Leadership skills

I've been trying to learn how to lead. Through my involvement with iGEM, amongst other things, I have a fair amount of experience with leading people. But *groups* of people. Not individual people, and certainly not while they're dancing. D:

Granted, it was only very recently that I started to try, but man oh man is it hard! Like frig! I think that I would struggle with it more than most follows, because it seems like most follows have at least a vague idea of the patterns they know... i.e., they actually know some patterns, to at least some sketchy extent. I imagine it's fairly common for a lead to ask a follow how to do a certain pattern and for the follow to not know how to teach the lead for it, but as a rule, follows seem to at least know their own steps for things, more or less. And I can *do* quite a number of things... I mean, I've only been at this for a year and a bit, so I definitely still consider myself a beginning dancer with a *ton* to learn, and my technique still sucks (actually, in a lot of ways, it's gotten much worse since I stopped taking ballroom in the spring :(!) -- but I'm at least at the point where, going out dancing salsa, I can follow most leads without too much trouble. But I have absolutely *no* idea what the hell I'm doing while I'm dancing. I don't even know how many times someone has asked me to show them something I just did, and I didn't have the faintest idea what it was that I'd just done. Like, four seconds earlier.

A friend of mine is continually shocked at the extent to which my dancing is devoid of conscious control. And I guess when it's brought to my attention, I find it kind of weird too. But then I think about it, and it's actually very much in keeping with other stuff for me... like for guitar, to show someone how to play a song that I know, I have to just play it myself, observe/figure out what I'm doing, and then show it to them. I don't keep any of that stuff in explicit memory at all, it seems. Only *while* I'm learning a song is my brain aware of what I have to do, and it tells my fingers to do it. But once my fingers have learned how to play the song, my brain is all, "Weeeell, looks like my job here is done!" and forgets the whole thing. Same goes for dance: it's been quite a while since I've been to any kind of patterns class*, but I usually learn the patterns pretty quickly and often end up helping my partner figure out how to lead it. But once we've got it, and *I* no longer have to worry about what it is that we're doing, my brain seems to promptly discard that no-longer-useful information and leave my body to do what it knows how to do. (*I guess I don't like patterns classes because, being a follow (and therefore entirely subject to the whim of my lead), I can't actually use them myself, so I invariably forget them anyway. So I stopped taking them once I no longer had a partner with whom I was learning on an ongoing basis -- it just seemed kind of pointless... But I must be missing something here: so many girls go to patterns classes, so there must be something to be gained by follows by taking them! Some benefit I'm just ignorant of. Someone enlighten me! :|!)

For practical purposes this mindless dancing has always seemed to work well enough for me, but a) there's something slightly disconcerting about having little-to-no conscious control of my body while I'm dancing :|, and b) now that I want to learn how to lead, I have no idea what there even *is* out there to be learned, in terms of what patterns exist -- patterns that I do all the time as a follow.

In any case, patterns classes just gained some obvious value for me, and I think I'm going to start taking some beginner ones with UW Mambo Club next term. I'll just buy a pack of these so the dudes don't try to dance with me:

I'm thinking "Scoundrel", in black.