Take group line dancing to enhance your motor skills. Find group lessons that devote an entire month to a single dance.

You MUST learn the cadence of each ballroom dance. You MUST practice the cadence each day for an hour. You MUST count as you practice. In order to concentrate on learning steps and leading a partner, you must first be conversant with the cadence.

In the course of advancing from incapable to competent I saw many succeed and many fail.

The successful applied themselves, familiarized themselves with the cadence and progressed.

The failed sabotaged themselves in one or more ways: missed lessons, didn't practice, considered counting as beneath them, failed to learn the cadence.

By cadence I mean the footwork: waltz being 1-2-3 (slow-quick-quick), foxtrot being 1-2-3-4 (slow-slow-quick-quick), etc.

Must must must...

or not.

In practice, rote issues can take a little effort at certain stages of learning, but the real journey of years is in learning to use the body optimally.

You can be the fastest to master the things beginners worry about or the slowest - in the long run, it really matters not a bit, because the things that beginners are worried about are just not very substantial parts of the overall art of dancing.

Keep with it, give it your best when you can and don't beat yourself up when you can't. The more you learn, the more you will start to discover where the really important challenges of dancing are.

This was first posted two and one-half years ago. How are you doing? So many people obviously care about your dancing, and I'm sure they would like to know.