Episode 184: Daily Habits
Dr. Chelsea: Hi, and welcome to Passion for Dance! I'm your host, Dr. Chelsea, and I'm on a mission to create happier, more successful dancers through positive mental skills. And one of the best ways to be happier and more successful is to focus on small, daily habits. So today, I'm going to share three daily habits of top performing dancers that you can implement right away.
And before I dive in, if you're new to the show, well, welcome! I know it might be a little overwhelming to know which episodes to listen to. There is a huge back catalog of advice and help that might be right for you. You can always go back to the beginning and binge listen, of course, but I know we don't have a single spare minute in our days.
So to help you decide where to start, I have a short, five-question quiz. It'll tell you which episodes will help you wherever you are right now. It's kind of like a personality quiz, but after a few quick questions, you'll get a curated podcast list with the top five episodes that will help you the most right now.
Maybe you need some motivation or inspiration, maybe your dancers need something to listen to for help, or maybe you're looking for help with confidence. Whatever support you need, take the short quiz and find out. It's at chelseapierotti.com/podcastquiz to get started. That's chelseapierotti.com/podcastquiz. Click the link in the show notes right below where you're listening now, and then come back here. Thank you for being here. I'm happy to have you a part of this community!
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Hi, I'm Dr. Chelsea, a former professional dancer and mental performance coach. I know what it feels like to be a passionate dance teacher who cares about your dancers, but you want to challenge them and help them be their best, and I also recognize that some traditions and teaching practices in the dance world are harmful. So I'm on a mission to change our dance industry by creating happier, more successful dancers using positive mental skills.
When you understand how to help your dancers with their confidence, how to find their own motivation, work together as a team and more, your dancers will unlock new levels of competitive success and happiness. And it's not just about them; you deserve the same. So we'll talk about how dance teachers can use positive mental skills to be more confident, resilient, and motivated as well.
Be sure to hit “subscribe” wherever you listen to podcasts. There are new episodes every Thursday, and each week you'll hear from me and my guests with advice and actionable tips for building mental toughness, covering topics about mindset, motivation, resilience, and building a community. Passion for Dance is a show designed to help dance educators like you have a positive impact on every dancer you teach.
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So let's talk about the daily habits that will make the biggest difference. The best performers in the world didn't get there through magic, definitely didn't get there overnight, and the best path to your personal best is to focus on small, daily habits that add up to consistent growth. Psychological research has taught us that there are three daily key habits to focus on: setting goals with intention, after-action reviews, and taking on challenges. So let's break it down and talk about what that looks like for dancers.
First Daily Habit: Setting Goals – 3:08
First, it's about the daily practice of setting goals with intention and clarity. I've talked about goals a lot, and you can hear more about it in the goal-setting series, which was episodes 123, 124, and 125. But the important part I want to talk about here is that small, daily goals have a clear intention, and they align with your long-term vision. If you want to dance in college or move to LA or open a dance studio someday, that long-term vision has to translate to daily actions. Here's how I encourage dancers to use goal setting as a daily habit.
Use a morning routine that includes identifying your top three priorities for progress today. Again, it should align with your larger vision and your short-term goals. It can be simple things like, “Sew my pointe shoes. Stay focused during ballet. Put my phone away at 9:00 PM to wind down.” Sometimes it's a bigger task, but the idea is you notice each morning, “What are my big three for the day? What would help me make progress towards my goals?”
Coaches and teachers, I also use this same approach to practice and identify the top three priorities to achieve in practice today. Same idea, and either way you don't just go through the motions every day or spend too much time on things that don't align with your bigger values and goals. You know what three things will keep you moving in the right direction, and you prioritize those things.
You can also use my goal-setting system, which is based on the acronym GWHOP (silly acronym, I know), which is where you set a clear goal, identify why you want to do it, how you'll get there, what obstacles might get in the way, and your plan when you hit those roadblocks. I break down that whole system in episode 161, but it's something I use regularly, roughly once a month. I set a clear goal for the month using that GWHOP method. Then each workday I know what the goal for the month is, and I set three priorities for the day that will help me reach that goal. It's a balance of short-term and long-term goals, and the idea is to have the big vision, know where you want to be, know what goal you're reaching for, and then break it down to short-term weekly or monthly goals and then a daily top three.
Here's a concrete example I used with a dancer recently. Her big vision goal was to make a specific college team. She's currently a sophomore in high school dancing at a competitive studio, so we talked about setting a monthly goal that would help her reach that long-term goal. And for this dancer right now, her goal was to improve her flexibility and strength related to a specific jump that she will likely see in future college auditions. So the goal was a specific strength and conditioning homework session that she would do three times a week for a month.
