The Quiet Tension

Miami City Ballet Principal Dancer Dawn Atkins talks with Dr. Sharon Chirban about changing companies, rebuilding trust in her shoulder after surgery, and helping young dancers learn about how to best fuel their bodies to continue practicing their art. Join the conversation as they explore the uncertainty of recovery and the question every performer eventually faces: when will it feel right to step away?

The Quiet Tension: Sidebar is a mini-series spinoff of Dr. Sharon Chirban’s podcast The Quiet Tension, where she explores the hidden cost of high performance with artists, athletes, coaches, and entrepreneurs across a range of professions and specialties. The Sidebar series takes a deeper look at each of these conversations with peers in the field, from principal dancers to Olympic competitors.

In this episode:
00:00 - Performing the evening before shoulder surgery
02:12 - Dawn Atkins speaks on learning to trust her body again after her injury
04:06 - How unpredictable moments can rebuild confidence
05:43 - Why Dawn Atkins became a nutrition coach
06:22 - Supporting young dancers with the Ballerina Fuel Pack
07:53 - What might signal the right time to retire

To learn more about the Ballerina Fuel Pack, visit Dawn’s website.

Watch John Lam’s Season 1 episode.

Photos in podcast and thumbnail are courtesy of Dawn Atkins. Photography credit Alexander Iziliaev. 

The Quiet Tension: Sidebar is released every other Wednesday. You can find full episodes of The Quiet Tension and new episodes of The Quiet Tension: Sidebar on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube.

What is The Quiet Tension?

Every high performer knows the feeling. A layer of pressure, drive, doubt, or longing that hums along beneath the achievement, rarely spoken and almost never examined.

That's the quiet tension.

Sometimes it's the force that gets you up before dawn and pushes past what others consider possible. Sometimes it's what's quietly costing you — in relationships, in health, in the distance between who you perform as and who you actually are. Often it's both at once.

Hosted by psychologist and executive coach Sharon Chirban, The Quiet Tension is a conversation about what really drives high performers, and what it asks of them in return. Through intimate interviews with founders, athletes, executives, and creatives, Sharon moves past the resume and into the questions most achievement culture avoids;

What actually makes you tick?
What does excellence give you — and what does it take?
And what begins to change when you finally look at the forces running underneath your ambition?

These conversations explore the emotional regulation beneath discipline, the identity questions beneath success, and the patterns shaping lives from below the surface.

Left unexamined, that tension can harden into burnout, emotional exhaustion, perfectionism, or disillusionment. But when understood, it becomes something else entirely — Insight, choice, and a more sustainable relationship to ambition.

This isn't a productivity podcast. There are no hacks or morning routines here. Just honest conversations about what it actually takes to perform at the highest levels and what becomes possible when you finally look at what's been running underneath.

The Quiet Tension. Listen closely.