Taking the Lead: Lessons From a Life in Motion (15 page)

I threw myself into the effort without hesitation because I had no choice. There were only two options: I could go out there and throw my hands up and say, “Just kidding! I’m a phony,” or get it done. I couldn’t let myself or my partners down.

This was the stage I was given, and I always want to be the best at whatever I’m doing. I never wanted my partners to feel they couldn’t rely on me. I had to go in there and make it happen. With that mentality, I found a way.

Be real
.

In work as in life, when you commit to a partner, you need to be willing to be personally vulnerable if you expect them to do the same with you. Letting down your guard isn’t easy; it means revealing who you really are, your authentic self. For me, it has been the only way to make my partners feel the trust that’s necessary to help them open up to conquering their fears. And in becoming vulnerable with others, I’ve learned many things about myself. Asking for help or admitting you’re lost or overwhelmed doesn’t mean you’re weak. It means you’re strong enough to allow your true self to be seen. Opening up to someone is the ultimate act of courage and faith.

REFLECTING ON DEREK

“Derek helped me remember to carry myself with confidence. Even when I felt completely out of my comfort zone, he reminded me to not underestimate myself.”

—JENNIE GARTH

PUSHING THROUGH THE PAIN

W
HEN I LIVED
with the Ballases, being sick was never really an option. I remember one time, when I first moved there, I was feeling under the weather. My head hurt, my nose was stuffed, and I had a scratchy throat. Shirley came into my bedroom to ask me if I was okay.

“No, not really,” I groaned. “I’m sick.”

She handed me a glass of water and patted me on the head: “Outta bed. Off to school. You’re fine.”

Shirley held herself to the same standards. She didn’t allow herself to be sick. Growing up in the projects of Liverpool, she’d had this ingrained in her. If you got sick, then you couldn’t make your money, and if you couldn’t make your money, you couldn’t make rent. But her grin-and-bear-it mentality was very different from how my family handled illness in Utah. As a little kid, I got sick all the time, and my mom doted on me. She was such a nurturer and a giver. I loved getting all that attention and a day off from school. If I said I was sick, she didn’t doubt it. She coddled me and nursed me back to health.

England was the exact opposite. If I had the flu, Shirley would give me a throat lozenge and usher me off on the train to school. There was just no sympathy.

“If you can’t go to school, then you can’t go to rehearsals. And if you can’t go to rehearsals, you can’t do the competitions,” she reminded me. And just like that, my body obeyed. I literally never got sick when I was there because I knew I had work to do.

But I still harbored my old hypochondriac ways—at least when it came to competition day. If I wasn’t dancing very well, I would think that my back was out or my hip was hurting or my shoulder was off. I always had some ache or pain, and it became a running joke among my coaches: “Okay, Derek, what’s wrong today?” Shirley actually carried a box of bandages, aspirin, antibiotics—an entire arsenal of cures for whatever might be ailing me. I gave myself all these excuses for why I wasn’t at my best. That way, if I didn’t win, I had an ailment to blame. It was my defense mechanism, a way of dealing with my nerves and buffering myself from any disappointment. But after being constantly teased by my coaches, I started to look at all the other competitors and how they handled pain. They all had injuries, but they never talked about them. They just got on with it. I thought about it: Maybe I should give the stoic thing a try? Maybe I should stop making excuses and own my performance? When I did stop complaining, my body healed itself a lot quicker. I learned that the more I focused attention on an ailment or injury, the longer it stayed around. I’m not saying to ignore your health problems—just don’t dwell on them. Acknowledge there’s a problem, deal with it, then move on.

