Finding Your Dance Confidence – Tips for Inexperienced Dancers

How do you define dance confidence? It might be the self-confidence feeling you get when dancing, and might be the belief in your ability and not worrying about negative outcomes in your dance activities. You can build dance confidence through positive dance experiences, a supportive dance community, as well as a good body image and excellent health.

At any given moment, several different factors are likely to affect an individual’s dance confidence. For example, the environment and how you connect with music, and how you perceive yourself when compared to other dancers. Your relationship with your dance partner as well as your overall mood, general physical condition, skills and possible weak areas are other factors likely to affect dance confidence.

As a beginner, you likely hope that your dance confidence will increase as time passes by. The more you grow as a dancer, the more you earn skills to build on your confidence. After a few weeks, you will likely have earned plenty of positive dance experiences – as well as dances – and great comments from fellow dances and your teachers.

In many instances, advanced dancers will usually be more confident because they’ve worked hard to overcome obstacles, fell down, and picked themselves up. As your confidence gradually grows, you will learn that beating yourself down over small stumbles does not help. Doubt at every corner will eventually kill that confidence you desperately need.

Now that you have some idea about dance confidence and what it entails, how do you build these confidence levels? Honestly, it can be difficult to pinpoint on what exactly builds or breaks an individual’s confidence. However, here are simple tips that have been used by professionals all over the world to boost dance confidence.

Work on Your Skills

The more you work on your skills as a dancer, the more confidence you will naturally grow. As you watch yourself get better, feel dance classes becoming easier, and start to understand music effortlessly, you are well on your way to achieving dance self-confidence. There is no way you could be making all that progress and never feel good about it!

Hard work results in increased confidence and motivation – even without results, hard work alone is something you should be proud about. Getting selected to lead the group or winning first place should not be what you aim for – your goal is to learn yourself better to win all the battles along your way. Train, learn and trust yourself, and you there’ll be little room for external factors that might shake your confidence.

Remember Posture

Do you want a simple trick that will help you execute your own or someone else’s choreography with unshaken confidence? Well, the trick is really simple – have the right body posture. However, this is not about puffing your chest and putting your chin up; it’s more about deciding the type of character you want to portray in your dance piece.

Confidence depends on the context; for instance, some styles like waacking require you to stand tall with shoulders back and focus up. Finding a posture that fits the piece you’re doing is going to help you capture its mood, making your dance look more confident and natural.

Be Immune to Mistakes

Consider the mistakes you make as blessings in disguise, they are pause buttons that allow you to stop and evaluate what just happened and how you can prevent yourself from doing the same mistake again. Approach challenges in your life and dance with this mindset, and you will have little to fear. In fact, adapt an open mindset, and you will learn and grow to success.

Therefore, the next time you make a mistake in the middle of a routine, do not stress about it. Instead, make use of the mistake as a catalyst to becoming better. However, being more confident does not mean that you are invincible; it means that you will not let fear of making a mistake hold you back.

Be Unique, Not Better

One of the best things about the art part of dance is that there is no set “right” or “wrong” way of doing things. Yes, you’ll definitely need to deal with the technical bits of dancing, but when it comes to finding a personal style, you should do you! One way of increasing your dance confidence – especially when freestyling or doing a choreographed routine – is by being original in terms of moves and the right dancewear from a huge selection of kids dance costumes, for example.

Many dancers make the mistake of emulating their idols. Maybe, they aren’t even aware that they should be working on developing their own unique style. Copying routines not only makes a performance feel like some watered-down style, it also sacrifices the true style you are meant to shine at.

Play the Part

You don’t actually have to be a confident person to attain dance confidence. Everyone is battling with one or more insecurities, out and inside of the dance realm. The best part of performing on stage is that you have the right to forget about such things for a minute, and be whoever you want to be.

In fact, as you perform your pieces, really listen to the song and let your mind get involved in the story. Ask yourself what the person intended to say in the song, what they were doing and what do they want. Adopting a specific role makes it easier to perform with the mannerisms, facials, and posture required.