Put an executive on a dance floor and something interesting happens: the title and the practiced confidence fall away in about three minutes. Carol Fraser built a leadership program around that moment. A longtime HR professional who has also taught swing dancing for nearly three decades, she noticed the words she used teaching dance were the same ones she used coaching leaders, and she's spent years turning that overlap into a method backed by neuroscience.
In this HR Expert Series episode of the Team Check-In, Carol tells host Emre Ok how she can read a person's leadership style from a single dance, and why the only real mistake on the floor is losing connection with your partner. She breaks down what touch and synchronized movement do inside the brain, from an oxytocin bump to the drop in defensiveness she calls neurocoupling. She also makes a pointed case that most leaders are too overloaded to lead, and offers a concrete way to rebuild the connection remote work stripped out.
1. How you move is how you lead. Fraser says she can spot a micromanager by how they "over-lead" on the dance floor, steering and over-explaining every step. The body reveals leadership habits that stay hidden behind a title at work.
2. The only mistake is losing connection. On the floor, a wrong step doesn't count; breaking connection with your partner does. Like sport, the music keeps going, so you recover and adapt instead of freezing, and the next move is usually better than the one you planned.
3. Dance bypasses the overthinking brain. Fraser argues most leadership training is all slides and no body. Partner dance quiets the rational frontal lobe and reaches the emotional brain, which is where the freeze response and real behavior change live.
4. The brain science is doing the work. Touch raises oxytocin, the trust chemical, while shared rhythm creates what she calls neurocoupling, aligning two brains until defensiveness drops and collaboration rises. She points to a Stony Brook study where partner dancing beat treadmill work for brain health in dementia patients by 20 to 30%.
5. Leaders are too busy to lead. Every promotion adds people but shrinks the time to spend with them. Fraser's blunt rule: if a quarter of your job isn't growing the humans under you, your company hasn't given you room to lead.
6. Rebuild what remote work took. Her fix for scattered teams: send everyone to a physical, in-person class of their choice, from dance to karate, then debrief the shared experience each week. It has to engage the body, not a screen.
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Emre (00:00.169)
sure you know I don't miss anything. By the way, have you tried one of these like the E Ink writing stuff? I got so stoked because I like reading on like the Kindles and stuff and yeah so I spent like a whole way more money than I should have on like this little notebook-y thing and I thought like it would have been I'm gonna be so organized I'm gonna be all like I'm gonna have all my notes arranged and like I'll do whatever and
Carol Fraser | Dancing Leaders (00:06.881)
No.
Emre (00:28.915)
I hate it. I absolutely hate it, but I have to justify it. have to know, like I have to, I have to stick with it because if my girlfriend sees me using regular pen and paper after I like talked so much about like saying, no, this is actually really good. I'm going to be using it a lot. I'm going to be using it all the time. She will flip out. Like she'll be so mad at me.
Carol Fraser | Dancing Leaders (00:30.968)
Not so much.
Carol Fraser | Dancing Leaders (00:54.476)
Yeah, I actually had something similar where it's not directly linked, but you write it and then you it's like it's an app that you take a picture of. And I'm like, this is far too much effort. I'll just keep my notebooks, which I have notebooks from years ago. The way I look at it, because HR tends to write everything down and you should never throw anything away.
Emre (01:09.143)
Yeah
Carol Fraser | Dancing Leaders (01:19.854)
I've got notebooks for years and I usually like an audit, like a tax audit. I will keep them for seven years and then I'll toss them.
Emre (01:20.215)
Mm-hmm.
Emre (01:32.887)
Yeah, I also like I'm addicted to like these, you know, the moleskin notebooks like They're so good. Yeah, so good Okay, so I can't like and it will just tell it cover casual conversation going over like the Talking points I sent you but if you want to like move in other directions, we're fine with it as well. So with all of that said
I would like to say hi everyone. Welcome to another episode of the Team Check-In, specifically our HR Expert Series. Now in this episode, we will be answering the crucial question of, can whatever weird thing is wrong with your boss be fixed through dancing? To answer that question with me today, I have Carol Fraser. Carol, hi, welcome to the show.
Carol Fraser | Dancing Leaders (02:25.634)
Thank you for having me. I really appreciate being here.
Emre (02:29.343)
Now, Carol, you are running one of the most interesting practices in terms of like training and workshops that I've ever seen, ever heard of. But in our previous conversation, you told me a bit more about it and it blew my mind. So I cannot wait for you to blow the minds of our audience. But before we do that, can you tell people a bit about yourself and what it is that you do?
