mental toughness

4 Mental Toughness Myths Holding You Back From Your Peak Performance

If you’ve ever set goals for yourself at the beginning of the season or calmed yourself down right before a pressure performance, then you may understand mental toughness.  If you’ve ever encouraged your team to take the floor with confidence…

Have A Confident Team Just By Cleaning a Routine

Confidence is difficult to instill in your dancers, but it's possible. However, there's no straight forward way to get there because there is no single cause of confidence. Confidence is cyclical – When you feel more confident, you perform…

Discover the Surprisingly Simple Origin of Confidence

I want to share a story with you. The story of a dancer's confidence and one simple competition day that changed my coaching career: It was a regional championship early in the season. In fact, it was our first event of the season. We…

How to Encourage GRIT in your Dancers

Grit is a game changer. Even if you’re not familiar with the term, you’ve probably seen it. The gritty dancer is the one who works so much harder than the "naturally talented" dancer who slides by. Grit is in the dancer who doesn’t…
captains

My 10 Best Competition Day Journal Prompts for Confidence

We live in a world of technology. Were phone notifications constantly go off. Earbuds are always in when we’re alone (or with friends for that matter). And the T.V. is always on the background. Most of us don’t spend a lot of time sitting…
mindfulness

The Best One-Minute Mindfulness Activity for Dancers

In the days where high schooler students have 32 hours of things to do in a 24-hour day, and college students are expected to do well in school, maintain a job, get an internship, volunteer, and never take a break… we could all learn a little…
visualization tools

10 Miracle Benefits of Effective Visualization Tools

Many coaches use visualization tools when teaching routines or preparing for a competition, and there’s a good reason. Effective visualization is not just about picturing yourself doing your routine. There are so many ways to visualize and…
breath training

Breath Training: The One Minute 4 Step Solution to Choking Under Pressure

It’s every coach’s nightmare… You’ve been cleaning your routine for months. Spent hours in technique or tumbling classes. Drilled your skills over and over again, and in practice the routine is flawless. You’re ready. The team is READY!…

How to Perform Under Pressure and Radically Reduce the Chance of a Mistake

Unlike other sports, dance and cheer coaches don’t get to coach ‘during the game’. Instead, we have to watch from the side and hope that our team can perform under pressure. We have to just watch and hope and pray they don’t make a mistake…
how to develop self confidence

Discover 7 New Ways to Build Your Team's Confidence

As a judge, I can always see the teams who just ooze confidence as they take the floor. It’s not fake. When they walk out, I know they are 100% confident and stand behind what they are about to do. Then there are those teams that walk out…