Riot and Frolic

If you've delved into ballroom dancing on the follow's side and feel you've developed some acuity on the art [sport?], surprise!  You've only got half the story!

Why You Should Learn to Lead 

• Cause.  As in "cause and effect".  As a follow, we are experts in rolling with those commas, semicolons, colons, ellipses, and run-on sentences and fill-in-the-blanks.  But what if we got to start the sentence?  And write the paragraph?  Maybe tell the whole story?  To be less figurative about it, it's great to learn what actions the lead needs to complete to get a reaction from the follow.
• Learn How to Follow.  Yeah, confusing since it's the opposite of the point of the post, but as you lead, you VERY QUICKLY and sometimes painfully learn what follows do wrong. Having tone (but not too much!), moving your own tush (but not too much!), keeping the rhythm (can there be too much?), holding yourself up, maintaining your side of the frame, transferring your weight completely, trusting your partnership… These all become pretty obvious as you're leading someone who is doing it (or not!). And most of those things, you've heard a million times from your teachers.  But feeling them?  ONE MILLION LIGHT BULBS. 

  

• Get Technical.  Learning what patterns can precede and follow (in layman's: go together with) other patterns makes your following guesswork easier, gives you insight into the art of floorcraft, and gives you another angle of the physics of dancing. It also gives you another layer in the beautiful cake of knowledge of dancing.  AND I LOVE CAKE.  
• Multi-task. While followers have their own list of tasks, leaders have list that is different, and duh, complementary. Listen to the music, stay with the music, lead patterns, and then some more patterns, pay attention to your follow's skills and work with them, don't run into people.  It's fun to see how the two parts combine into actual dancing.
• Empathize with Your Partner. After you've lead a few trips around the floor and several songs worth of dances, it's easier to cut your multi-tasking partner a break when he leads the same move 5 times in a row, or freezes in the middle of a cluster of people on the floor.  
• More Opportunity to Dance. Quite possibly the most obvious move to the leader's side of a partnership is to increase your chances to dance.  More often than not, there are more ladies than guys at dances and in group classes.  If you're a confident lead (note: that does not mean you know a lot of patterns, but that you know where your frame should be, what the timing of the dance and the basic pattern is, and a couple [2-4!] moves), then you can pinch-hit anytime.

Want to know when to lead?  There's a post for that!