Confidence During Your Irish Dance Classes

Confidence is a massive aspect of Irish dancing, but that doesn’t just relate to Feises. There are lots of dancers who feel like they lack confidence during dance class. Often this isn’t spoken about a lot because dancers feel like they are talking negatively about their teachers or their dance school, and if they mention this to someone then people may think a certain way about their school. This is not the case and, the more we speak about how we feel, then the more people around us can help and we can help ourselves feel more confident every week. 

Everyone will have experienced times when they didn’t feel so confident during dance classes, whether that is when you have to perform a new step, your first time in a new school, or dance a step that you know doesn’t show off your strengths; but some dancers feel like this at every dance class. 

If this is you…read on!!

There’s nothing wrong with how you are feeling right now and your feelings are completely valid. But it would be much more beneficial for your dancing and your enjoyment of dancing if you felt more confident in dance class. 

How to Improve Confidence During Your Irish Dance Classes

Here are three ways in which you can work on your confidence every time you step into the studio: 

• Practice regularly 

The first thing to consider is how you have prepared for dance class. Have you worked on your corrections at home? The more prepared you feel heading into dance class then the more likely you are to feel confident stepping onto the dance floor. So make sure you don’t only use your time at home wisely to practice your corrections but also use your time before bed and in the car to visualise your steps and remember the corrections your teachers have told you, you could even use a journal or notes in your phone to keep tabs on these corrections too. 

• Be kind to yourself and embrace mistakes 

One of the most common reasons why dancers don’t feel so confident at dance class is because they are so scared of making mistakes. When you are worried about making mistakes you tend to feel under more pressure, which ends up in us often making more mistakes. Every single dancer makes mistakes. Even World Champions like me! That’s because we are all human and humans make mistakes - remind yourself that you’re not a robot and you’re going to make mistakes and that doesn’t make you any more or less of an amazing dancer. When your friends in dance class make mistakes, do you think any less of them? No? Then they won’t think less of you either. What is important is how we react when we make mistakes. The best way to do this is to be kind to yourself, stay calm, and simply try again. We should be making mistakes in dance class so that we don’t make mistakes out on stage. 

• Surround yourself with support

Finally, make sure you surround yourself with support both in dance class and at home. When you feel safe enough to be vulnerable, give 100%, and make mistakes in dance class then you are more likely to go out on the floor and perform with everything you have. Use your time at home to lean on your support system to talk through any moments in dance class that you feel like you may have made, how you felt about it, how you dealt with it, and how you can learn from it. If you do this after every class, then your confidence will continue to grow exponentially (it will grow and grow and growwwwww). 

It is important to work on your confidence in dance class because this will hugely impact not only the way you dance in class but also on stage at Feises. But by working on your confidence in dance class and seeing it improve over a few weeks, then you are also proving to yourself that you can improve your confidence in all aspects of your dance and personal life. 

Give this a practice over the next month and let us know how you get on! 

We work on our confidence weekly in the MWM Gold Club in our Thursday morning Mindset classes with Annabelle, our MWM Mindset Coach. You can join in on these classes (and the previous 50+ mindset classes uploaded to our system) by joining our Gold Club here.