#54 10 Tips to Overcome Your Fear of Dancing

 I found an article that gave out 10 tips to Overcome Your Fear of Dancing. It's mostly geared towards men, but I think it serves a good purpose for everyone.

"Some people simply freak out at the thought of dancing. Whether it’s at a wedding, or at a bar, or even at their first dance class, some people are so overwhelmed at the feeling of being humiliated and shamed that they cringe and cave inward, and either hide wherever they can or walk away.
If you are one of those people, fear not - help is on the way. James Joseph, author of Every Man’s Survival Guide to Ballroom Dancing, says plain and simple, “It doesn’t have to be that way. Dancing can transform someone who thinks they are doomed for life into a winner who is as popular and sought after wherever they go.”
“You can break through your fear barriers, if before you even step on the floor, you get some really straight forward attitude adjustment,” he says. “It’s a crucial action once done, you are free to enjoy the pleasures that can be found.”
Men – dance is the only activity where you can go up to beautiful women one right after the other, spend three minutes touching them artfully all over their body, and each one will thank you for it afterwards."


Tips:

1. Understand the music. Learn how to count the beats of music to identify the musical structure. Focus on the music you love. It makes it so much easier.
2. Take Lessons. A good teacher will demonstrate the elements of music and dance that defy words and will tell you when you are doing something right and wrong. If you need to, take the beginners class a second time before moving on to a harder class so you really get the basics down.
3. Focus on rhythm patterns, not direction of movement. Learn to understand when to step. It is far more important than where to step.
4. Focus on technique, not learning more step patterns. The step pattern is the fancy moves you make when you move on the floor. Technique is what you look like and feel like when you do it. Make what you do look really good before you make it complicated.
5. Get out and dance. Time on the floor dancing is the only thing that will make you better. Get out and dance! With great classes, great music and enjoyable people, it’s fun and it’s easy.
6. Dance with a variety of partners. Dancing with one person risks the creation of bad habits. Having to dance with a variety of partners is a basic dance skill. It removes the stress of dancing and is a good way to build confidence and skill.
7. Dance Up – which means that you ask better dancers to dance with you. When you work with someone more skilled than you, suddenly the difficult things will start to work.
8. Recover seamlessly from missteps. Handling mistakes is tough. Lighten up, smile, take the next step. Some of your best accidents will produce the most interesting results and improvements you will ever make. As Ms Frizzle says, “Go ahead. Make mistakes!”
9. Watch great dancers! Some of the best dancers in the world are on TV week after week. Watch the dancers and learn from the best. Men – if you get hooked on dancing, you’ll stop gazing at the women and start studying the men – to steal their moves!
10. Learn manners. Be a gentle and polite dancer and you’ll have lots of happy willing partners. It’s hard to dance with someone who lacks sensitivity of their partner. It’s OK to be a little klutzy. It’s not OK to be rude or arrogant. Be warm and friendly with all eye contact. Treat everyone with respect.
    

Read the whole article here

#46 How To Make Rainbow Brownies

Seeing all the positive reaction to yesterday's post, I decided to post another recipe today, this time for rainbow brownies. I've made this recipe also, and while they are good brownies, the enjoyment really comes from showing them to people. 

#41 How To Peel A Banana

A short video, i'll be making a more informative post later today but for now, learn how to peel a banana like monkeys do. I did this yesterday and by god it works.

#37 Know Which Dietary Supplements Are Beneficial Or Just A Scam

This is a part of my on-going living healthy series of posts. A handy little chart that tells you how effective or beneficial certain dietary supplements are, ranging from None (for no evidence of health benefits) to Strong (for strong evidence of health benefits) This is also good at showing which "breakthrough" supplements that are supposed to be miracle workers are mostly just "Snake Oil" which is to say it's all hype and no good reason to believe it does what they say it does. 

#36 How To Fold a T-shirt in 2 seconds

This video shows how to effectively fold t-shirts in a nice and orderly manner, with the help of just a few pinches that with practice take no time at all.

