Author: D. Schoeppner
Tension. Fear. Cold hands. Sweaty palms. A racing mind about making mistakes. Will I remember that new part of the routine? I don’t want to disappoint my instructor. I want to perform well for my family and friends, judges and audience. I want to place well among the competition. Panic sets in. I have experienced each of these before a performance and competition, just as many of my dance friends, have experienced. It affects not just amateurs but professionals too. All these things can be summed up in one word, “anxiety.”
In this blog post I hope to pass along a few tips that I have found to be very beneficial in coping with, and even defeating, my anxiety about performing and competing on the dance floor. I hope this helps you, too.
Anxiety is commonly defined as “a feeling of worry, nervousness, or unease, typically about an imminent event or something with an uncertain outcome.” It is based in our psychological thoughts about the imminent event and often leads to performing below your potential.
Some people suggest that you should breathe to calm yourself, simply relax, or just be confident. Although well intended, these have never really helped me and often frustrated me further. What I needed was a practical strategy beyond these superficial ideas of controlling my anxiety. One that can teach me how to gain control of my mind, and think differently by cutting to the root cause of the matter. But, how do I find such a strategy, then implement it?
What I stumbled across, and found to be effective, comes not from the ballroom community, but leveraging two concepts from other environments. The first comes from a world class Olympic Gold Medalist and the second is from the psychological training of mindfulness. By bringing these concepts together, I’ve successfully overcome my anxiety.
First concept - Mindfulness is defined as “a mental state achieved by focusing one's awareness on the present moment, while calmly acknowledging and accepting one's feelings, thoughts, and bodily sensations.”
Mindfulness practices were inspired mainly by teachings from the Eastern World and have been adopted by many individuals, sports professionals such as Phil Jackson’s Chicago Bulls and LA Lakers as well as the corporate workplaces such as Google, Target, Goldman Sachs, and Aetna.
Jon Kabat-Zinn is Professor of Medicine Emeritus and creator of the Stress Reduction Clinic and the Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Health Care, and Society at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. He says that mindfulness teaches you to be in the moment without projecting from the past or into the future. The present moment often gets squeezed out because we are focused on past mistakes or future results.
Your mind can only think about one thing at a time. So use your mind to stay focused on the moment, and think about what you need to perform your best. Don’t let your mind think of anything but ‘now.’ There will be plenty of time after the performance or competition to review and assess your performance and plan to improve it.
Second concept – A matter of perspective. Lenny Bassham, an American sports shooter who won a gold medal in the 1976 Summer Olympics, is author of the book With Winning in Mind and founder of Mental Management Systems LLC. He taught me that, to improve your performance, there are only a few things you have to accept. And if you accept them, you create a new and different attitude toward your performance and defeating anxiety.
He says: Everything that happens to you in life happens for a positive reason, if you look for it. Everything that happens needs to happen, because I know that only two things can happen to me. Either I win or I learn. Either I perform well, succeed and feel great about that, or I’m shown something that I absolutely need to see and experience in order to move forward.
When do we learn? We don’t learn much when everything goes right. Lenny said that every champion he ever met says the same thing: you learn more when you fail than when you perform well. We tend to learn when we struggle, when we realize that things didn’t go well because I didn’t train well on that item.
This does not mean you should deliberately fail. You don’t have to do that; life will throw you enough curves. Having the right attitude when you do have a bad performance is critical to your learning and knowing what to work on and where to improve. What happens to you in life doesn’t matter; what you do about it does.
To beat anxiety, go into the performance or competition with this attitude: Whatever happens to me needs to happen so that I can perform well or learn where I still need to improve. If you weren’t trying to improve, you wouldn’t be taking lessons and coaching.
SUMMARY:
HELPFUL RESOURCES:
Mindfulness:
Tension. Fear. Cold hands. Sweaty palms. A racing mind about making mistakes. Will I remember that new part of the routine? I don’t want to disappoint my instructor. I want to perform well for my family and friends, judges and audience. I want to place well among the competition. Panic sets in. I have experienced each of these before a performance and competition, just as many of my dance friends, have experienced. It affects not just amateurs but professionals too. All these things can be summed up in one word, “anxiety.”
In this blog post I hope to pass along a few tips that I have found to be very beneficial in coping with, and even defeating, my anxiety about performing and competing on the dance floor. I hope this helps you, too.
Anxiety is commonly defined as “a feeling of worry, nervousness, or unease, typically about an imminent event or something with an uncertain outcome.” It is based in our psychological thoughts about the imminent event and often leads to performing below your potential.
