Feeling confident in relation to your dancing performance means you are sure of your skills and ability to feel successful while dancing. It is an internal determination or judgment. Your confidence in your dancing is based on your track record of succeeding in various similar arenas. The feeling of self-confidence is learned and can be passed from one task to another.

What Prevents Me from Having Confidence?

You become confident by successfully doing something or completing a task and acknowledging that achievement. The internal acknowledgment is recorded in the mind as, "I can do this again."

Following are several things that block your ability to gain confidence:

• You Don't Acknowledge Your Success. One reason you aren't confident after successfully completing a task or achieving a difficult goal is because you often don't acknowledge your achievement and may even demean what you have done. You put your achievement down by saying something like "Oh, I was just lucky" or "It wasn't all that good."
• Your Goal Seems Too Large. Another reason for lack of confidence is viewing a task or a goal as too large an entity. Success or failure is achieved by small steps and often takes days or months or years of practice.
• Your Goal Is Too Difficult. Some people purposely take on tasks that are way over their head, such that they are assured of failure. They do this to reinforce their perceived lack of self-confidence. There is some strange psychology involved in this situation.

Gaining Confidence

The way to gain confidence is to:

1. Break tasks into smaller units
2. Acknowledge your success for each step
3. Learn from your mistakes to reinforce your confidence

Break Your Goals into Smaller Steps

How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time! Before you set out to perform a task or try to achieve a goal, you must realize that the activity is really a series of smaller steps. Thus, instead of waiting until the end to determine if you are successful, you have a series of successes that lead to the finish.

Acknowledge Success for Each Step

For each one of these steps or mini-tasks, you must acknowledge your success. This self-talk will re-enforce your acknowledgment of your abilities and increase your confidence as you go along on achieving the greater goal.

Reinforce Your Confidence

Congratulate yourself each time you succeed. If you don't do well, correct your error. Take care about admonishing yourself, except in extreme cases.

Example of Gaining Confidence

Your goal may be to win a dance competition. Each time you practice a step, you are performing a minitask necessary to complete your final goal of winning the competition. Your minitasks will continually get larger. Once you feel confident that you know several steps well, you can put them together to form a routine. In turn, the routine becomes your minitask.

Each time you perform a minitask well, congratulate yourself verbally, preferably out loud, by saying something like "good job!" Each time you miss, note what to correct. Perhaps say, "Use my knees more next time."

Throughout your practices, your confidence will build, so that even if you lose to a better dancer, you will feel sure of your overall ability to dance well.

In Conclusion

You can build your confidence by acknowledging your successes for each step along the way to trying to achieve a goal. The self-congratulations will build and reinforce your confidence along the way to feeling like a champion.