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Solo Chica Poster Girl Kelly Macias on Tango, Coaching, and Traveling to Buenos Aires

by | May 18, 2021 | Solo Chica, Tango, Travel


Solo Chica Contest Winner Kelly Macias on her trip to Buenos Aires with my Tango Adventure team, November, 2019

Way back in the pre-pandemic era, I created the brand Solo Chica to encourage women to travel alone.

To launch Solo Chica, we sponsored a contest.

We chose Kelly Macias from Washington, DC as the winner.

Kelly is a writer, storyteller and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion consultant focused on social justice, currently based in Washington, DC. She uses storytelling as a key part of her DEI work to create worlds where everyone gets seen and everyone matters.

Kelly has been in love with tango for years but she was not dancing or studying when we first met. She reached out to me for life coaching, initially with reconnecting to her body and pleasure as the goal with the idea that she might get back into tango too. Through our coaching relationship, she decided to come to Buenos Aires for a Solo Chica Tango Adventure. Kelly came to Buenos Aires just a few months before the pandemia (the pandemic!) sidelined us from the dance floor.

We loved Kelly’s answers. Why should we choose you for the launch contest? “I’ve spent the last few years feeling very disconnected from my sexuality, sensuality and feminine energy, as a whole. I would the opportunity to get support in exploring it.”

What would it mean for you to rediscover the Tango Goddess in you through the photo shoot? “Like many working women in their forties, I’ve been busy focusing on my career for the last several years. The stress of trying to be successful in a hectic society centered around class and patriarchy and white supremacy has taken its toll. I’m no longer as carefree or vulnerable as I used to be.

Add technology and social media to the mix, and it has meant that I spend most of my time in front of a computer screen than tending to my intimate relationships. I want to connect back to my vulnerability and sensuality and joy and think that the Tango Goddess photo shoot is a way to liberate myself from all that has been weighing me down.”

The grand prize: a Free Tango Goddess Photo Shoot with our resident genius photographer Tan Kurttekin, who shoots for Netflix among other clients!

We are super excited to share the results of the photo shoot with you here. Kelly is definitely a TANGO GODDESS! She was already a goddess before she arrived.

In this video that we recorded in Plaza Dorrego, where tango is danced on Sunday nights in San Telmo, Buenos Aires, and the streets are taken over early in the day by pounding drums and a street fair, Kelly talks about what it was like to work with me in a coaching relationship and to combine that work with the trip to Argentina.

Before we started working together, Kelly struggled with her own doubts about whether tango is really a dance for a curvy, Black woman. She hadn’t seen many other women in the US tango scene who looked like her. She worried that to dance tango, one had to have a thin ballet-like body.

I could understand that fear. I used to feel the same way. I thought being a curvy woman would make being a tango dancer impossible. I’m sure many others have felt this way. Far too many women (and some men too) put our desires on hold thinking we need to get to some magical number on the scale, or BMI, before we go out in the world and do the things we want to do.

The most amazing part is how Kelly found me. She googled “curvy woman tango” and found me through an Internet search. I don’t ever remember using those words in a blog post, but I do put my body out there as an example that one doesn’t have to be skinny or flat-chested to be a dancer.

Kelly told us, “I feel much more connected to my body compared to at home, less hip and back pain. Just in general feeling much more alive and embodied and aware of what’s happening in my body. Also the feeling of not being stressed. I can feel space opened up. And the heaviness that I feel normally has been lifted. My muscles are working in ways that they haven’t in years.”

“I learned that the lessons that apply to tango, apply to life. Things about connection and being able to connect with strangers through dance. Dancing with a good dancer sort of feels like falling in love. So there’s been this experience that’s sort of like falling in love. Every time I’m dancing, every time I’m held at a milonga or at a practice, every time I trust someone new it’s just this wonderful sort of high feeling that I haven’t felt in a really long time so this experience it’s been transformative in that way.”


With the wonderful Wanda Abramor, a key teacher in my Tango Your Life/Tango Adventure team

As a poster girl for solo female tango travel to Buenos Aires, Kelly told us she wanted to help us show that tango is for everybody, and every body type, racial/ethnic background, age, and background. We are completely on board for this mission of inclusion!