Some people suggest that you should breathe to calm yourself, simply relax, or just be confident. Although well intended, these have never really helped me and often frustrated me further. What I needed was a practical strategy beyond these superficial ideas of controlling my anxiety. One that can teach me how to gain control of my mind, and think differently by cutting to the root cause of the matter. But, how do I find such a strategy, then implement it?
What I stumbled across, and found to be effective, comes not from the ballroom community, but leveraging two concepts from other environments. The first comes from a world class Olympic Gold Medalist and the second is from the psychological training of mindfulness. By bringing these concepts together, I’ve successfully overcome my anxiety.
First concept - Mindfulness is defined as “a mental state achieved by focusing one's awareness on the present moment, while calmly acknowledging and accepting one's feelings, thoughts, and bodily sensations.”
Mindfulness practices were inspired mainly by teachings from the Eastern World and have been adopted by many individuals, sports professionals such as Phil Jackson’s Chicago Bulls and LA Lakers as well as the corporate workplaces such as Google, Target, Goldman Sachs, and Aetna.
Jon Kabat-Zinn is Professor of Medicine Emeritus and creator of the Stress Reduction Clinic and the Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Health Care, and Society at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. He says that mindfulness teaches you to be in the moment without projecting from the past or into the future. The present moment often gets squeezed out because we are focused on past mistakes or future results.
Your mind can only think about one thing at a time. So use your mind to stay focused on the moment, and think about what you need to perform your best. Don’t let your mind think of anything but ‘now.’ There will be plenty of time after the performance or competition to review and assess your performance and plan to improve it.
Second concept – A matter of perspective. Lenny Bassham, an American sports shooter who won a gold medal in the 1976 Summer Olympics, is author of the book With Winning in Mind and founder of Mental Management Systems LLC. He taught me that, to improve your performance, there are only a few things you have to accept. And if you accept them, you create a new and different attitude toward your performance and defeating anxiety.
He says: Everything that happens to you in life happens for a positive reason, if you look for it. Everything that happens needs to happen, because I know that only two things can happen to me. Either I win or I learn. Either I perform well, succeed and feel great about that, or I’m shown something that I absolutely need to see and experience in order to move forward.
When do we learn? We don’t learn much when everything goes right. Lenny said that every champion he ever met says the same thing: you learn more when you fail than when you perform well. We tend to learn when we struggle, when we realize that things didn’t go well because I didn’t train well on that item.
This does not mean you should deliberately fail. You don’t have to do that; life will throw you enough curves. Having the right attitude when you do have a bad performance is critical to your learning and knowing what to work on and where to improve. What happens to you in life doesn’t matter; what you do about it does.
To beat anxiety, go into the performance or competition with this attitude: Whatever happens to me needs to happen so that I can perform well or learn where I still need to improve. If you weren’t trying to improve, you wouldn’t be taking lessons and coaching.
SUMMARY:
- Mindfulness (focus on the present moment). Focus your mind on the present moment, the now, not about what happened in the past or what the audience, judges, instructor or yourself might think after the fact. Let those thoughts about the past and future go and be in the moment with complete focus on your performance without any attachment to the result.
- Attitude perspective. Everything that happens during your performance needs to happen. And only two things can result. Either you perform well/win and you can be proud of your accomplishment, or you learn what to improve upon. Either way you look at it, you win. This is what is called a win-win attitude perspective!
HELPFUL RESOURCES:
Mindfulness:
- What is Mindfulness? By Jon Kabat-Zinn.
- 60 Minutes Mindfulness Episode Correspondent Anderson Cooper investigates the benefits of practicing mindfulness techniques on the brain and body.
- Phil Jackson on mindfulness training of his NBA championship Chicago Bulls and LA Lakers teams.
- Stephanie "Steph" Davis on fear. She is one of the world's leading female rock climbers, BASE jumper, and wingsuit flyer who talks about her inside game and fear.
- Corporations’ Newest Productivity Hack: Meditation by Joe Pinsker
- How to eliminate fear forever and deal with pressure in competition a short discussion by Lenny Bassham
- An hour interview: With Winning in Mind with Lanny Bassham by Brian Johnson
- YouTube video: Overcoming Performance Anxiety & Stage Fright by Kathryn (Katy) Morgan, a former ballerina with the New York City Ballet.
- Dancecompreview.com article: DanceSport Competition Performance Anxiety by Egor Shalvarov.
- Sport Psychology for Competitive Dancers by Joel Minden.
- Dancemania.biz article: How to deal with nerves before a performance by Sophie.
- Ballroom Dance and Psychology is a unique slide presentation by Elise Jones
- Article in Sport Psychologist, Performance Enhancement for Ballroom Dancers: Psychological Perspectives by Patsy Tremayne and Debra A. Ballinger
RSS Feed