So when someone asks how I could understand what a total beginner feels, that's my answer. And samba isn't the only time. I've been the beginner in the room over and over, mostly in languages: six months of Chinese in Shanghai, straining to hear four tones that all sounded the same. Portuguese in São Paulo, close enough to Spanish to make me confident and different enough to make me wrong. Italian in Rome, where the words came fast and the unspoken part took years.
Sometimes the words come slowly. Sometimes the words come fast and the feeling takes years. Dance has both.
If you've ever stood on your floor at home with a video paused, thinking everyone gets this except me, I know that feeling. I felt it in my first months of samba, with decades of dancing behind me.
What languages taught me about learning to dance
Somewhere between Shanghai and Rome I noticed something. Dance and language are learned the same way. And they're taught badly the same way.
Bad teaching, in both, is fast. It demonstrates instead of explaining. It assumes you'll "pick it up" by being around it, and when you don't, it quietly lets you believe the problem is you.
Good teaching is slow on purpose. It breaks something whole into pieces small enough to actually hold. It repeats without apologizing. It lets you be bad for as long as you need to be bad.
A few things that turned out to be true in both:
You learn in small units, not big ones. Nobody learns Portuguese by opening a novel on day one. You learn bom dia. Then a sentence. Dance is the same: one basic step, done until your feet stop asking permission. Six minutes at a time isn't a shortcut. It's how learning actually works.
Repetition isn't the boring part. It is the part. The tenth time you say a phrase, it stops being a thing you know and becomes a thing you have. The tenth time you do a basic, the same thing happens in your legs.
Counting is your training wheels, and that's fine. In Shanghai, a classmate from New York asked me, on the side, to teach him salsa. So I'd count for him whenever we had a moment (one two three, five six seven) and during the breaks between Chinese lessons he'd practice, repeating the count under his breath. It was fun. The count stuck. That's all a beginner needs at first: a number to hold on to until the music takes over.
Nobody is fluent at week two. Six months of Chinese didn't make me fluent. Over a year of samba and I'm still a student. That's not failure, that's the timeline. The only people who truly "fail" at a language are the ones who stop, usually because someone made them feel slow. Dance is no different.
Why this changed how I built the school
The idea is older than the school. I came home from Shanghai with it already in my head: what if you could learn to dance online, as if you were here in Colombia? I still have footage from early 2019 of me trying to make that work, before I had the method to do it properly.
The method came later, in Rome, coordinating executive programs at LUISS Business School, watching how busy adults actually learn new things. In short blocks. With clear explanations. With someone in the room who wants them to get it and says so.
Then I came back to Colombia and built it. Zero to Dance Studio is a question I carried for more than a decade, finally answered: what if dance was taught the way adults learn?
And I know learning a dance from zero, online, at home, actually works. Not because I read it somewhere. Because it's how I learned samba.
So that's how the courses are built. Short lessons, six minutes at a time. One thing per lesson. Our Colombian instructors, Mau and Derian, teach in Spanish, and I'm right there in every lesson, walking you through it in English, with English subtitles throughout. No partner, no studio, no one watching you be bad at it. You can rewind as many times as you need, and nobody will ever know it was eleven.
It's Hispanic Heritage Month in the US as I write this, and if there's one thing from my heritage I'd want to hand you, it isn't a performance. It's permission. Dance is a language, and you don't need to be born into it. You need someone to speak it slowly.
You can see the four courses here: zerotodance.com/courses
Start with one step. I'll count.
— Pao