Monthly Archives: June 2015

I won first place of L-CSR Silver Closed Rhythm Scholarships (Cha Cha/Rumba/Swing/Bolero/Mambo) and L-C Closed Silver World Dancesport Series Rhythm (Cha Cha/Rumba/Swing/Bolero/Mambo).  It’s the first time I ever climbed up the award platform let alone standing at the top in a dance event.  It’s both an exhilarating and humbling experience.  My previous competition experiences had always been scary and disappointing.  But after years of hard work and countless coaching sessions with top pros, I am finally getting better and ready to compete.  This local event has been the perfect one to reenter the competition scene.

Thursday night, I did two open smooth with Tim and it was very enjoyable.  I was confident about the routines, waltz and foxtrot and everything worked when I danced.  And it was the first time I had confidence and also enjoyed the dances.  I wanted to go out there and do more that night.  It’s a great beginning for the competitions.  Just right to ease my nerves and to look forward to the rhythm heats the next day.

I awoke early and tossed and turned the next morning in my hotel room.  Finally I decided to use what Gregor has suggested and did a relaxing meditation and reconfirmed my wish to dance well and I left the winning part to God.  Got up, showered and went down and had a good breakfast.  Spent the next couple of hours putting on the makeup and getting ready.  Leo came shortly before my heats and went downstairs with me.  I barely got there to start my heats.  That hour was the biggest fear I had whether I would have the energy to do a whole hour of dancing without stop.  I did almost 20 heats in that time.  And I ran to the water lots of times in between the heats.  Feeling self conscious but also thankful that I could.  The first round went fine, the second round I slipped up on a couple.  It reflected in the results.  I got 2 3rd places, 2 2nd places.  But the rest were all 1st places.  At one time I felt silly when I was getting 1st place one after another.  I went up to get the ribbon, turned around to leave only to hear my name again and turned around to receive the next ribbon.  It’s a wonderful feeling though.

After an hour of rest, the two scholarships came up.  After learning that I did poorly in a few heats, I was a bit nervous.  But after we got into it, I settled down and started enjoying myself.  I had fun dancing one of the swings.  Jonathan, my instructor and partner, has trained me well and was a calming effect for me to carry me through the heats.  I am very thankful for his help in the last 10 months.  From the pictures the photographer took, I know my form isn’t always good, and my facial expression not so complimentary.  🙂  The exhaustion did get to me.  I’m just not in a good enough shape for a 5 dance scholarship or heats one after another.  But fortunately the judges overlooked it and gave me the 1st place.  I am very grateful for it.  I know it’s just a local event and I am not dancing the best I can, so to win the 1st place is a combination of a not so competitive field and God’s grace on me.

All in all, it’s a great experience and I know I have a lot more to work on.  Tomorrow I’m going back to hear about it.  But I’m ready to improve and get better.  I’m looking forward to the next few years.

Leo was sick last week.  For a couple of days, he was coughing, had a fever and headache and running nose.  This week, it’s my turn.  I got a lesser version of his, thank goodness.  Still, I slept till the afternoon today.  Felt better after that.  The dayquil helped I think.  This kind of put a dent into my motivation to do things.  Still, I kept up with the updates to the facebook for the studio and even made a few graphic images for announcements.  Even though I used some stock images and just made changes to them, I still feel pretty good about them.  For someone with no designer background or official training, being able to feel my way through photoshop and AE has been an achievement of itself.  And it is very interesting to dig into the social media and learn from observing how others create interesting posts.

Learning is a process that never gets old.  The curiosity of the mind is a must to keep us up to date and young.  Age is a state of mind not the number of years.  And to that, I feel young and enthusiastic about life in general.  Well, at least not old.  🙂

It’s been a while since my last involvement with a business website.  Recently, I traded my service for lessons and subsidy for competitions of my ballroom addiction, and now I’m up to my ears with hands on implementation of facebook page, web redesign, and overall online presence improvement.  Wow, do I have my eyes opened.

Just to consolidate all the facebook pages that were created and never used or maintained took weeks.  Facebook itself was not helpful at all.  Reports sent in have never been answered.  But little by little through perseverance and focus, we finally got to the bottom of all the unused pages, some created out of ignorance, some created out of good will.   To add to the complication, the business was using a personal profile instead of a business page.  Converting it to a business page took a lot of tries.  The multiple pages created presented the biggest challenge.  Facebook will let me initiate the conversion and at the last step, threw up its hand and said ‘Oops, error encountered’.  No explanation of why and how to remedy the situation.  A new page appeared ready to be setup instead and no conversion completed.  But then a couple of days later, it magically let me go through the whole process.  And gave us a new business page with all the followers intact as likes.  Don’t know how or why.  But I’m happy it worked.

After the conversion, the process of having a plan for posting took some efforts too.  Being new to the business side of social media, I’m very careful not to over-post which usually alienates the followers and leads to losing the audience.  And I constantly need to play the gatekeeper for the enthusiastic owners wanting to send the same post multiple times.  At the same time, I’m feeling my way trying to find a good balance of interests and solicitations.  Give and take of the game.  It’s all interesting and fascinating to me.  So far, I’m loving the challenge and wondering why I never paid attention to this side of online engagement years ago.  I may have enjoyed it and stayed involved longer years ago in the web world.

Learning ‘about’ SEO and responsive web design is also both overwhelming and interesting at the same time.  I know I will never master SEO to offer service, but getting to know more about what makes a site tick and stay relevant in the google search world is helpful still in the day to day maintenance of the website and for the redesign.  Having an eye catching website is only half the battle.  That helps when the audience arrive at your site.  How to bring them to your site is the other half.  How to combat the one or two bad reviews you inevitably get when running a business is also very challenging.  Catchy negative title for a bad review invokes curiosity of anyone who is looking up your site on google for example.  They tend to click on it and makes Google think that page is more relevant.  This is frustrating for the business owners and people like me who try to help them build a positive image and bring in more business.  Currently, we are dealing with a negative article written by Plain Dealer of an employee who has left the business years ago.  But the article stays up and high in the search result with our business name.  Even though it is not relevant to the business any more and only hurts the reputation, of course, Plain Dealer won’t take it down.  It creates hits for their site for sure.  How do you deal with this but trying to build current and more relevant pages and information to counteract the negative influence.  This is an uphill battle and there is no easy solution.  I learned the importance of being aware of the content you put out there and being responsible for it.  Sometimes you have in your hand the livelihood of some one else.

Redesign is another big project.  Trying to keep all that matters incorporated into a website is a mind boggling job.  And I am walking slowly into this.  I’m sure I will learn tons in the end if not in the process already.