#Verified: Tama Barry

Ten years ago, Tama Barry was plastered on billboards around Scotland. As the principal male dancer for the Scottish Ballet, Tama was quite literally the face (and body) of the national company.

After leaving dance in 2013, Tama retrained in sports psychology, focusing on rehabilitation, career transitions, and mental well-being. Today, Tama is putting his research and first-hand experience to good use as Performance Psychologist at the Queensland Academy of Sport.

Here, Tama talks to us about his career in elite ballet, how he navigated retirement, and preventative care tips for the person/performer identity struggle.

You reached dizzying heights during your ballet career. Were there any daily habits that helped make this possible?
Tama Barry: My pathway to becoming a ballet dancer was quite intense and quite different. I started full-time ballet training when I was 14, and I moved out of home that year and went to live with a family in another country.

What I got from that is that you have to turn up every day. And as a teenage boy, that wasn't necessarily what I wanted to do, but that really built that habit of, "It doesn't matter how you feel, you turn up and you do the work". And your work might be good, it might be mediocre, but you turn up and work. That really is the thing that gets you to the top.

Trying to be intelligent about how you turn up is really important [too]. I always had a thought in my head about what I wanted to improve that day. I was quite goal-oriented in that way – small goal oriented.

And the third thing – I'm atypical for a principal dancer. My body shape was always more rugby than ballet. I had to recognise that, and I had to work with it rather than against it. So I created a space for myself, rather than try to fit myself into someone else's space.

Did you notice any other common threads shared by those at the top?
TB: The main thing was curiosity – being and remaining curious. When you're doing ballet, for instance, you do ballet class every day of your life. I don't know how many pliés I've done... You do the same ballet year after year. The Nutcracker comes around again and again, right? So it's very easy to fall into the trap of, "Oh, this again...". But you have to be curious. You have to find the new things. You've got to find the nuances to make it interesting and different for you and the audience. Otherwise, you're just a stale cardboard cut-out going on stage.

Alongside that is the idea of lifelong learning. I was never as good as I wanted to be, and neither were the people around me. In some cases, that was defeating for people, whereas for those at the top or moving in that direction, it was growth. It was: "Failure happens, and it's part of the step forward".

And being humble. It doesn't matter if you're standing at the front in the spotlight in a prince costume. Someone made the costume, someone's doing the music, someone's got the light, someone's called the show, someone saved your butt earlier on. The minute you think you're better – that's a pathway to the end.

The length of your dance career is super impressive too. Did you have any strategies for navigating the inevitable setbacks along the way?
TB: I wasn't so good at that part. The psychologist in me would do it very differently [today]. The two main things that I went to were avoidance and desperation – I didn't want to cope with the experience I was going through, and I was desperate to be back.

What I would say now is, those processes, they're really difficult. There's no getting around that. Validate yourself for feeling down and desperate and sad and avoiding. We have the right to feel those feelings. They're part of the human experience.

But that part of the human experience is a process of resilience building. It's a process of learning yourself. It's a process of growth. When I look back, that process is part of who I am now. Would I have gone through it differently today? Yes. I would suggest getting a good psychologist and building some mental skills. Also, what else can you do in that time? Maybe you've got time to read books. Maybe you've got time to explore other elements of yourself. There's a valuable space there that can be used.

On this, could you touch upon emotion regulation and its importance in peak performance environments?
TB: People who worked with me at the very beginning would probably say I had very little emotional regulation, and that my go-to was probably frustration and anger with myself. But toward the end of my career, I was far more accepting of the emotions that would come up, and I was more able to perform at peak level regardless.

We know that understanding and being able to regulate our emotions is incredibly important in peak performance. When we think about the effect of emotions on the body, you're more prone to injury, you're more prone to eating in weird ways – maybe not eating enough, maybe eating too much – and you're more likely to sleep poorly.

As artists, we kind of learn emotion regulation as we learn to bring up and put down emotions. It's kind of inherently learnt. But the important thing is being able to do it by choice.

