaying
those moments in my mind. And like I said, it
(16:43):
really helped editing the final version of So What Now What,
because I was utilizing every one of the things in
that book. Every day I'm rehearsing and in the nighttime
I'm editing and sketching things with Cam and building the
rest of this book, and I'm using all the techniques
that we talked about. Because I was a it was
as much work to keep my head screwed on as
(17:03):
it was to keep my body working. There's just a
couple of thoughts. There's more to come. There's more dancing
to come, but I don't want to. I'll tell you
about it that next time. I think it's about another
two weeks or so before I dance again. Because it
was a group and B group. I was in a
B group. I don't want to spoil anything. It's a
very fun adventure this show. But the lesson that I
could share with you out of it today was that
(17:24):
I was really proud of saying yes to it, and
I'll encourage you to do the same, because, like I said,
it's important to do things that are hard. It's important
to find humility. It was frustrating to not be able
to do it as well as I wanted to do it,
but that's the show, and that's the moments they capture
(17:47):
on camera. It was really fascinating watching that part of
my brain that wanted other people to like me really
fire up. I'll talk to you about it more after
the next time that we have a dancing show. I
will say, though, if you do want to hear me
tell a story, you want to come to the live show.
We've got the next Story Club show on the sixth
of July with Marley silver Merrick Watts, Phil O'Neil, Nadia Townsend,
(18:10):
Zoet Lodging myself, the femas. Everybody needs good neighbors. You
can get the tickets in the show notes, as well
as where the substack is, which has a couple of
full length stories. Larry's is up there, Duncan Fellows, Hannah Riley,
they're all there, the full stories there for subscribers. Have
a fantastic week. I'll see you back here on Wednesday.
Thanks Adam a bunch of for producing this show. I'm
(18:33):
off to drink the rest of this year, but Marte bye.
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