Derek Hough Didn’t Expect His Lowest Moment to Happen at the Top
Jane LaCroix
Derek Hough was only 12 years old when he convinced his parents to let him move to England to train as a ballroom dancer, but listening to him now, it’s clear that decision came from something deeper than ambition.
During his conversation on The Bossticks, Hough opens up about feeling out of place as a kid, getting bullied growing up, and how dance became the first thing that gave him structure. But with that success came the pressure of tying his self-worth to achievement, along with a bunch of loneliness at the height of his career.
And then, of course, there was the terrifying moment when Hough’s wife, Hayley Erbert, suffered a life-threatening brain bleed just months after their wedding. Basically, it hasn’t always been easy for Hough, and he’s here to talk through it all.
Below are the highlights from the conversation, adapted from the episode.
What made you decide to move to England at just 12 years old?
“It was very much my choice. Yeah. In fact, I actually begged my parents to go, because I went to England for this big Latin ballroom competition called Blackpool, and I got kicked out in the first round. I was like, ‘Oh, I am nowhere near the level of these dancers,’ you know, I’m like just a different, you know, it’s a different level. And so I knew in order to get to where I wanted to go, even at 12 years old, I kind of had clear goals. I knew I needed to be there. I need to be around that, you know, environment and those coaches, and so when the opportunity came up, I was like, ‘Please let me go.’”
How much did your childhood shape the person you became later in life?
“I lived in my neighborhood, we had these neighbors who were bullying…They tormented me, where they would hang me up in a tree by my ankles and put a gun to my head and spit on me or hog tie me in a field and…I was scared. I would have night terrors. It was very traumatic. I would wet the bed, and you know I was a scared kid. I was a terrified kid, scared of the dark, scared of my shadow, just scared and constantly on edge. So it’s kind of ironic the fact that at 12 years old, I moved across the world and trained and, you know, competed and did stuff, but it was interesting. Once I was there, I felt like I was on track, you know, and I felt safe. I actually felt safe being away. I felt like I had a goal. I had a vision. I knew what I was doing.”
Why do you think dance became such an important outlet for you?
“Dancing is primal. Before you can walk or crawl, we all have babies, you put them on the ground before you put music on, they’re kind of like, you know, they’re moving around—it’s in us. But somewhere along the way, we sort of decide not to dance anymore. Having that freedom, listening to the music, syncing your body up to the rhythm and the beat, it just does something, and then you get yourself in a community, and then a competition, and then it was like a perfect storm.”
Did success ever stop feeling fulfilling for you?
“I was in my apartment here in Los Angeles, and I think I had just won Dancing with the Stars for the third time. I think I had won an Emmy by then, and I was looking up and I’d won the world championships. I’ve won all these awards, you know, it’s trophies. And I was kind of looking up at them, and I was really in a dark place in my life. I was really, really depressed and down, and I was just like, I’m confused…I’m on the number one show in America. We’re getting, you know, amazing ratings and all this stuff, and I’ve won the show more than anybody else, and why am I so depressed?”
How did you start pulling yourself out of that darker period?
“I would go to seminars. I would go to, you know, go to events or go to places and learn and absorb. And actually being a teacher on Dancing with the Stars helped me a lot because now I’m not focusing on myself. I’m here to serve. I’m here to be like, how can I, how can I bring the best out in you? How can I like, oh, you’re nervous. OK, how do I work on that? How do I help you with that?”
You’ve spoken about loneliness before. When did you feel it the most?
“I think when I talk about the loneliest part of it, I, funnily enough, felt the most lonely when I lived in LA. When I was in England, I didn’t feel lonely. I felt like I was on a mission. But when I was in LA in my own apartment and, you know, seemingly everything’s amazing and fantastic and at the prime and, you know. It was incredibly lonely.”
What’s your advice for people who get nervous putting themselves out there?
“Being nervous and excited is identically the same chemically in your body, and I actually learned that when I was dancing with Kellie Pickler one of the seasons of Dancing with the Stars, and she just had paralyzing nerves and she’d be like, ‘Derek, I’m just so nervous.’ And I would walk her through this process of like, don’t say the word nervous, just say that you’re excited. She’s like, ‘Well, but I am.’ I’m like, ‘No, no, no, just say it.’ And what happened was by changing the language, it changed her focus, and what we focused on is what we feel.”
What’s something people misunderstand about high achievement?
“Being a competitor, you gotta think about yourself. It’s very selfish. It’s about me. I gotta be the best. I wanna win. I want to beat you, you know, and that’s fine, but it’s not really sustainable. Once it started getting to a place of like, ‘Hey, I wanna help you, I want to serve you,’ then it just changed, it changed so much.”
What happened to your wife, Hayley?
“We just got married in August and three months later, she had a brain bleed on stage. We hit heads while we were dancing, and she immediately just, you know, started bleeding essentially in her brain, but she didn’t know. Nobody knew until the end of the show, and then she started having this thing happening, and I thought she hurt her neck…But she started having seizures on the side of the stage…
…The EMTs were just like, ‘We think it’s a stroke. We didn’t know what happened,’ you know…So we have an option to go to a hospital that’s 10 minutes down the road, because we’re in Washington D.C. Or we can go to the one that’s 45 minutes away. And they’re asking me like, ‘What would you like to do?’ And I was like, ‘Where should we go?’ And they’re like, ‘This one can treat if it’s a stroke, but if it’s anything brain-related, we should go to this one.” And so in that moment, I was like, ‘Well, let’s go to the furthest one, so we have all the facilities.’ We went there. Which, later I found out, the head of the hospital came up to me and he said, ‘I just want to let you know, like, I’m glad you guys chose that because if she would have went there, she wouldn’t be here anymore.” Like it would have been lights out essentially because they couldn’t have serviced her…because it was an emergency craniectomy where they had to remove 40 percent of her skull.”
What was the hardest part of that experience for you emotionally?
“I go into a hotel room, I open it, I close the door, and it’s just boom. It’s just like silence, that hum that you feel…That moment was like the worst moment of my life, like. The biggest high and adrenaline just going for two days straight, essentially, and then just…it was like the next level of just despair.”
To hear the full conversation with Derek Hough, listen to The Bossticks wherever you get your podcasts.
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