Acceptable at a Dance

I would never deny that I am a relatively stiff guy.

Not physically—I have decent mobility after years of dedicated recovery work. Constitutionally. My personality can be stiff. I love routine, certainty, and all things predictable. I plan ahead. I prepare for contingencies. I am, in most situations, the person who has already thought through what comes next and arranged himself accordingly. Those traits serve me well as an M&A advisor, a board member, a volunteer firefighter. As schoolmaster John Roxburgh once put it, I’d be “acceptable at a dance, invaluable in a shipwreck.” At the dance, perhaps. Barely.

Those same traits serve me considerably less well when something genuinely emotional is at stake.

A few weeks ago, my twenty-one-year-old daughter and I attended a concert at Red Rocks Amphitheater. Lord Huron, a Los Angeles band neither of us knew particularly well, was featured. I’d heard about Red Rocks for years—all positive—including from my daughter. A friend mentioned I should prepare myself for a cloud of smoke. What kind, he didn’t specify. This is Colorado. I got the message.

I went all out for my inaugural visit. Second row tickets. A driver to drop us at the venue and collect us at the end. I prepared for the worst—the crowd, the smoke, the possibility that standing in an outdoor amphitheater for three hours would feel exactly as uncomfortable as it sounds for someone who prefers a controlled environment.

What I didn’t prepare for was what actually happened.

The dusk lit the rock formations behind the stage in a way that photographs don’t capture. The temperature was perfect. The acoustics—which I had been told were exceptional and assumed were overstated—were not overstated. Lord Huron opened and within a few songs I felt something I hadn’t anticipated: I got it. Not intellectually. Not as an observation. In my body, before my brain had a chance to weigh in.

My daughter loves concerts the way I love training—completely, without self-consciousness, without negotiating with herself about whether to be present. She led the way, attitude-wise. And somewhere in the middle of the set, without deciding to, I started moving. Swaying with the rhythm. Following the strumming. I looked for my default self-consciousness—the stiff, slightly guarded version of myself that shows up whenever something unscripted is happening—and he wasn’t there. Or at least temporarily absent.

I wanted to sit down. I couldn’t.

What happened at Red Rocks wasn’t magic. It was something more interesting than that—and more useful.

There is a growing body of research on what scientists call embodied cognition: the idea that the body doesn’t simply execute what the mind decides, but actively shapes how we think, feel, and process experience. Movement—particularly rhythmic movement synchronized to music—bypasses the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain responsible for planning, analysis, and self-monitoring. The same neural machinery that makes high performers exceptional at their work—the constant evaluation, the forward planning, the intuitive risk assessment—is also what keeps them stuck when the situation calls for something other than analysis.

Music short-circuits that machinery in a way that almost nothing else does. It enters through the auditory system and activates the motor cortex directly—which is why you move before you decide to move. Which is why I was swaying at Red Rocks before I had consciously chosen to sway. The body got there first. The mind caught up later and, finding nothing to object to, stood down.

This is not a small thing for people who live primarily in their heads.

Most high performers I know—and I count myself firmly in this category—have a complicated relationship with the parts of life that resist analysis. Emotion. Spontaneity. The unscripted moment. We manage these things rather than experience them. We prepare for concerts the way I prepared for Red Rocks—logistically, thoroughly, with contingency plans for foot traffic and secondhand smoke. What we don’t prepare for is the possibility that something might bypass the preparation entirely and land somewhere more direct.

Yoga does this. Running does this—particularly long, rhythmic running where the analytical mind eventually exhausts itself and something quieter takes over. Dancing does this, which is why people who would never describe themselves as dancers find themselves moving at weddings and concerts and anywhere else the music is loud enough and the social permission sufficient. The body knows things the mind hasn’t processed yet. Movement is how those things surface.

I’ve written in earlier posts about the physical foundation—the six pillars, the identity shift, the difference between fitness and health. What I hadn’t written about is this: the body is not just a vehicle for performance. It is also a way of knowing.

One of the first questions I ask clients is simply: how are you feeling? Almost every time, the response begins with “I think...” The CEO who hasn’t cried in fifteen years isn’t unfeeling. He’s overcontrolled. The founder who can’t sit still in a meditation session isn’t undisciplined. She’s never had to function without structure—and doesn’t yet know she can. The executive who describes himself as not a music person has probably never stood in the front row at Red Rocks at dusk with someone he loves and let the strumming do what strumming does when you stop bracing against it.

I’m not suggesting one abandons the left brain. I am suggesting that the traits that make high performers exceptional—the discipline, the control, the forward planning—occasionally need a circuit breaker. Something that gets to the body before the mind can intervene. Something that allows the mind to, for once, follow rather than lead.

For me it was an indie folk band at an amphitheater in the Rocky Mountains foothills with my daughter beside me and nowhere to be and nothing to prepare for.

I didn’t decide to be moved. I just was.

That turned out to be exactly what I needed—and I couldn’t have planned my way there.