🫀 Yeah, you can love your job. You've just gotta love yourself more.
What I learned from the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders on the perils of pleasure, passion and pressure.
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I understood Victoria immediately. Her hopeful, listening smile and shining eyes searching every face for a hint that maybe this time she’d finally measure up. The grasping perfectionism, itching to prove she absolutely can do it no matter what they may say. She may not be the best, but she’ll work harder than the whole room put together — even if it means hurting herself in the process. The helpful way she hands her self worth to the person in charge, asking again and again to finally be set at ease.
I know it because it’s been me.
I was not cool or pretty or popular in high-school. I was a late-blooming goody-two-shoes who found my first home in the marching band and then the drama club once I realized the band kids were too weird even for me. I avoided the cheerleaders and the athletes, labeling them superficial jocks who would peak in high-school and ate my lunch with the Puppetry Society — a little knot of goth kids unofficially led by a guy who knew every line from Interview with the Vampire and drank Coke by biting through the side of the can.
Pretty much nothing in my world has ever so much as glanced the side of the Dallas Cowboys or their cheerleaders, and I hadn’t planned to watch the documentary until my therapist mentioned she’d seen a few episodes and it gave her a peek at the real-into-Jesus part of my background you kind of have to live through to understand.
I took that as an invitation to grab a big bowl of ice cream and schadenfreude to sit down and feel superior about these women and their religious devotion to an ideal I simply don’t understand … but Greg Whiteley wouldn’t let me.
Yes, the beauty ideal is white Barbie. Yes, there is a disturbing behavioral handbook that doesn’t seem to have been updated since 1973. Yes, there is a pathological level of perfectionism and body policing. I expected all that. What I didn’t expect — what I couldn’t look away from — was how in spite of all that, these women did it anyway for the love of performing and dance.
In the last year, I’ve asked sixty-some-odd people to walk me through their career and tell me why they made their choices. I didn’t realize I would hear almost sixty-some-odd stories about an ongoing search for safety.
There was the earnest, big-hearted barely 30 year-old who told me he would need to earn fifteen million a year before he’d finally feel like he had enough. Safety that looks like a pile of money. And the brilliant-but-over-it young woman who explained that life had given her enough unwanted adventure and she planned to look for something stable even if it meant she’d be bored. Safety that looks like standing still. And the bright flash of a young man who twisted in his chair until he decided that what he really wanted was influence. Safety that looks like prestige and power.
There have been only 5 interviews where safety was pushed aside for what I can best describe as pleasure — where folks chose to do the work they love the most, even when it meant saying no to other options that were more lucrative, prestigious or secure. These folks have a singular vibe — they glow with unencumbered generosity, treat work like play and delight in the process even when it’s difficult. In most of my interviews, folks seem weighed down by the pressure of measuring up to a cultural ideal of success. These folks feel lighter — I think it’s because they’ve defined success to be spending their time doing something they enjoy and they don’t care what anyone else thinks about it. I was shocked to see that same energy gushing out of so many of the women profiled in America’s Sweethearts, but it doesn’t come without a price.
Barely half way into the first episode, Whiteley interviews Charlotte Jones and asks her about how much the cheerleaders are paid:
“There’s a lot of cynicism around pay for NFL cheerleaders—as it should be. They’re not paid a lot. But the facts are, they actually don’t come here for the money. They come here for something that’s actually bigger than that to them. They have a passion for dance. There are not a lot of opportunities in the field of dance to get to perform at an elite level. It is about being a part of something bigger than themselves. It is about a sisterhood that they are able to form, about relationships that they have for the rest of their life. They have a chance to feel like they are valued, they are special, and they are making a difference. When the women come here, they find their passion and they find their purpose.”
— Charlotte Jones, Chief Brand Officer, owner & daughter of Jerry Jones, owner of the Dallas Cowboys
In other words, it’s easy to exploit someone when their work is closely tied with their joy. Pleasure will go to work when it doesn’t pay enough, when the work is painful and hard, when no one else gets it. Pleasure will work a little too hard just for the fun of it. Pleasure forgets time, allowing us to dissolve into the feeling of creation.
Seeking pleasure in your work is vulnerable, even dangerous. Especially if you love your work more than you love yourself. Or worse, if you’ve confused the two entirely.
“My love and my heart and soul are here, and I just want to know that it’s reciprocated … kind of.” — Victoria Kalina, episode 7
At the end of the series, the cheerleaders file into a conference room to return their uniform and tell Judy and Kelli, the two women who run the team, whether they plan to audition for the following year. Throughout the show I’ve wistfully watched Victoria look everywhere except inside herself for someone to tell her she’s enough. These two women especially.
“We didn’t know you wanted that.” Says Judy with cool indifference … despite several scenes showing her talking with Kelli about how Victoria wants nothing more.
“I just really want to know if I should say yes or no today. If it’s my time to go I want y’all to tell me.” Victoria pleads, tears welling.
She’s met with more criticism before deciding that she’ll continue for one more year — not because she loves it, but because she wants to leave a good last impression on Judy and Kelli.
I’ve been in that chair, heart racing, eyes leaking — hoping someone will save me from myself. It’s hard to figure out how something that brought you so much joy grew into a leash around your neck.
We all look to mentors and idols when we’re starting out. How else would we figure out how to grow? They have an answer for everything — what you should do, what you should want and how you should be. We take notes and pay attention, learning to track our success according to their metrics. And when you win their praise, holy moly — that brassy high makes the soft shine of self-satisfaction pale in comparison.
The feedback loop is knocked further out of whack by the process of mastery itself. Most of the early-career folks I meet are still bubbling with the lightness of learning new things — the work is harder, but the challenge is thrilling. Novelty makes us happy; the better we get at something the more rote and boring it can become. On top of that, most career arcs nudge us into management roles — pushing us to spend our time even further from whatever kernel of joy we set out to grow.
We hit the middle of our careers and feel suddenly lost, standing on top of a pile of experience and knowledge feeling like we’ve been caught in a bait and switch. The titles and the money and the praise haven’t made us as happy as we’d thought, but we don’t know what else to do. Having spent too much modeling our lives on everyone else’s dreams, we wake up to find we’ve lost sight of our own.
Kelcey, a team captain in her last year on the squad, sits down with Victoria in the last episode to talk about whether Victoria should keep at it for another year.
Victoria looks up at Kelcey, painfully conflicted. “I’m still terrified of Kelli and Judy and I don’t know why!” she says.
“We all think Judy and Kelli hate us.” Kelcey says. “I didn’t get that “you’re doing great!” from them for my first three years, so I had to kind of realize — like… okay. I’m never gonna get that. So I need to be confident in what I’m bringing to the table. They’re going to think what they want, but half the time you just have to ignore it and put it out of your head. Once you can stop thinking about what they think of you, you’re gonna soar.”
I think I clapped and said “YES!” out loud in my living room.
This was it — the same thing I’d heard in those five unusual interviews. After climbing and fighting to prove themselves for years, they hit a wall. The difference is about what happens next. Instead of digging in and trying harder, they did the unthinkable and let it all go. They dropped the dead weight of what everyone else thought they should be and soared into everything they’d wanted to become.
Some jobs come from a pure love of what you do. Food and the arts are some of those callings. I'm grateful that some people follow their heart, otherwise what a boring world we would live in.
The bait and switch… what a good way to put it. I have spent the past eight years of my career doing what I thought was paying my dues. “We just need you to complete X project to build the foundation, and then you can build something beautiful on top of it.” But every time I finished one foundation, another one needed pouring. Now my whole job is pouring concrete and watching it dry, and I can’t get a role building anything beautiful due to lack of experience.