Carol Fraser | Dancing Leaders (02:54.036)
Absolutely. So I have been doing human resources and I say doing because sometimes it feels like a doing thing, not necessarily a practicing thing. But I've been in the field for over 30 years. I started back in the day when it was called personnel and I've watched the iterations over the years and I am primed and ready for this next iteration and
On top of my years of experience in human resources, I've also been dancing my entire life and I've been actually teaching swing dancing for going on 28 years. So there's the coupling of my lovely program. I'm certified in almost anything in human resources as a SHRM certification, compensation professional, certified.
coach, certified workforce planning. I could keep going on and on, but it's just like, if I had to learn something, I wasn't going to half ass it. said, you know what? I might as well go the full gamut and just get certified in it.
Emre (04:05.235)
I totally get it. did you do the whole like, you know, the second you got certified, you put it on LinkedIn and did you do the whole like, I'm very happy to announce.
Carol Fraser | Dancing Leaders (04:14.366)
No, actually, I'm really bad at that! I probably should have, but no, I did not do that!
Emre (04:21.463)
Yeah.
And the thing is I make a lot of fun of that. The second I get any form of certification, I do the same thing as well. Or the second we release anything, I'm like the first person to share it using that form of language as well. So, can you tell me a bit about dancing leaders? How did that come about? How did, you know, connecting dance and leadership first come into play?
Carol Fraser | Dancing Leaders (04:52.174)
So it was, I had the epiphany. I think I probably saw parallels before the epiphany. I had the epiphany in 2017 and I was in the midst of teaching a fairly large class, 30 odd people, just doing basic swing dancing. And I found that the words coming out of my mouth were very akin to the words that come out of my mouth when I'm doing leadership development. And I started, you know, in my program, I always say,
there must be at least a dozen times during the Dancing Leaders Program that I'll go, dance lesson, life lesson. And that's where it started to all of a sudden click together, that there is an opportunity through embodied learning, which has tons of studies, that you could move the needle faster in leadership development through a form of movement.
And so in 2017, I started playing around with it. I did about, I don't know, three or four sessions with some small companies. It was fantastic. And then around, cause it really launched in 18, around 19, we started to get space, codify it, trademark it, and then COVID hit. And so of course nobody could touch one another. So that, it's not something you could do virtually via zoom.
So it kind of went back on the shelf until two years ago. And two years ago, I pulled it off the shelf, I dusted it off, and I just so happened at the same time, got to work with two different neuroscientists. One who was the head of neuroscience over at the Einstein Institute, now she's the head of neuroscience at Stony Brook University. And the other is the head of neuroscience for Nassau County here in New York.
and I have a son who has epilepsy and that's how I met him. He actually became a student of mine. So I'm teaching him and his wife who is a psychotherapist how to dance. And we had lovely conversations where we started to recognize he's got a program where he links brain health and movement, brain health and music, I should say. And he does lecturing all over the country. And he introduced me to Dr. Blumen.
Carol Fraser | Dancing Leaders (07:14.798)
who is the neuroscience head over at Stony Brook University, where she is actually doing a study, and I'm partnering her with on it, where they're comparing for dementia or Alzheimer's patients, the difference between doing treadmill work and what that does for brain health and doing partner dancing and what that does for brain health. And her studies have shown exponentially greater results
through partner dancing, cognition, memory, just overall brain health, 20 to 30 % better in those patients than those just doing treadmill. So when I started partnering with those two a couple of years ago, I said, there's way more to this than even I thought. So I started codifying it even deeper and we started actually doing correlations with movement and how people show up in their leadership capacity, as well as team cohesion.
So that's kind of how it kind of blew up over the last two years.
Emre (08:17.687)
So, I mean, that's really incredible. And, you know, the fact that it's based in science, like the connections between like neuroscience research and movement and all of that, it's amazing because anyone can slap two concepts together and say like, you know, this actually is connected to this. And, you know, if you're somewhat good with language, you can make some loosey goosey connection.
And if you're a good salesman, you can probably sell it. I've met people who could, you know, do that sell. But, so this is, this has some like actual hard evidence and science backing it, which is pretty cool. But I want to go a little back and because you told me that you saw like when you, during your dance lessons, you said like you recognized some language that you were using in, you know, leadership training. So.
Carol Fraser | Dancing Leaders (09:00.248)
Yeah. Okay.
Emre (09:13.727)
What are some of those like common phrases and common language that you use, you know, in between dance lessons and leadership management training?
