About

I started dancing WCS when I was 14, a year after the sudden loss of my dad. It helped me express myself in ways I had previously been unable to as a quiet, shy kid, and helped build my confidence. It became an integral part of my life and I later began to build it into a career, becoming a massage therapist to pay the bills in the meantime.

While I was passionate about teaching and learning more about this ever-changing dance, I struggled with imposter syndrome, anxiety, procrastination and people-pleasing behavior, among other things, even though I had "made it" as a Champion-level dancer and was hired to teach with my partner 30+ weekends a year.

In looking for help, I stumbled across a program that would change my life. It was a form of mindset work called Thoughtwork, that was straightforward and non-'woo', which was what I needed at the time. It taught me what thoughts and feelings actually were, and how to process and shift them, in an incremental, sustainable way that made sense to me.

It helped me totally change my relationship to the imposter syndrome, procrastination, people-pleasing, and anxiety, and even helped improve my relationship with my then-husband and with making friends as an adult. In fact, I don't think there was an area of my life it didn't touch.

With the upheaval of the pandemic, my dance career needed to pivot, and having seen all the changes in myself, I had already been feeling pulled to help people in a different way. I became a certified life coach and launched my new venture in August of 2020.

Since then I've added some other modalities and concepts to my toolbelt, including more somatic practices, but the Thoughtwork tools remain central to my process.

I've also been integrating these tools more and more into my dance teaching process. A lot can come up for people when they're dancing - body image stuff, how they are viewed socially, thoughts about physical limitations, what they make competitive success mean, etc., and coaching tools can help with so much of that.

My goal is to help you recognize your own authority and create the experience you want to have, whether in dance or in your life in general. I want you to take up more space, feel free to express yourself, and feel fulfillment and joy no matter what life throws at you. I want you to be able to find and trust in your own decisions, and not look to me for answers. I am just here to teach you what I know to be true, and to support you in finding what's true for you.

I believe playful exploration > shame-based education. You can't know what you don't know, everyone has a unique timeline, and every brain learns differently. I also bring a trauma-informed, intersectional feminist lens to my work. There are so many factors and systems that go into making you who you are. Even if we can't directly change them, acknowledging them can be powerful.

I believe the individual can express themselves most fully within a supportive community environment, and I strive to help create that to the best of my capacity.

I embrace my imperfections, and I hope I can help you embrace yours too.

I'm experimenting with something new. I wanted to create an online library for my teaching and coaching content, and the places they converge.

Most of my coaching clients are dancers, and all of my students could use the mindset tools, so it made sense to me to put it all together as one program.

My goal is to create something that is navigable like a wiki or a mind-map, where you can search easily, see related content linked within the resource you're in, and understand how things tie together.

I'm just getting started, and I'd love your feedback as I grow.

If you have a question, or a suggestion for a topic you'd like me to address, send me an email: bonnie@bonniecannoncoach.com