Hello all you gorgeous people, welcome to the latest rendition of Ballroom Blogging with Brandon (yeah, I’ll work on the name). As some of you are aware, we’ve grown tremendously in our almost 4 years in wonderful West Chester/Liberty Township. It wouldn’t be possible without AMAZING students who entrust their dancing/personal goals to us. We constantly train and keep educating ourselves to make sure we’re doing the absolute best job possible. We can’t anticipate every goal and need that every student will have, which brings me to my topic for the day… COMMUNICATION!!
You already know how important communication is to your own personal relationships, whether it be your spouse, parents, kids, friends, or even your dog (perhaps that last one is the most important), but it is also of extreme importance for you to communicate with your dance team as well. Your dance lessons and time at Arthur Murray should be some of the happiest, most stress free portions of your day/week/year. If it’s not, we just ask one thing… for you to communicate to us when something seems off.
In what ways does communicating with your dance team help your dance experience? Let us count the ways!
- Your Personal Benefits: Almost every single person who steps foot into any dance studio wants to gain something from dancing other than “the dancing”. Whether it’s a more fun form of exercise (so you can maybe lose a couple inches in a more fun way), to connect better with a significant other (so you can feel more like you did when you were dating), to feel more confident in your own skin (so you can more confidently ask for that job promotion), or to even marry someone who’s waaay better than you (okay, that worked for me, but we can’t promise that for everybody). Whatever you want from this whole dance thing we can give you. If you’re in here for exercise, we can make sure there’s tons of movement overall. If you want to grow as a couple, we can make sure to include some flirty moments in the dancing :). If you want to become a better singer… avoid Brandon at all costs. Our goal is for you to get what you want from your dancing. And if that changes over time, which is perfectly fine, just let us know and we’ll adapt accordingly.
- Lessons: Now obviously this is one of the main ways people get what they want from their dance experience. It’s the personal time that allows us to focus on you! Our team of teachers try to make sure every lesson is fun, informative, and in my case full of singing (although everyone really benefits from that). We also try to adapt our way of teaching to each student and we think we do a great job of communication among the team. We know that we’re not perfect, and sometimes miss things. If you feel like we’re missing something, please please let us know. Whether it’s in the way we’re teaching something to you, in the way we go about planning our programs, or anything else. We want you to get the very most out of your dancing. If something doesn’t make sense, ask us, we typically have reasons for everything we do. We will give you our opinion on what works best for what you want from your dancing and hopefully you’ll trust our professional recommendation. On an aside, if you think your team does an amazing job, let them know as well:). It’s always nice to hear a little praise!
- Group Classes: Group classes are a little tricky in regards to communication, but we do our best. If there’s something that you feel can improve our group classes, please share your thoughts. We’re ALWAYS open to ways to make things better. One of the small things we’ve changed per request is in big, more advanced group classes to break the group into smaller subgroups when switching partners. That way if you came with a partner, you can dance with them more frequently, while still getting the benefit of dancing with other partners. On another aside, we will never make you switch partners if you really don’t want to. Another change we’ve implemented is to show the whole pattern at the start of class so you have an idea of the whole picture beforehand. If you have other suggestions, we’re happy to hear them!
- Events: We constantly have events going on here at Arthur Murray and we would LOVE for everyone to be able to do everything (because the more awesome people that are there, the more fun the event is). With that being said, we do not expect you to do everything. What we do try to do is make sure you’re informed of everything we have going on. If you feel like an event may not be for you or just don’t want to do it, please tell us. Or if you’re just tired of hearing about events for a little while, please let us know that as well. Events can be a GREAT way to increase focus on lessons, but for some people they add more stress than focus. If that’s the case for you, that’s perfectly fine. Every event should give you some butterflies, which is great because that means you care and want to do well. Some events might cause mass panic and cause you to dread coming in. If that’s ever the case, please let us know. As I said earlier, this place is supposed to be a break from the normal stresses of the day. If it ever becomes stressful, let us know so we can take steps to make it not so.
- Your Team’s Peace of Mind: I mentioned this earlier, but your team of teachers takes your dancing and your happiness when you’re here extremely seriously. I believe that we are one of the most caring teams that exists. When we don’t see a student for a little while, we think about how we could have made their experience better. Sometimes it’s true that there’s nothing we can do, but we’re constantly trying to make everyone’s experience better. This is our full time job, and for many of us a career. We love teaching/dancing and dedicate TONS of time making sure we are not only great dancers but are also teaching things in a clear, concise way (except for Brandon… not so concise… or clear). Each day we talk about who’s teaching who and what’s best to work on for each lesson; and when the day’s finished we talk about how the lessons went. We’re constantly striving to make sure everyone has an amazing time when they’re here and when things seem off we worry. If there’s ever a miscommunication, we take those instances extremely seriously and want to fix things as quickly as possible.
Thank you so so much for dealing with this long-fingered(??) blog. We feel truly blessed to be doing what we love and have such an amazing group of students to teach/help realize their goals. We earnestly try to have a familial feel to our studio and want everyone to be as happy as we can make them. Hopefully you do! But if not, you know what to do.
– Brandon and the rest of your Arthur Murray Family