Carol Fraser | Dancing Leaders (09:23.054)
Well, it's interesting. I'd say the quickest one is the fear component, right? It's people are free. They're going to step on someone's toes. They're going to mess up the move. People freeze a lot of times on the dance floor when they mess up. And so what I started to say to people was that's just a syncopation. You have to use your growth in the mindset. You're learning something new.
So you're going to have to make mistakes to figure out what feels best on you. And so that, that Carol Dweck mindset of growth, yes, and all of that was one area where I started doing a lot of talking about it. And I hadn't even read Carol Dweck back in 2017. So I was like, now of course I've read that and I'm like, look at, that's what I was saying. And who knew? So there was that fear component and the fear of
growing or making a mistake and learning from that mistake. We always say on the dance floor, there's never a mistake. It's just a syncopation. So what if you didn't do a triple step or whatever we asked you to do? You did you. And as long as you're with your partner and you're with the music, you're dancing. So that was one. And then the other one were those people who were over leading. Like I had a, can I tell a story? I had a
Emre (10:46.069)
Yep, all yours.
Carol Fraser | Dancing Leaders (10:46.894)
a networking event that I had gone to recently, a bunch of HR people, and I was explaining dancing leaders and somebody said, hey, dance with me and tell me what my leadership style is. So I picked this person up and I started dancing with them around the floor. And this was one person and I just said, so let me ask you this, when you're in these situations and you show up like this, what's the reaction? And she's like, how do you know I show up like that? And I'm like,
I don't know your name, but I can tell you what your leadership style is based on how you just danced on the floor. And it was amazing. And another gentleman said, wait, wait, do me. And so I said, okay. And I put my hand out and I said, okay, you lead me. And as he was leading me through the dance and my dude, he didn't need to know any steps, right? I'm doing me, he's doing him, but we're connected and the music's playing, we're connected.
He was over leading. was micromanaging my movement. Okay, I'm going to move you over here. Okay. Are you good? I'm just going to move you over here. Okay. Can I, can I turn you like that? Just like talking through the entire dance. And I was like, hon, live in the moment, calm down. So that was another parallel that I had seen way back in 2017 where people were over explaining and micromanaging the move, if you will, by over leading it.
And I was like, my God, I see this all the time in leadership development.
Emre (12:13.431)
All right. That's, that's really cool. And I mean, mind you, we've had like a conversation about this with Carol before, but we didn't go into the specifics. And Carol, the more you're talking, like I'm recognizing language. Like you said, like, people don't want to step on people's toes. I can't like, I can't remember how many times I've said literally the exact same language to my coworkers. I'm like, Hey, I don't want to step on your toes.
the more you're talking, I'm making these connections about the way I work, not specifically like the way I manage, but like the way I work, like my direct report, Dorothy, you have no idea how many times, know, whenever like I give her like a task or like something, something to do, whatever, you have no idea how many times I chicken, but is this cool? Like, do you feel comfortable doing the, just let her work, you know, like, so, and
that is kind of me on the dance floor. I am a very tentative dancer. I was in a musical in high school and like I was kind of the lead and during the rehearsals I dropped my co-lead so hard and it was so bad because I was like dancing with her and by the way my girlfriend at the time was like a way way like a background person in the musical and she was not happy about it.
So she was like, I was dancing with my co-lead and she, I saw my girlfriend like staring daggers through me and you should have seen the way I like whoops drop.
Carol Fraser | Dancing Leaders (13:49.902)
yeah, that might be a little bit of a collaboration issue right there.
Emre (13:55.511)
You
Emre (14:02.195)
So, what I want to ask you is, when executives step into the dance floor with you and with their employees, what surprises them the most?
Carol Fraser | Dancing Leaders (14:18.67)
You know, many times they walk in a level of confidence, right? So they're leaders, they've been doing it. I find that my C-suite executives have the greatest breakthroughs and growths. But when they come into the program, everybody's put on the same level. So unless you're someone who is also a dance teacher,
you're likely going to feel uncomfortable the moment I ask you if you're leading to put your hand around the waist of the follow, if you're following to put the hand on the shoulder of the leader and the two of you connect hands. Right there, things crumble, right? So all of the walls, all the persona, all the cosplaying, right? All the code switching that we do inside
our offices, they crumble when you get on the dance floor. Because you may be a leader at work, but I may ask you to be a follow on the dance floor, which means you're no longer really in charge for the next three minutes. Somebody else is in charge of your movement. So it's an opportunity to bring leaders back into their bodies because our bodies respond way
than our heads respond. And so when I pull them into touch and really connecting with where their body is in relation to another person, it's amazing the immediate trust that one needs to give to that partnership. And so when these executives come into the program, many of them
I would say probably more like 80 % of them are ready to go. They're like, I want to learn more about myself. I always have that 20%. And even from the team players, if we do it with the whole group, we're like, I don't want to touch my boss. And we move them through that fear, through that judgment, through those assumptions, and we get them actually moving together. I've gone into large forums where I'll do a talk.