What was your experience of constantly being in the public eye?
TB: The fame you get as a ballet dancer is very limited, but within certain groups of people, you are very well-known.

What it does is create a veneer of a person that you place over the top of yourself. All I would need is for someone to say, "Oh, I saw you doing...", and instantly, I changed the way I spoke – not my accent, but I'd be really cautious about what I said – and I'd try to remain positive. It was really important to me that whoever I was speaking to left feeling it was a good conversation and that they had got what they wanted. The performer comes out.

It can be isolating because you create a space between yourself and others. Other people may have experienced it in different ways, but certainly, my experience was very much trying to portray the person I thought [the public] wanted to see.

A large component of your current research looks at life transitions for dancers. Can you walk us through what your own retirement was like?
TB: This is a huge part of why I'm interested in life transitions because mine was terrible.

My career ended through an injury that occurred in the middle of a tour. I had some weird pain in my knee that wouldn't go away. It got progressively worse over the tour, and when I got back to Glasgow, I got scans done, and I had worn away a bit of cartilage in my knee. I got microfracture surgery – where they drill into the bone and release stem cells from the bone marrow to rebuild cartilage – but [the cartilage] isn't as smooth and not as strong, so it doesn't act as well.

I came back from surgery and did A Streetcar Named Desire, which was made on me. [Choreographer] Annabelle Lopez Ochoa was awesome in building it around me because I was literally limping when we started making it. But by the time we were a couple of weeks out, I was able to dance fully. After that, we did some stuff for the Olympics, and my knee started swelling up more and more. It was downhill from there.

Unfortunately, this happened at the same time as the directorship changed, so the new director had never really seen me dance, and we kind of agreed that that would be it.

I really struggled. I still wasn't back to fitness, I had made some plans, but I certainly hadn't made enough plans, and I really hadn't done any emotional or identity work. I went through some pretty dark mental health stuff there.

So looking back on it, what should I have done? I should never have gone to ballet school at 14. I should have had a normal-as-possible childhood. I certainly don't blame my parents for this because they were doing what they thought was best for me, and they knew I wanted to do this as a career, but I could have done other things. I could have grown my mind and my interests further.

[But] I honestly think the best advice for anyone in a short-term career is financial literacy. Have enough money to survive for six months – and not just survive, but to live. Because you lose a wage up here, and the next job is down here. There's a huge financial deficit that comes with it. So, right from the beginning of your career, prepare financially for your retirement. Even if you don't prepare emotionally, even if you don't prepare other interests, simply having money there will make the process better.

On lessons learnt, what from the world of elite ballet continues to inform your life today?
TB: I am inherently a dancer. It's in my DNA. All those attributes that made me successful as a ballet dancer are the same things that drive my world now – I'm humble, I'm curious, I love working in teams, I believe that each person brings something special to the table, and I turn up every day trying to improve something.

[Also], my expectations of the world are different. I don't want to do a job that just pays my bills – that's never going to be enough for me. I want a job where I'm passionate, which is why I love psychology. Does it feed me the way ballet did? No. But it's different.

I can think similarly here [though]: "How do I use my individual difference in this space to get the best?". It means that I'm not everyone's cup of tea. And that's fine because I wasn't everyone's cup of tea back then, either. But for some people, I'm going to be a very good brew.

Is there anything else you're super conscious to instil in your dancers and athletes?
TB: This isn't about toxic positivity – turning up every day and thinking, "My life is amazing!" – but taking the time through your career to reflect and go, "Wow... This is good... This is just the bomb". Because when you're at the end of your career, and you're looking back nostalgically, you'll go, "I should have enjoyed that. I should have celebrated that. I should have spent time basking in that glory".

If you do a good show, live it. Push the humble aside every so often and go, "I did well".

Tama's qualifications: BA (Hons) Psychology, Master of Psychology (Sports and Exercise), PhD Candidate (Social Psychology).

Big props to Tama for his time. If you’d like to find out more about Tama's work and say hello, let him know you’re from the Dojo 👊