Former Dancing With The Stars Pro Chelsie Hightower Shares Her Story

What a cool read on former Dancing With The Stars Pro Chelsie Hightower from the Desert News on how her dancing story began. Here are a couple of takes from the link. I wish they’d ask her back to do Dancing With The Stars.

While I am admittedly biased one year later, I wasn’t then. I was not a fan of “Dancing With the Stars,” and I didn’t know she had also been on Fox’s “So You Think You Can Dance.”

Two weeks after our first visit, she hosted a ward activity in her home on a Sunday night.

She and I talked for two hours afterward and have been friends ever since. I listened that night as she talked about realizing that she couldn’t handle the demands of her career on her own and how she came to understand that the Savior’s “yoke is easy” and his “burden is light,” as it says in Matthew 11:30.

Hightower’s dance career began when she was 9 and her family moved into the boundaries of the only elementary school in the United States with a ballroom dance program.

“I think I realized at a young age … that I was meant to be in that ballroom program, and I was meant to find dance,” Hightower said. “I felt like … the Lord was opening doors for me and guiding my path, and I’ve felt like dance was a part of that path since I was 9 years old.”

With the transition to Los Angeles and the pressure of the show, she found herself having anxiety and panic attacks, but she poured herself into dance.

During her time on “Dancing With the Stars,” she was nominated for an Emmy. She coached world champion rodeo cowboy Ty Murray to a fourth-place finish during her first season, and singer-songwriter Micheal Bolton called her “his light” during their time as partners on the show in 2010. She remembers these friendships as the most rewarding part of the experience.

Still, she knew where her strength came from.

To read the complete story, see the Desert News.