Carol Fraser | Dancing Leaders (16:43.66)
and these people don't know each other at all. They're not even working together. They all just bought a ticket and came to a forum. And I make them hold each other's hands and stare into each other's eyes and just sway back and forth. The whole room by the end of that 10 minutes, because sometimes I only get a 30 minute talk, after 10 minutes of doing rhythm and connection and connecting with each other and connecting with the music, the whole room just got connected.
Whoever's talking after me has the most engaged audience ever.
So when they come in, we actually break it down very, very quickly. The breakthrough happens very quickly. The moment somebody says, great, I want you to touch this person. I want you to follow these rhythms and we're all going to go together. It's that if we go to the neuroscience, it's that near neuron connection. That's what makes that immediate trust happen. That your brain and truly the energies that are coming out of your body from your brain are connected.
Emre (17:21.161)
Emre (17:37.911)
Mm-hmm.
Carol Fraser | Dancing Leaders (17:50.375)
neurologically with the person.
Emre (17:54.291)
Exactly. I was going to ask you about that because sharing such an intimate space and connecting through touch with your boss or your coworker, it's not an easy barrier to break. it might not be the most easiest practice for some people. So.
In like a scenario where, you know, you switch the roles on the dance floor and the leader in the office has to follow and the follower in the office has to lead, who do you think has the most trouble, you know, letting go of their role?
Carol Fraser | Dancing Leaders (18:37.414)
wow, that's a really good question. And I'd have to say it depends on the group. It depends on how the group usually works. I just did an offsite with an organization that was remote first, right? So everybody is working from home. They did their company offsite. We got everybody up moving. And there was such a desire for connection.
because they didn't have connection on a daily basis, that I'd say that in that scenario, it was the leaders. Like the team was so hungry to want to connect with one another, but leaders tend to be so busy and like meeting after meeting after meeting after meeting, that sometimes it's a little harder for them to stop that routine and be present in the moment. So in that scenario, I would say it was probably the leaders.
But I will say there was another scenario and this is where I think this group was great because it was an international group. So I had people from Brazil, I had people from Argentina, I had people from Puerto Rico, I had people from two different states in America and we all got together and I did the Dancing Leaders with them. I would say in that scenario, and again, it's a little bit of the industry too. So imagine engineers versus creatives, right?
the engineers themselves, the leaders were not having any issues whatsoever. Like, this is the greatest thing ever. I get to actually learn more about my team. The engineers were like, you want me to do what? So sometimes it could be a little based on what their roles are. But overall, I will say even in that last scenario that was international, I had two people say, I'm injured. I can't do it. We still have them in the room.
We still have them listening to music. I usually actually give them an assignment to help them raise their own self-awareness by watching others. So they're getting their social awareness and their self-awareness up. But I haven't had a time yet, including that one, where after 10 minutes of doing Dancing Leaders, they get up and go, I can do this. This isn't that bad. I thought you were gonna make me do like aerials and stuff, but I'm like,
Carol Fraser | Dancing Leaders (21:02.072)
So I haven't had a chance to see somebody truly sit out. Everybody ends up getting involved in some way, or form. And it's amazing.
Emre (21:11.201)
Yep. And I think you touched upon something really interesting there because we, know, when you initially told me about the concept and, know, the, think the initial thought is like, you know, managers learning to lead and dance into it. But the different departments, you know, people you don't usually work with that connection is very key because again, if
especially if you're working remote, you don't get to connect with those people. So that's pretty interesting. So I think another key parallel that can be drawn with the dance floor and the workplaces, the idea of messing up, the fear of messing up and just letting the person across from you down. how do you help? What do you recommend to leaders?
if they want to loosen their grip on perfection and, you know, get rid of the fear of messing up.
Carol Fraser | Dancing Leaders (22:16.13)
It's about normalizing it. mean, I know we say that even in regular leadership, but when you're on the dance floor, and I kind of reference this a little bit, there's no mistakes. The mistakes happen, if I had to call it a mistake, the mistakes happen when you lose connection with your partner. So that is the one mistake that we focus on. It's not the mistakes of the feet. It's not the mistakes of whether or not you're on time with the music.