We set the plan for how often, which days it fit in her schedule, why it mattered to her, the resources she would use to know what to do for that training. And then we talked about what would get in the way, like a busy homework schedule, homecoming week at school, just being too tired. And finally, we talked about the plan to deal with those things when they come up.
That all leads to the ability to set a daily top three. If it was a training day for this goal, that training was always in the top three priorities. Other things might fall below it, and that's okay. It was keeping her focused and keeping that big goal top of mind. All of this together creates the small, daily habits of knowing where you're going, how you're going to get there, and what you need to do today to make that happen.
Second Daily Habit: After-Action Reviews – 6:31
Okay, the second daily habit is what I call after-action reviews. It's a specific type of self-reflection that allows for more learning and growth each day. After dance class, it's the reflection to pause and think about, “What worked well today, what didn't, and what did I learn?” You can do this on the drive home from class or as part of your bedtime routine, and it's allowing the space to pause and notice what's going well and what you learned. That awareness helps you learn faster and reset quicker when you get off track.
Self-reflection is one of the most important mental skills because it allows you to see growth in all other areas. The best way to practice self-reflection and get better at this skill is to do it every day. It can be a journal. It can simply be in your head on the way home from the studio. But allow yourself the space to pause and notice what went well, what didn't, and what you learned today.
It's important that your self-reflection includes both highs and lows. Many dancers are so quick to notice what went wrong but have a hard time identifying the progress. Notice what's working well, so you can focus on the positive areas when you need to. For example, a dancer who had a rough time in class today could notice that what went well was that you started class in a bad mood, but you were able to shift your mindset and not waste the whole class. So no, maybe it wasn't your best ever, but you were able to turn it around and have a productive class.
If you notice what helped you shift your mindset, you can get better at that skill and use it more in the future. But if the only thing you noticed was, “Oh, I had such a bad day,” and don't think about what in your control led to that, you get stuck and frustrated and likely repeat it in the future. But again, if you notice what didn't work was that you didn't have a good snack in between school and class, so you were hungry and that was the issue, then there's something you can learn from that, and maybe your big three tomorrow might include prepping a healthy snack to eat when you don't have a lot of time between school and dance.
These after-action reviews are all about increasing awareness, noticing what didn't go well, what's in your control in that scenario, and how you can change it, and then noticing what is going well, so you can celebrate it and repeat those behaviors in the future.
Third Daily Habit: Taking on Challenges – 8:45
The third daily habit of successful dancers is taking on challenges. Deliberately seeking out a challenging task is how you build mental toughness. You're training yourself to be resilient, training your response muscle, just like you train your quads or your hamstrings. The more you seek out a challenge and rise to that challenge, the more your mind believes that you can take on anything and thrive. It's not enough to wait around for those challenges to happen because usually when life throws a challenge in your way, it's a big one, and it's too late to learn what to do. So instead, it's the daily habit of seeking out smaller challenges and flexing that response muscle regularly.
These challenges can be physical, like a challenging workout, or even just a challenging petit allegro that reverses, so you know it's going to make your brain hurt. It could be a mental challenge like learning something new, trying a new skill, working on one that you're striving for but haven't mastered yet. It's finding small physical or mental challenges every day, so you learn to push yourself a little out of your comfort zone, realize you can do it, and even thrive when you encounter a challenge.
Overcoming those daily challenges and smaller discomforts will allow you to be so much more resilient in high-pressure situations. So dancers who are more successful onstage are used to taking on a challenge, not giving up, staying positive, and fighting through. So when something unexpected happens, especially onstage, or maybe you have a really important audition, you feel confident in your ability to rise to that challenge. Confidence comes from the daily habit of seeking small challenges and going for it.
All Three Habits Build on One Another – 10:21
All three of these daily habits build on each other. If you have a clear goal and intention, you can set a daily big three to keep you focused and ensure one of those three is a challenge that'll push you a little bit. Then once you have given yourself a challenge, you go through a quick after-action review to see how it went. If you didn't achieve your goal or fell short of the challenge, that's okay. As long as you learned something in the process, you are still moving forward and can approach that challenge again in the future with more confidence.
If you're a dancer with big goals, I encourage you to integrate these three practices in your daily life for better performance in class and onstage, greater confidence when you perform, and the resilience to bounce back quickly when things go wrong.
If you found this helpful, please share it with another dancer who you think might find this helpful as well. This community is all about building up every dancer to be happier and more successful. So please help me on this mission by sharing the episode with one special dancer in your life. Thank you for being here and keep sharing your passion for dance with the world!
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Thank you for listening to Passion for Dance! You can find all episode resources at www.chelseapierotti.com/podcast, and be sure to follow me on Instagram for more high-performance tips at @dr.chelsea.pierotti. This podcast is for passionate dance teachers and coaches who are ready to change the dance industry by creating happier, more successful dancers. I'm Dr. Chelsea and keep sharing your passion for dance with the world.
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