Did You Become What You First Wanted to Be?

September 2025

Think back to your earliest childhood days. Did you aspire to be something amazing when you grew up? Who or what inspired your first ideas about what you wanted to become someday?

I distinctly remember that my first ambition was to become a dancer … a tap dancer, specifically. Not a fluid, moving-in-silence ballet dancer, as many little girls aspire to be. No, I wanted to be a lively, smiling, fast moving, entertaining tap dancer. Perhaps I wanted to be a tap dancer because, as an only child, tap dancing was something I could enjoy doing all by myself.   

Looking back, I’m quite certain this ambition stemmed from all the afternoons I spent watching The Mickey Mouse Club on television when I was about three years old. I especially loved watching “Sharon!” (Baird) and “Bobby!” (Burgess) whose tap dancing skills were featured daily from 1955 to 1958.  

Thanks to my intense desire to be just like the Mouseketeer dancers, I tap danced virtually everywhere I went. I tapped in the kitchen. I tapped in the driveway. I tapped at the grocery store. I tapped wherever an uncarpeted floor would enable my shiny black patent leather Mary Jane “Sunday school shoes” to make a loud, tippity-tapping noise as I swirled, twirled, and tapped merrily along, wherever I went.

To this day, I still have the old home movies that my father took of me as a little one, tap dancing down Disneyland’s Main Street, wearing my black Mickey Mouse Ears hat with “Debbie” embroidered on the front—just like a real Mouseketeer. Tap dancing down Disneyland’s Main Street was my very favorite place to dance as a little one, just as it still would be in the years to come.

Perhaps in hopes of influencing me to engage in a quieter, more lady-like activity, my mother enrolled me in ballet lessons at the local dance academy when I turned five. But ballet was not for me. I had no interest in the kind of dancing where beginners essentially stood still, practicing boringly quiet and sedate ballet “positions,” pointing their toes and gracefully extending their arms and fingers in just the perfect angles.

No, I wanted to be a tap dancer, and I wanted the kind of training where the students were required to wear real tap shoes with metal taps on their toes and heels. I wanted active, vivacious movement and lots of sound! Eventually my mom caved and enrolled me in a tap-dancing class, where wearing real tap shoes—and making lots of loud, tippity tapping noise—was gloriously fun.

I loved tap dancing so much that I insisted on wearing my metal-tipped tap shoes to Los Angeles international airport (LAX) whenever my mother and I would go there to pick up my father from his weekly business trips. Tap dancing my way down the long, brightly lit, tile-floored jetways was the absolute best. Not only did I get in several minutes of loud tap dancing as I gyrated in syncopated rhythm down the long corridors of LAX before greeting my dad at his arrival gate, but hundreds of admiring adults would smile, clap, and cheer me on along the way. Their obvious appreciation for my unique tapping talents made me feel like a real (5-year-old) dance star!

By the time I entered high school, I had no interest in becoming a cheerleader, as most girls did. Instead, I elected to become a squad leader on our high school dance drill team, where 120 girls performed highly complex yet well-coordinated dance routines in sharp, military-like precision during half time performances at home football games and hometown parades. As a young teenager, I loved dancing down the streets of our town, just as much as I loved dancing down Disneyland’s Main Street and LAX jetways as a young child, because everyone who watched us smiled, waved and cheered us on.

The most thrilling dance drill team experience of my life was during my junior year of high school. That year, Disneyland held a competitive, day-long audition in search of the “best of the best” nine-member all-girl dance drill team in southern California (I mention this experience in my book Heartfelt Leadership). The dance drill team that ultimately won this intensely fierce competition would be hired (as a team) to perform in Disneyland’s twice-daily Main Street Christmas Parade for the duration of the winter holiday season.

To make a long story short, our 9-member dance drill team won the competition. After having watched the Disney Mouseketeer dancers on TV as a young child, it was an unbelievable thrill to get paid to dance as a cast member at Disneyland. Even though this Disneyland gig was only for the duration of the Christmas holiday season, becoming a dancer at Disneyland—with taps on our boots—was a dream come true.  To this day, that experience rates as one of the best (and most fun) jobs I ever had.

Yet, as much as I enjoyed dancing as a Disneyland cast member, I never considered dancing as a career. Dancing was simply something I did for pure enjoyment.  From the time I was old enough to earn spending money working in my father’s business, I set my career sights on the corporate world and never looked back. 

As the years passed, I always enjoyed taking or leading dance-related exercise classes. During my early twenties, while working at Raytheon Missile Systems by day, I taught aerobic dance classes after work and enjoyed every minute of it. I’ve always found teaching dance-style exercise classes—from aerobic dancing to Zumba—a fun diversion and a great way to stay in shape.

One thing I’ve never quite understood is how so many people fear “standing up and speaking in front of a group” even more than death. Throughout my life, I’ve jumped at almost every chance I’ve had to speak or perform in front of an audience. From an early age, performing as a dancer taught me that audiences simply want to be entertained. I’ve never shied away from entertaining people, and I credit my childhood passion for tapdancing as the catalyst that led to my later-in-life career as a public speaker.  

While I may not be tapdancing much anymore, I’ve always found ways to become (and continue to be) precisely what I had first wanted to be: lively, smiling, fast moving and entertaining…. regardless of whether I’m tap dancing or not.

I hope you, too, have found a variety of ways throughout your life to become whatever it was you first wanted to be.  Regardless of your age, if you haven’t yet tried to do whatever it was that once so inspired you, why not give it a try…. even if it’s just a ride-along? You might be amazed at how fulfilling and fun trying it out might be.