It's the mistake of did you lose connection with the person that you're supposed to be connecting with. That's the only one. And you know, the playfulness of dancing and the fact like in sports, the music's still going and just like in sports, the ball is still moving. You need to recover quickly. You can't sit there and let the music keep going and you're stuck on the floor not moving. Just like if you were playing tennis.
If you worried about the lob you just did over the net and now you're overthinking it, that ball is going to come back and just smack you in the face. So you can't overthink it. So the same principles apply on the dance floor. The idea is music still playing, get over it and let's keep going. And what happens when we teach the brain to get over it and just keep going, you actually, the next moves on the dance floor or even in leadership,
the next moves that you do are actually better moves than the one that you thought you were going to do perfectly that you made a mistake in. Because you actually quickly learned what you could or could not do with your body or your skills, and you quickly adapted to doing it a different way. And that way actually will always produce a better outcome. Period. End of story. So adding the playfulness, showing that mistakes
are fine to make, just stay connected with your partner and listen to the music and just keep moving. The perfectionism gets shut down through the creativity and the improvisation is actually what starts to build the trust.
Emre (24:31.735)
And are there, do you see any parallels between how people react to failure in the dance floor and versus how people react to failure in the workplace?
Carol Fraser | Dancing Leaders (24:41.194)
yeah, the shutdown is the big one that we usually see where they literally stop dancing. I would say, so when we do the program, have a, whoever is the leader and the follower in the first program is the opposite position in the second part of the program, right? So we do the dancing two times and then we do dialogic workshops after each one of those to really raise the awareness and focus on the discoveries.
And what ends up happening, the freeze moments that happen on the dance floor, we focus on letting that pass and we give them, what's the best word I can use? We give them calm and saying, we'll talk about that in the workshop so they can shelf it, right? They can put it in the parking lot, if you will.
and know that somebody's going to talk about it so that they can work their emotions through that. So I never poo poo a mistake or a freeze, like I will sometimes see in real leadership in real life. Like, and you're in the boardroom and you like, I just said the wrong thing and you freeze, right? We'll always say, I totally get that right now. Your brain is telling you, you should stop. Let's put that in the parking lot.
let's listen to the music and try a different move, something completely different. And we'll talk about that in the hour that we're going to be talking about everything. The freeze is the one that we have to get past because that is the whole rational brain thinking. That's the whole frontal lobe. And what the dancing leaders does is it bypasses that rational brain and it speaks directly to the emotional brain. And it's funny because
After 10 minutes, over-intellectualizing, that's a long word, of movement goes away and they start listening to their bodies. And that's where I think people in the regular world don't focus enough on what's happening in their body to be able to pivot as leaders. They're over-intellectualizing.
Carol Fraser | Dancing Leaders (27:05.388)
you know, my boss told me to do this or this is the training that I had. And it said that this was the right way to address a conflict or a difficult conversation instead of listening, just listening, even if it's just listening with your eyes because movement, just listening and then getting past that assumption, a sub-div mindset of what it is to. That I have to do right.
Emre (27:32.821)
Yeah, I think there are some real lessons people can learn here because freezing, the whole concept of freezing, that is not isolated to the dance floor, right? Because two episodes ago, we were talking about fear and shame and anxiety in the workplace. And it is such a trauma overall. And we were discussing like, you
Carol Fraser | Dancing Leaders (27:45.666)
No, not at all.
Emre (28:02.027)
the individual who decided to focus on fear and shame in the workplace, Mindy. So when I asked her, why did you think, why was this of interest to you? Why did you want to focus on this? And she said, I was just looking into the most common blockers at work. And when we're talking about a blocker, we usually think, it's a lack of resources. it's an alignment issue. it's this. It's that. The most primal, the most root cause blockers that we experience
day to day in the workplace are these issues of fear, shame, anxiety, all of that. And I think anyone listening can relate to the instance of you have a task to do, you know what you should do, and you know what should be done, and you have all the resources, but you freeze. You procrastinate, you don't know what to do, you don't know what to say, so you
push it away. Or, you know, again, in the boardroom, you're talking and you have an idea, you say it wrong, there's a silence, you freeze, you have everything in your arsenal to, you know, remedy that mistake or, you know, guide the discussion away or to explain yourself better, but you freeze. And that is such a natural part of the workplace experience. And I like the way, you said, wait, the
dancing experience can lead people through that notion of freezing.
