THE WHOA

The original article was created for Substack on 5.15.2026

Why the most important growth happens before you know the steps

I don’t walk into rooms. I stand at the edge and watch first.

I read who’s performing and who’s actually present. What’s safe and what isn’t. What’s worth the cost of entry. I’ve done it so long it feels like personality but it isn’t. It’s what happens when you grow up in a house where being too loud, too happy, too much, draws the wrong kind of attention. You learn to make yourself smaller. You learn to scan before you step. You carry that long after you’ve left the house that taught it to you.

I know now that smallness was never mine to keep. But the body is slower than the mind, and some things take longer to “unknow” than to learn.

Which is why, on that Saturday, I watched the Zumba class through the window and kept walking.

A room full of women jumping around, screaming, dancing to music that had no interest in being subtle. I checked the schedule, clocked it, and left.

 But something stayed.

A month into my strength training routine I decided to add cardio. I told myself it was practical. One class, once a week. I didn’t say out loud what I was actually walking toward.

The moment the music started something came loose in my body that I wasn’t prepared for.

I got emotional. The kind that moves up from below your ribs and sits in your throat. I was on my own island, half a beat behind, copying moves wrong, clearly lost and I was unlocking. I’ve done enough internal work to know what I was feeling. An inner child waking up. One who had learned, early, that her joy was inconvenient. One who had been kept very, very quiet.

I cried through first few minutes of that class. Then I let the joy and silliness overtake me and danced.

The second week I went back.

There’s a moment in Zumba where the whole room erupts together. A collective WHOA at the same beat of the song. I had been watching it happen around me without joining. Observing from inside my own body the way I always do.

Until I didn’t.

I opened my mouth and let the sound out and something enormous shifted. Absurd. Joyful. Forbidden. That word is the one I keep coming back to. It felt forbidden in a way I couldn’t immediately name, which told me everything about how long I had been holding it and whose voice had put it there.

I was missing steps. I looked like a fool. I kept going.

I leave every class exhausted and wrung out and completely certain I’m going back. Because this stopped being about cardio after the first five minutes. Whatever is being unlocked in there is happening in installments. Each class peels something loose, each whoa makes more room. The liberation feels almost forbidden, which at this point in my life I’ve learned to treat as a signal.

Here’s what I think about when I work with leaders navigating unfamiliar terrain: the instinct to observe until conditions are perfect is understandable. Intelligent, even up to a point. But growth doesn’t live in the doorway. The transformation is always on the other side of the threshold you keep almost crossing. You don’t get there by waiting until you know all the steps. You get there by starting to move.

At Anthilles, this is the work. Helping leaders step fully into the room, past the edge where it’s safe and familiar and nothing changes, into what they’re actually capable of.

I should know. I’m still learning it myself, one whoa at a time.