Strider     Magazine
 

No 3

 

Bridging the gap 

 
December 2001 

The Birth of A Business
The birth of 'Mama Can Tap' was a long arduous labour that started out five years ago in another state...........

In 1996 I stopped working as a dancer and singer in professional musicals because I was completely unfulfilled and miserable. I had been on tour continuously for three years and basically needed to 'get a life'. When I stopped I didn't know what I wanted to do, but I knew I didn't want to be a showgirl anymore, and so my research for a meaningful and financially rewarding career began. 

After moving to Melbourne last year I finally reached a point where I'd carried one too many plates of foccacia to poker faced Puckle St diners and decided to put an end to my short but painful career in hospitality. The only good thing about working in a job you hate is that eventually (if your courageous enough) you'll force yourself to find a way out. I decided to seriously consider starting my own small business. The question was, doing WHAT?
I discovered that before you can change anything externally you really need to look within and do some hard personal growth work to figure out what really makes you tick and what truly gives your life meaning.

I went to ENET to have some career counseling and met the fantastic staff there. We had a serious discussion about what I did and didn't want to do. I explored heaps of ideas and options and eventually decided I wanted to be a florist. So they helped me look into courses and suggested that I go around to florists to see if I could get an apprenticeship. 

So feeling a bit disheartened I decided to take a break from looking for the perfect career and did some soul searching by going to a woman's discussion group, writing in my journal and basically looking up to the sky and asking the Gods constantly "What should I be doing?" Because I sure as hell couldn't work it out for myself.

   Then one night I was writing in my journal a thought popped into my head. "Why dont you teach women how to tap dance?" So the next day I called Peter at ENET and said "I've got it, I know what I want to do!" He booked me into a fantastic small business course with the CAE (Council for Adult Education) I went to see him and ran ideas by him and worked out a kind of plan to get me started.

From the moment of discovery I was off, finally empowering myself, utilizing my years of dance training and really doing something I found meaningful. I get such a high from seeing the women laughing and having a great time accomplishing a step they couldn't even imagine doing 3 weeks ago. There is a real feeling of 'sisters doing it for themselves' in my classes, maybe because that's what I wanted for myself and I think the woman really pick up on that energy.

Just recently I started another class called 'Sisters of groove' (a funky jazz based class) and I'm thinking of expanding.

  Holding weekend dance retreats which will include dance, yoga, meditation, group discussions and lots of yummy food and frivolity.

If there was some advice I would give to anyone who wanted to start their own small business it would be to do a small business course, make sure you're pursuing something you're really into, go out and meet people who are doing what you think you would like to do and ask questions about what it's really like and keep your eye on the prize by constantly keeping your perspective and focus on why you wanted to do it in the first place.

I feel extremely lucky to have had the support and encouragement of a place like ENET, I was helped every step of the way from the initial tentative meeting to on-going practical support and advice, the whole process would have been a lot more difficult and downright scary without them. So a big THANK YOU to ENET and Peter from the bottom of my little red tap shoes.

DEBORAH DEKOVIC