Carol Fraser | Dancing Leaders (29:37.142)
It's learning what your body is doing during that fear mode. the minute that someone says something wrong, physically something's happening in your body. You're sweating, or you get cold, or you start to shake. Your brain is producing all of those fear chemicals. And people are disconnected with their body.
Emre (29:40.437)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Carol Fraser | Dancing Leaders (30:06.83)
If you're able to be more connected with your body, you're able to respond as opposed to react. And the dancing portion pulls people back into a body, but it's no longer their own body that they are trying to pay attention to. It's a connected body with someone else. None of us are leaders in a vacuum.
when you're a leader, you're a leader because there are other people involved, right? And so imagine what Mindy was talking about and trying to help people understand that blocker. Now imagine you're able to now maybe focus more on how you can show up better and work yourself through that fear, but you're still a leader and you need to help somebody else get through that. And sometimes what comes out of my mouth may or may not help that.
person because they're unique over there. But now if I were to touch and help you move physically through something and then be able to draw that parallel on having to helping you move through something metaphorically in the workplace, you're going to see that the trust and the collaboration and the communication and the ability to delegate and their psychological bravery to bring back to their leaders. I think I screwed up. So
Again, mitigating fear on all levels allows things to flow so much better.
Emre (31:42.071)
Yeah, exactly. And I think it's also the matter of the other side of it, right? You know, we talked about how your body reacts to failure and like the freezing, but also how do you react when the person across from you freezes? Because I think this might be one of the areas where people's behaviors in the workplace versus how would they would behave in the dance floor.
could very much be different. I think if you're dancing and the person across from you freezes, I don't think your reaction would be, OK, come on, now what? But why did you freeze? You're not pushing. You wouldn't push them. It would be a much more compassionate and understanding approach to someone freezing. Whereas in the workplace,
you might not be so understanding. And I think many leaders, many people could benefit from taking, you know, their, the more compassionate behavior they display in the dance floor and applying them to the workplace, they could change a lot.
Carol Fraser | Dancing Leaders (32:54.988)
They could, they absolutely could. And for those leaders who are more akin to, I'm just trying to move you over here. You'd be amazed what I'm capable of doing because we've got scribes, which are also dancers, walking the rooms, actually listening to everybody's little comments. And they also are taking note of the physical aspects of what's happening to people. But because they're also dance teachers, they're able to
step in at that moment and they've been trained to ask specific kinds of questions that cause the brain to immediately gain self-awareness of how that came out. Let's face it, if my boss said something bad to me and I were to look that person straight in the face and go, I'm sorry, what did you just say? As if to say, you just said something wrong. But it's amazing when a dance teacher walks around and goes, I'm sorry, what did you just say to your partner?
Because they go, I'm sorry. What I meant was, I'm glad I slapped you right back in there. And I saved that relationship because I'm able to pull it away from the work, but I am able to highlight the back heat.
Emre (34:08.407)
I think every workplace would benefit from just having like a third party with no stakes whatsoever just hang out and slap people in the wrist.
Emre (34:22.868)
my god, I just invented the consulting industry again. Just...
Carol Fraser | Dancing Leaders (34:26.37)
There you go. I mean, look, we can we can slap people on the wrist, but I think when you put people in a in an environment that bodes well without huge implications to draw those attentions, I think it makes it a little bit safer than if you do it as a consultant. I mean, I'm a consultant. So I how I approach it through my coaching background and through inquiry and through
support is very different and it takes longer. It does. It takes a lot longer to get from point A to point B in your brain as a consultant than it is on the dance floor. And it's great because that person that wanted to say, the follower that wanted to say, I'm sorry, what did you just say to me? Now has a reference point to be able to go back to their leader and go, remember when we were on the dance floor? And remember when I felt like you weren't listening?
when you were trying to lead me into that pass and the dance teacher kind of came over and kind of like reset us. Can we do that kind of reset now? Like now they have a shared experience that they can pull upon to be able to say, hey, I really want to pull that back and see if you can remember how that felt for both of us. And could we kind of apply a new way to reset here at the workplace?
Emre (35:51.147)
Yeah, that's amazing. That's awesome. And I also want to ask you, what do you think the physical movement aspect and these physical activities and movement practices, what are some things that they can unlock that traditional coaching methods can't?
