Good morning, Mickey. (It's 11:00 am where I am).

I was thinking about your situation this morning when something came to mind.

I don't know if you remember the figure skater Michelle Kwan -- she may have been a little before your time, but she is a 2-time Olympic Champion. She has always been a fine technician, but when she was first starting to compete she just couldn't seem to get into anything emotionally. She couldn't think of anything she wanted to express in her program. Her coach was working with her trying to light a fire under her somehow, and -- Voila! An idea came.

She started putting on different kinds of music, and asked Michelle to just start moving to the music, just improvising, not worrying about choreography or anything. They tried different kinds of music. Finally she put on a sort of slinky Arabic kind of music, the kind you'd wear a belly dancing costume to. Amazingly, to that Michelle came alive. You wouldn't have thought it was her type of thing necessarily, but she LOVED it, and she started moving to it, expressing herself.

From that they developed her championship routine.