Maria Menounos taught me an amazing lesson about enduring. It was during our first dance, the cha-cha. There’s a move in the beginning where she goes over my leg and I twist her, then she goes into another dip. A week before the premiere, we were practicing that move, but when I twisted her, she landed on my knee and cracked two ribs. Another person might have said, “That’s it, we’re finished here,” but not Maria. She had her ribs taped up and went right back to work. She even joked about it: “Obviously, Derek’s knee is very hard and my ribs are very soft.” I was worried about her, but she kept saying, “We are not talking about this! We are dancing. I am having the best time of my life and I need to power through.” When she got home, she’d ice her ribs or soak in a bath of Epson salts. As if that weren’t bad enough, our second dance was the quick step, a dance with lots of jumping around and bouncing on the feet. In the middle of rehearsing, Maria fractured both feet pretty badly—three toes on her left foot and two on her right. Every day she would have work with
Extra
, then go straight to the hospital to have injections and get her feet wrapped. I teased her, “Careful, Grandma!” but I was in utter awe of her dedication and work ethic. She never once complained, even when I saw the pain on her face. Her doctors advised her to stop dancing, and she wouldn’t. The woman is a fighter, and she genuinely wanted to be there, to learn, and to do well. She wasn’t going to let anything hold her back from it.

But sometimes you do have to sit one out in order to heal. For me, that’s a worse agony than physical pain. I never want to let anyone down, and I hate when my body doesn’t cooperate. But I experienced this during
DWTS: All-Stars
when I was dancing with Shawn Johnson. I woke up one morning in agony. I had been doing a lot of tricks and lifts with her, so my body was taking a beating. I could actually feel my bones rubbing together in my neck, and it scared me. The doctor ran some tests and ordered me to take a week off.

“I don’t really do that,” I told him. But he was pretty insistent. This was a bad enough injury that if I didn’t rest up, it would get a lot worse. I could wind up completely immobilized. I later found out that I have bone spurs in my neck from my years of dancing and whipping my head around. When the bone calcifies and heals, it creates extra bone on top of the bone. It closes the gap, but there’s a small opening for the nerves to get through. The excruciating pain I was feeling was the nerves rubbing against the bone.

So for once, I took the doctor’s advice and sat the week out. I don’t know what hurt worse—the pain in my neck, or the feeling that I was letting Shawn down. I didn’t want her to pick up on that, so I tried to hide it and pretend it didn’t bother me. Sometimes the pain isn’t only physical, it’s mental as well. In this case, I had to power through my disappointment and frustration to keep my partner going. I owed it to her; I owed to myself. Shawn told me she had never seen me look so heartbroken and frustrated. But I shook it off, just like the flu when I was a kid. Mark, her previous partner, stepped in, and I choreographed the routine so I could still be a part of it even if I couldn’t dance it. Instead of focusing on the negative of having to take the week off, I focused on the positive: “You guys are going to do a fantastic job and I’ll be back next week to finish what we started.” I’ve always performed, so for me not to be on the stage was a weird sensation. But I still felt the adrenaline rush. In a way, choreographing was even more nerve-racking than dancing. There was no control: I had to send them off and hope for the best. In the end, Shawn and Mark didn’t let me down: they got a perfect 30. And I learned that even though I was injured, I wasn’t useless. I could still be creative and feel a genuine sense of fulfillment.

It’s a fact that a dancer’s career is not forever. Eventually, if you dance hard and you dance often, your body is going to rebel. I do dance hard and often, but I don’t think about that. I know there may come a point where I won’t be able to do what I do now. I know a lot of pros who retire in their thirties. I’ve seen it and wondered, What if . . . ? But I keep it way, way in the back of my mind. Instead, I look for ways to defy age and keep my body strong and limber. I learn as much as I can about nutrition and exercise and I keep moving forward. Life is truly a series of transitions, from one season to another, from one phase to another.

I’m glad I had this experience of being injured, because I could draw on it when I was partnered with Amber Riley in Season 17. The
Glee
star had a problem with her knees from day one of our dancing. “I have really weak ankles and bad knees,” she told me the minute she walked into the studio. So we kept an eye on that, but as we were going on, I noticed that Amber’s body posture was all slouched over. When she would walk, she was giving in to that pain in her knees. She hung her head down and rounded her shoulders—what I like to refer to as “defeatist pose.” But I could see right off the bat that Amber could move. I believed in her potential.