Carol Fraser | Dancing Leaders (36:11.596)
Yeah, this is where I think I probably spend the first dialogic workshop that we do after the first dancing, talking about the somatic of the partner dance and the connection to the music and what that's also doing to the brain. It's, you know, the current leadership world, great slides, but
zero somatic grounding. And a lot of times there's too much content and there's not enough integration. And so when we talk about touching one another and what's happening in the brain and the body when we do that, we are actually overcoming the emotional blockers unconsciously that people don't understand or are afraid to
actually articulate. So we want to think that the touch is going to get all those happy, happy chemicals going. It's this is where my loving little neuroscientist, but I'm going to make it very, very rudimentary in the language because a lot of times I, I see the eyes glaze over when I get to, did I lose you? When I get to scientific. So what I usually do is tell people,
Emre (37:22.347)
Mm-hmm.
Carol Fraser | Dancing Leaders (37:35.918)
that the touch is hitting a certain part of your brain that's allowing those chemicals to launch in your body so that you can actually be more present in the moment. When you're listening to the music, what that's doing is it's pulling upon memory and that memory also is putting forth those happy neurons and the reducing the cortisol, the stress neurons. And what you're able to do then is open up
to build trust. So the touch and the music and the eye contact and the shared steps is actually creating something in your world.
Emre (38:16.213)
so,
Wait, Carol, so I had like a disconnection happen. I think it's the Cloudflare thingy kind of messing up some of the stuff. So.
Carol Fraser | Dancing Leaders (38:29.71)
I saw that, but I kept talking because I saw the recording was still going.
Emre (38:34.425)
Yeah, but I just want to make sure that I have full context before we continue.
Carol Fraser | Dancing Leaders (38:43.224)
You got it. You got it. I was like, did I lose you? But I see it's still recording like maybe he just turned his camera off. I don't know.
Emre (38:44.197)
Yeah. So, cause I mean, no, no, I'm like, I am very good at pretending to have heard things and they keep going, but I don't want to do that. yeah. Yeah. Can we get it back to the place where you said like, I'm connecting it to neuroscience, but I'm not going to use too much jargon.
Carol Fraser | Dancing Leaders (38:58.914)
it again then what about touch
Carol Fraser | Dancing Leaders (39:09.442)
Yes, absolutely. So when I talk about the benefits of touch and music in the Dancing Leaders program, I try not to get too scientific because the eyes glaze over. And what I'll try to do is make it into terms that people can kind of understand. So touched and shared space actually reduces the threat response and it increases the happy chemicals like oxytocin, right? And that's
the actual trust chemical that is in your brain. Then when you actually are listening to the music and moving together, like you have shared rhythms in your footwork, the synchronized movements actually create what I talked a little bit about, which was that neurocoupling, literally aligning the brains. And when people actually move together,
the defensiveness drops, right? So your fight, flight, freeze amygdala starts to reduce. The cortisol starts to reduce. And that's when the defensiveness kind of drops away and the collaboration really starts to rise. So that is, you know, a very high level of what happens when you get into a physical connection that requires
a shared agreement to move as one.
Emre (40:40.209)
Yeah. And I think one thing I want to connect here is, believe it or not, even though we are speaking about like Carol's program in detail, she did not book an ad for the episode. This is not like we're not, we're not doing like paid promotion. This is just very interesting. And I think the broader spectrum is most of the things you're talking about can be applied to any, you know, shared physical connection, shared physical space.
movement-based activity that includes some form of collaboration and synchronicity. so my question for you is, did we lose opportunities for this with the advent of remote work?
Carol Fraser | Dancing Leaders (41:28.354)
Yes, the answer is yes. We really did. Even if we go back to the pre-COVID days, whenever you had lunch with someone, you connected on a different level, right? When you did do your company gatherings or even in meetings, whenever we had that opportunity to get closer physically, your body emits energy, your neurons are connecting.
And it's important to understand that it doesn't need to be permeated through every single day. But even pre-COVID, we used to try to coach our leaders to do something that was outside of the project or outside of business as usual, to ensure that you're creating that connection to increase trust, to increase communication, to increase collaboration. People, when they know more about you,
and the vulnerable portion about you, you will find that they will buy in and do way more than they need to do because there is an agreement, that unwritten agreement between the company and its employees when you actually take care of your employees. And the leader's role, that is part of the leader's role, is to take care of everyone within their
purview and it's not just take care from a professional. As we know, we spend more time with our work buddies than we do with our freaking families. So you need to understand that if you sign up to be a leader, you sign up to actually be somebody who impacts other people's lives as a whole, not just their careers. That is, I must have said a thousand times in leadership development courses.
If your job description isn't at least 25 % of actually ensuring that people under your organization are growing as humans and are connected as humans, you're not a leader. You've got the responsibility, but your company didn't give you enough time to actually lead. Because leading is about aspiring other people.
