Hello and welcome! Today, we’re going to break down confidence and what it actually means and then, I’ll be sharing some tips to boost your confidence day to day. I do cover some aspects of mental health and self-love so if you find this hard, please consider reading at a time where you feel better able to cope with this. If you wish to watch this in video form, click here.

To start off…

We’ll be going through the psychology-based definitions of what confidence actually is but if you want to skip straight to the tips then scroll on down. Okay let’s go through these quickly but if you want a bit more information about the psychology behind definitions, take a look at psychologist Albert Bandura who first defined these terms.

Confidence is made up of three segments:

  • self-efficacy
  • self-confidence
  • self-esteem.

So, in order to understand what confidence means, we need to look at each of these terms separately.

  1. Self-efficacy is your belief in your ability to accomplish a very very specific task such as a triple turn without any hesitation.
  2. Self-confidence is a broader view of your belief in yourself, to be able to accomplish a goal or to sort of take on a larger task and this, like self-efficacy is also based on past experience. So, if you have, in the past, been able to dance quite well, you can have a bit more self-confidence in the fact that you know you are a good dancer. It is similar to self-efficacy but it considers you as a whole rather than very very specific tasks, for example, that triple term.
  3. Self-esteem believes in your sense of self-worth so phrases like ‘I’m not good enough’ kind of comes under that self-worth category. According to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, it’s so important, that it is one of the five core human needs. Today we’re just gonna be focusing on the day-to-day and how you can improve your confidence over time.

Confidence is a skill and it does take practice to build that skill up.

You’re not going to read and suddenly become the Queen of confidence! The aim is for slow growth over a long period of time which does require consistent practice because confidence is a skill.

Marwa Ramsi

We’re going to go through seven points today starting with:

Number one: Practice your dancing outside of class

Now, I’m not the first teacher to say this, I won’t be the last teacher to say this and I’m sure you’ve heard it a million times but I will say it again. A one-hour class a week is not enough to develop your dancing at the rate that you want it to develop at. You need to practice outside of class. If you forget easily, try and record the class or do some online classes and then work from those.

Going back to the definitions of confidence, two out of three of them rely on your past experiences. So, if you keep practicing specific moves over and over again until you’re comfortable and happy with them, you will feel more confident carrying them out in front of other people. This will help boost your self-efficacy over time and once you start adding more dances into your repertoire, your self-confidence as a dancer too.

Number two: Practice correctly

It’s all well and good to me telling you to practice and practice and practice but not if you’re practising the wrong stuff or the wrong technique or the wrong timing. You know practice doesn’t make perfect, it just takes what you think you know about something and it makes it permanent. Make sure you are learning from a teacher who has broken down complex moves into smaller steps – just the footwork maybe just the arm styling, the timing, the rhythm, the musicality to make sure that you’re getting every single bit correctly and then start to practice those individual bits. This leads me on really nicely to number three.

Number 3: Use a mirror.

The amount of times I have said to a student to move their hand to a certain position and to have them say ‘oh my hand is in that position’ and then me come along and adjust it.

Sometimes you don’t have the body awareness to understand what your body’s doing so mirrors can be very very useful. If you’re using a mirror you’re getting this sort of feedback constantly which is very helpful especially if you don’t have a teacher there to help you or if you’re using things like online classes. This however does come with the warning – you don’t want to be using mirrors from a place of negative judgment. Use it as a tool to help you improve and to practice.

Number four: Have default moves which you are comfortable in within your repertoire of dancing.

Make sure you have your go-to moves and your default positions that you always fall back to if you go blank or you don’t know what to do in a certain situation or part of the song. I have created a more in-depth video talking about how to get default movements into your muscle memory and I’ve also given you a little starter on four default hand positions that you can try out to get you started. Read that here.

Number five: Make self-love one of your mental health goals.

Something intrinsic to confidence, as mentioned before, is self-esteem. If you haven’t already, I recommend adding ‘improving your self-love’ to your goals list. There are many books and resources which cover this so I won’t go into it too much today but I’ve put some of the books in the below for you guys to have a look at. The books are affiliate links so I do get a small commission if you use the links below.

TOP SELLING BOOKS ON SELF-LOVE (affiliate links):

Please note it’s very hard to be confident in your dancing if you don’t love yourself and love the way your body looks when you are dancing. It’s even harder to improve your dancing if you don’t feel like you are good enough or that you deserve to put the time into your practice.

If this is a deeper issue for you there is help available, there is CBT. there’s counselling sessions and these have been proven to be very useful, please speak to your Doctor for more information.

Number six: everyone has a path, don’t compare yourself.

People have different focuses in life and where they direct that focus, that’s what they tend to get good at.

Often we hear phrases like ‘oh they’re such a talented dancer’ without actually taking into account the amount of hours that that person has put in and the amount of practice or even money that person has put in to become that good of a dancer. As a result, not all journeys are equal someone may have had more opportunities to dance, they may have started earlier or perhaps put in more hours than you have or sometimes something seemingly unrelated like they can play a musical instrument or they have an older sister who dances. Either way, you cannot compare your life experiences to another person’s, so why are you comparing your dance journey to another person’s. Your only focus should be becoming better than you were yesterday and your only competition is yourself.

Number seven: Bring good energy to your dance practices.

Start your practices on a positive note, take away everything else that’s happened that week… that day… that year… and distract yourself with something enjoyable. You can take a shower, watch a funny video, try out one of my three-minute dance lineups.

It doesn’t really matter what you do, the idea is to boost your happy hormones and then to go and do your practices. Associating feel-good hormones with dancing will make you look forward to dancing even more, that will then make you feel more confident and excited to get dancing and this will hopefully create a never-ending positive feedback loop.

So, that’s all the tips for today.

I hope you gained some value and some ideas on how to improve your confidence when dancing, both practically with some of the first few tips and also from a mental health perspective as well. And please, if you have any tips on how to improve your confidence or anything that you do which you find helps a lot, please help others as well by sharing them in the comments below. That way people that have come to this post to come to find out what I say about confidence, they can also see your comments as well.

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