It’s important to touch on the history of tango here. The African origins of tango in Argentina have often been erased since many Argentines perceive themselves as a white country with European roots. The African influence was present and vital in the roots of tango, and these days more people are talking about that. This recognition of the role of African influence in tango goes in parallel with social change happening in Argentina. It’s common to hear stories from people who realize they had a Black grandmother that nobody talked about. More and more Argentines are identifying themselves as Afro-descendants.

Kelly was the perfect fit for the Solo Chica Program because this project was created to show more women the infinite doors tango can open up beyond the dance itself.

Kelly said so many good things in our interview that we wanted to share more clips with you to share her story so you can see those in the Instagram clips below:

“Less Politics, More Tango”
“Mistakes as Part of the Dance,”
“The African Roots of Tango in Buenos Aires.”

Maybe being in a relationship would NOT be boring! AKA Transforming a limiting belief: Step One!

by | Jan 20, 2014 | Advice

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“Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes.”–Oscar Wilde

If mistakes are what teach us, I have made plenty. I’ve walked around for YEARS with limiting beliefs in my head (aka junk) that have kept me from more love, free-flowing creativity, money, and fun in my life. Over the last few years, I’ve been cleaning out my limiting beliefs and replacing them with more powerful, open beliefs. I want to help you do the same. We tend to have a lot of limiting beliefs about relationships and being single and in every area: work, family, creativity.

I’ve been talking about limiting beliefs lately because this is the crux of the work we do together in our Quirkytogether 101 class. We learn how to turn around limiting beliefs like:
— “I haven’t had enough relationship experience, so no one will want me” or
— “It hasn’t happened yet, so it’s not going to happen now,” or
— “There are no good men/women left or men/women who are quirky enough for me.”
We turn these into into beliefs that give us more power and possibility.

Today I will walk you through the steps of how to turn around a limiting belief. If you’re joining our QT101 class, this post is a warm-up. You can certainly do this on your own too. (It is easier and more fun with the support of two coaches and others who are doing the same thing.)

Step one: The Purge: Naming Our Limiting Beliefs
What is a limiting belief?
A belief is just a thought that we keep thinking. A thought becomes stuck, like a record that keeps playing the same note, and we assume it to be true. A thought becomes a belief merely because we have said it to ourselves so many times.Read More

The Power of Admitting You Don’t Have It Figured Out

by | Aug 15, 2011 | Advice, My Life

I am training to be a life coach. It’s an honor to help people go down a path of honesty about what they really want to create in their lives and then help them go for it. I love coaching others. Any coach will tell you that the most important part of the training is the work that you do on yourself. We can only share (and embody) the approaches that resonate with us. So I have been on a wild ride lately, examining my own limiting beliefs, looking more closely at what I want in my life, and even, what is my unique life purpose (I have many thoughts on that whole concept, to be shared in a later post).

A few weeks ago my wonderful peer coach from the program was coaching me on the phone. We were talking about my life (my career; relationships; whether I will have a child). I broke down in tears and said something to the effect of, “I can’t believe I don’t have it all figured out yet.” I have published books and a magazine, started a company, traveled extensively, and despite all that, I sometimes feel like I am at the beginning again with a blank slate. There is so much uncertainty in my life, so many paths that can be taken (or not taken). I get the feeling that from the outside I look strong and sure, but I often feel small and confused. Like a child. Breaking down in tears to my peer coach felt potent and real.

Later that weekend I snuggled on the couch rereading an old favorite book: Care of the Soul: A Guide for Cultivating Sacredness and Depth in Everyday Life by Thomas Moore (Harper Collins, 1992). I stumbled on a perfect passage to clarify why admitting that I don’t have it figured out–that I feel like a child–actually felt very pressure-relieving.

Sometimes you hear adults in their thirties and forties say lightheartedly, “I still don’t know what I’m going to be when I grow up.” No matter how lightly this common sentiment is stated, the feeling is full of inferiority. What’s wrong with me? I should be a success by now. I should be making plent of money. I should be settled. But in spite of these wishes, the sense of the child who is not yet ready for success and settling is strong. This recognition can be a soulful moment. It bears a melancholic tone that is a signal of soul reflecting on its fate and wondering about its future. It is a potential opening to imagination, and to some extent this is the power of the child. The child’s smallness and inadequacy is the “open sesame” to a future and to the unfolding of possibility.

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