Carol Fraser | Dancing Leaders (43:54.264)
to do good. So you have to inspire to aspire, have other people aspire to do greatness. And that takes time. It takes time in your calendar to do that. Yes, you can do some little micro moments when you're in meetings or you're in your one-on-one, but every time I see a new person get promoted and more people coming under their purview, their job expands, but their amount of time to spend time with their team diminishes.
And that's not what a leadership position is. And I wish every CEO would listen to that line and say, the only way your company is going to scale and sustain is if you've given your leaders enough time to actually lead. If you're not making your numbers, it's because your leaders don't have time to actually lead. You've overburdened your leaders to do the work when they should be given less work and more time to inspire other people's, other people's.
Emre (44:53.841)
I love that. No, no, no, keep it. It's all yours. Keep the soapbox. Stay on it. Stay on it forever. Like preach.
Carol Fraser | Dancing Leaders (44:54.158)
Sorry, that's my soapbox and I'll get off of it now.
Emre (45:05.219)
love that, but it's such a thin line because if you don't, because in order to quote unquote lead and inspire to help people grow, the leaders do have to be working because at some point the people following go like, well, what is this guy doing? Right. so, yeah, there is, you know, that incredibly tight balance and
Carol Fraser | Dancing Leaders (45:08.622)
Cheers.
Emre (45:31.779)
I also want to ask you, and I think this is a lovely note to end on, and this is something I'm very curious about, because you talked about, we discussed a little bit, that the loss of shared space and movement with remote working, people losing that connection. I I am very much pro-work and pro-remote work, and I'm pretty sure you are as well. So the real question is,
How do we regain that connection? How do we maintain that connection that used to come from sharing a space when we're working remote?
Carol Fraser | Dancing Leaders (46:15.086)
So it's a good question and I get asked that a lot because my program is catalytic in its effects. When people bring me in to do the offsite, the way that everything kind of comes together so quickly, but then they scatter off into their remote environments. So I've put together some ideas and I think that their ideas, how it gets applied is really based on your company's culture. I would say,
Every leader, I mean, I would say everybody, but if I have to focus on leaders, every leader has to go take a dance class at least once a year, honestly, on their own, not with their team. Because if you at least invest in your wellbeing and your increase in self-awareness and social awareness and what it means to move somebody else, even if it's not somebody that works with you, you will become a better leader.
because you're becoming more attuned to how people respond, react, how you influence that response or reaction. And I'd say, even if it's just once a year, I would say once a quarter, I would say do it every week, but you know, get out there and do something that physically connects you with someone that puts you in a position that you need to collaborate with somebody who you do not have a whole lot of
interaction with, i.e. a stranger, and you need to learn how quickly that road is to trust and collaboration. If you can do that with a stranger in a dance class or on the dance floor, you're learning skills that are completely applicable to what you need to do in a remote environment. Alternatively, some other ideas is to make the team
do something together, but in their own areas so that they still have that shared experience. So if I'm a marketing team of six, the thing that we're going to do with our wellness dollars or our team building dollars is everybody's going to go sign up for a dance class or a karate class or a yoga class. But what we're going to do with that is we're all going to come back every week and we're going to talk about that.
Carol Fraser | Dancing Leaders (48:36.53)
shared experience so that there is the connection that everybody feels. And again, some people are like, maybe I don't want to do yoga. Maybe I want to do this. It has to be physical in nature because you have to connect to your body. That is what is going to help to raise the neuro pathways between what happens, what your body feels and how you respond.
Because if you don't take, if you don't focus on what your body feels and what happens becomes a reaction. And that's an emotional response. If you can get closer to understanding what your body is telling you, your brain will go from your amygdala up to your prefrontal cortex and you'll learn how to respond and have less emotion attached.
Emre (49:26.747)
Leaders, you've heard it here, put on your red shoes and dance the blues. Carol, thank you so much for coming on the show. This has been an amazing episode. Where can people find you?
Carol Fraser | Dancing Leaders (49:39.404)
You can find me at dancingleaders.com and you can find me out on Facebook at Carol Fraser. And I can't wait to get to know you and find out how dancing can help you and your teams.
Emre (49:51.569)
Amazing and if you're listening to us on iTunes, Spotify, wherever you found podcasts, leave us a like, subscribe. It really helps us show out. And if you want to try the highest rated performance management software in the Microsoft ecosystem, Team Flex for absolutely free. You can always click the link in the description. Every episode I try to say this a bit faster. Let's see if I mess up in the next episode. This has been the team check-in. Bye-bye everyone. All right, that was the episode. Carol, thank you so much.
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