“I don’t want you to use the knees as a crutch,” I explained to her. “It’s not an excuse to be second best. Yeah, you need to take the pressure off them, and there are certain things you need to do to protect yourself and to prevent further injury. But you have to get your head in the game.” Week 4’s tango was one of our hardest dances. We went to the doctor and he recommended draining the fluid out of her knees. Amber couldn’t even start dancing till the Friday before Monday night’s live show. There were lots of tears and lots of frustration: “It hurts to even sit down,” she told me. “I don’t want to disappoint anybody.” We tangoed to Kanye’s “Love Lockdown” and it was scorching (and earned us three 9s from the judges, including my sis Julianne, who was one tough guest judge/critic).

The samba in week 6 scared the hell out of Amber because it was so fast and the moves were a lot more complicated. We were also at the halfway mark—time to up our game. “I’m your rock, your support, your barre—whatever you need me to be,” I assured her. “Whenever things go wrong, you stay strong.” We got two 10s from Carrie Ann and Bruno, and an 8 from Len (what can I say? He found it a “tad repetitive”). The next week’s paso doble really kicked our butts: my back was killing me, and Amber’s shoulders were aching from holding the paso stance. By week 9, she had to go to the hospital and learned that she had torn a tendon in her knee. Could anything else go wrong? But I took a deep breath and shifted gears: “We just want to make sure we can finish the experience and finish it right,” I told her. I had to change my strategy and create intricate choreography that would also save her knees. I choreographed a jazz routine that she could do sitting behind a desk.

There were a couple of times Amber told me or texted me that she thought she might need to quit. The word
forfeit
kept coming up. I wouldn’t let her, just like Shirley had refused to let me stay home in bed “sick.” It had always been Amber’s pattern in the past: get sick or get injured and pull out. I wasn’t going to allow her to continue down that path although I understood where she was coming from. I realized part of her pain was emotional—I could see it in the way she carried herself. I drove her nuts about her posture. I had to convince her that just standing tall would give her a whole new outlook. When you stand tall, your testosterone levels go up and your stress levels go down. I was constantly barking at Amber to stand up straight and “lift it up.” I know I pissed her off, but eventually, she did it naturally. And when she did, her whole face brightened and her moves became faster and more confident. She found the determination and the strength to push through it. She’s a warrior. By week 10, she got her fire back, just in time for the finals. “Amber Riley’s back in the house!” I told her.

When we hit the finale, it was all about her taking the lead. Six fierce pros, and she completely commanded that dance floor. Bruno said it best: “You’re a true leading lady.” When we won the Mirror Ball, she bawled: “I didn’t know if I could do it, but you can do whatever you put your mind to!” Mission accomplished.

It’s one thing to work with a stranger on overcoming her pain. It’s another thing entirely when that person is your mom. A few months ago, my mother passed out and hit her head. We’re not really sure why, but she wound up in the hospital for a few days while the doctors made sure it was nothing serious. She was okay, just very shaken up by it. A few weeks went by, and she came to stay with me at my place in L.A. I saw a change in her—and it worried me. She was taking a lot of naps and complaining about getting old (FYI, she’s only fifty-six!). This wasn’t the woman I knew. My mom was always a ball of energy. She had had five kids and never slowed down for a second. Where was this coming from?

“Come on, you’re not that old,” I teased her. “Stop saying that to yourself.”

“I’m tired,” she sighed. “I need to rest.”

I didn’t want to aggravate her, especially after the scare she’d been through, but I wasn’t buying it. I don’t believe you reach a certain age where you just sit down and wait for yourself to decay. I thought what she needed was a little kick in the butt to get her back up and running. So I cranked up the music—“#thatPOWER” by Will.i.am—as loud as I could and dragged her up to dance with me. We were jumping up and down and twirling around, acting like idiots nonstop for ten minutes. It reminded me of our early days at home in our family kitchen, grooving to the oldies station on the radio. When I turned off the music, she was smiling and breathing hard.

“Okay, you can take your nap now,” I told her.

“What? Are you kidding me? Let’s go do something. Let’s go outside. Let’s go for a walk. Let’s go jog. I want to do anything but take a nap.”

I smiled. “Isn’t that interesting. One minute you want to take a nap, and the next you don’t want to stop moving?”

I sat her down and we had a heart-to-heart. “Mom, you’re always trying to be this supermom,” I told her. “But you also need to be Marriann. You don’t have to do everything for everyone. You’re a person, too.”