#35 How To Be Pro At Life (part 2)

The second part in a series of informational pictures about how to social engineer and lifehack your way through life. I'm all for making your life easier, so if you do too check it out

#31 How To Live Healthier

     An on-going project of mine with this blog is to cover a lot of bases on how to get healthy and to live a healthier lifestyle. So far I've covered tips and tricks on fixing your sleep schedule, how to cut down on and avoid High Fructose Corn Syrup, and some ways to get yourself into shape. Today I'm going to talk a little about working exercise into your daily life, and vitamins to take.

  First, some quick tips on how to get more exercise when you feel like there isn't enough time in the day to do it, or for people who just want more exercise to do.

• If going to some sort of store like a Costco or an Albertsons, park in the back of the lot. It makes you walk more to get to your car and back, and only costs you a minute or two more. It's not big, but every little bit helps.
• Two different tricks for motivating yourself to exercise while watching TV. I utilize both, for whichever occasion is on hand.  The first trick is to do light exercise during commercial breaks on tv. Nothing special, just jumping jacks, push-ups, crunches, even walking around. I do this when I'm watching a show on TV live, which isn't often but it happens. The other trick is to set aside 10 minutes for exercise for every hour you watch TV in a day. You take your collected time and use it to work out for a certain amount of time on a day you have set for exercising. For example, if I watch 4 hours of TV, I spend my next exercise day walking for 40 minutes. I use this trick when Im watching shows without commercials, or can skip through commercials. With these tricks you either start getting into shape, or you watch less TV, and neither are such a bad thing.
• Try to reduce how many individual breaks you take, and combine them into a time where you can exercise. For instance, if you take 5 coffee breaks a day at your office, take 3 instead, and combine the time you would have spent on the other two into climbing stairs or just walking around. 
• Clean your house. Most house-hold cleaning activities involve some form of physical labor, from weeding your front lawn to mowing to vacuuming the house or sweeping the floor. It keeps you active and keeps your house looking nice too.

     And now for some vitamin tips

• A multi-vitamin can cover a lot of bases already on keeping your daily intakes of most things in check. Sometimes though you might want to throw a little bit more on to help
• Vitamin B-12 will do wonders for you. B and C are common in foods you already eat, and B vitamins will help boost your metabolism. They give you such things as;
• Boosted metabolism
• Healthy skin
• Muscle tone
• Stronger immune system
• Promotes cell growth and function 
• Take Chromium Picolinate, mostly just called Chromium when in vitamin form. It helps digest food, so your body will get more out of what you eat, and as a result will decrease your appetite. It also lowers your bad cholesterol levels and increases your good cholesterol levels
• Acai Berries. You can take pill forms of the so called wonder fruit known as Acai berries, but I'm someone who is more a fan of eating the berries themselves. No one has really concluded whether or not these diet supplement products that include Acai are any good for you, but tests have shown that the real Acai berry has wonderful effects on your body, mainly because the berry contains a large collection of the total number of vitamins humans need to live and stay healthy, all in one fruit. Acai berries contain fatty acids (important, that's where the term Omega-3 comes from) Iron, B-vitamins, vitamin C&E, Fiber and Calcium. All of that, in one berry. Hell if you had regular servings of Acai berries, you could probably ditch taking multi-vitamins, because they are one. 

#27 How To Be A Pro At Life (part 1)

A collection of tips and tricks on how to social engineer your way to a better life. I don't endorse all of these, as I have yet to try all of them, but just use common sense. Social Engineering, for those who don't know the term, is about knowing how to use your surroundings as an advantage. One tip I can highly recommend for this post is doing something nice for free once a month. This works especially well as the person describes it in the info, who is a pizza driver. Once a month he delivers a pizza, and pays for it himself. People will think you're awesome and might even call in to the store and talk about how great of a person you are. Use your surroundings to your advantage.