We:30 Share & Tell: Emily Shares Her Passion for Ballet Dancing

This week's We:30 features Emily, our Community Management Specialist, as she shares with us how her passion for ballet dancing has helped shaped both her personal and professional life. 
Ever since I can remember, I dreamed of becoming a professional ballerina. For 18 years, I dedicated my life to pursuing this dream – sacrificing a “normal” childhood experience to attend ballet summer intensives, and leaving home at the age of 15 to go to a ballet boarding school across the country. While I never made it as a professional dancer, I have a profound respect and passion for the ballet art form. Ballet combines the strength and athleticism of a sport with the elegance and attention to detail of an art – to master both is a remarkable feat. If you have ever watched a live ballet performance, you will see what I mean. While the ballerinas onstage make it look effortless, there are countless hours of training, injuries, sometimes tears, and sacrifices made to achieve the aesthetic – it’s a beautiful but brutal world! 

Ballet has shaped me in many ways – it’s taught me how to take direction, maintain discipline, turn criticism into opportunity, and constantly strive for improvement. These are skills that I apply every day at Red Door and in life. Ballet also led me to my first social media job with the internationally-acclaimed Miami City Ballet. There, a lifelong dream of mine actually did come true!

I’ve always believed that ballet lacks mainstream popularity because the general public perceives it as girls in tutus and tiaras prancing around to old, boring music. My goal has been to change this perception by highlighting the parallels between sports and ballet. Sports are popular, so why can’t ballet be too? At Miami City Ballet, I had the opportunity to work on a marketing campaign featuring the ballet and the NBA champions, the Miami Heat. Inserting my passion into the campaign messaging, and giving Lebron James and Dwayne Wade some partnering tips during our photo shoot, was an experience I will never forget! 
Ballet will always be close to my heart – whether I’m taking a dance class, attending a performance, teaching my “dance” spin class (shameless plug – stop by The Rush studio for a FREE class), or applying the skills I attained from the art form to everyday life. 

Every Wednesday at 3:30 we gather to celebrate an employee who exemplifies our core values to inspire, share, evolve, exceed and be 100% jerk-free. In our Share & Tell edition, we invite the employee to share their unique story, or simply something that inspires them.

• Culture