Ballroom State of Mind

The person who loves walking will walk further than the man who loves the destination. Everyone loves a good result. Everyone loves the fulfillment of a finished product. But if you don't fall in love with the process, the odds of you getting that finished product are vastly reduced. And if you don't reward yourself along the way, you'll quit prematurely. The best strategy I can offer to you is to...

Book a Dance Strategy Call HERE How do you dance freely and expressively and also think about all the things you are supposed to be doing with your body? The short answer is you really can't. The part of your brain that has to think through things and concentrate to make them happen is minimal. We want to delegate as much as we can to the part of our brain that does actions automatically without m...

Book a Dance Strategy call HERE Don't roll your eyes at the subject of self-talk.  Your self-talk is a large part of your everyday experience and has a lot to do with your ability to get the results that you want in your life.  Self-talk is the voice you hear all day. It can be used for good or evil. When your inner voice is on default, how does it sound? Do you even know? If you start t...

Book a Dance Strategy Call here Sometimes I call it MATH and DRAMA In this podcast I am calling it TASK vs EGO. These are two mindset states that we as dancers tend to be in. In the case of a task-oriented mindset, we are focused on what needs to be done. There are certain traits associated with this mindset that turn out to be very useful. You persist at tasks longer, you enjoy the process more,...

Click here to book a free Dance Strategy Call Click here to find Joyful Ballroom Facebook Group The brain is so good at identifying problems. This is good since it helps us survive better as humans. However, we tend to get stuck in our problems. We become problem-focused. We stay stuck in the fact that we have a problem, talk about it, find evidence for it, etc, when we could just move to a soluti...

Free Dance Strategy Call HERE Rather than go into your comp feeling nervous, defensive, and worried that something bad is going to happen, I recommend you get into a more empowered headspace. You can do that by giving the competition a job. A competition is there for you to use as a tool. You can use it for your purposes. This will give your mind something productive to focus on which will help pr...

To feel jealous is human. But then what? Because feeling jealous can feel pretty terrible and sometimes it feels hard to let it go. In this episode, we unpack whether you are feeling jealousy or envy toward other dancers (hint: they are not the same thing!) and what that means for you. Envy is more of a 2-person emotion where someone has something that you want. Jealous is more of a 3-person situa...

For a free Dance Strategy Call, go here. As I have worked with ballroom dance clients, themes have emerged. Today I share 7 areas that you can take a look at to measure how you are doing with mental strength in your dancing. This isn't a complete list and I'm sure it will evolve over time, but it's a good place to start. Rate yourself on a scale of 1-10 to get a baseline, then start improving in s...

amberhaider.com Goals have the power to either stress you out or motivate you. Some people avoid setting goals all together and some live for it. In this episode, we talk about why a goal might be stressful and how to choose more motivating goals.  The most surprising this about this episode, though, might be that the purpose of the goal isn't to actually accomplish it. Listen in to find out...

So many of us don't want to look bad. It makes sense. None of us want to feel embarrassed or look silly. We don't want people to judge us or think less of us. But when it comes to dancing, if you are willing to look bad, you will suddenly find yourself getting very good very quickly.  When you avoid looking bad, you will avoid situations where people will see you stumbling or faltering. &nbsp...

Join Joyful Ballroom HERE One of the most common things I hear from clients is, "I just don't want to make a mistake," or "I don't want to f*** up," or "I don't want to mess up." Another friend in our Joyful Ballroom Facebook Group asked how to get over a bad performance. These concepts are similar and I want to give you some help around this in this episode. The reason we are terrified of making...

Self doubt and self belief cannot occupy your mind and the same time.  Where self doubt can come on as a reaction to what has happened, and then cause you to spin out of control, self belief doesn't happen by chance. Self belief is a choice you make. Whereas confidence can come after you have successfully accomplished something, self belief needs no evidence. It is a choice you make when ther...

Book a Dance Strategy Call here. Join Joyful Ballroom here. Pain is inevitable in life. We keep trying to avoid it but it doesn't work.  In this episode, we sift through clean and dirty pain so you can see what pain is worth dealing with and what part is unnecessary. The good news is that the unnecessary pain is created by us so we can stop generating it.  Clean pain is constructive and...

It helps to know you aren't alone. In this episode, I reveal many of the things that have come up in dance strategy calls and sessions with clients.  Enjoy these confessions of amateur ballroom dancers! Click here to schedule a free Dance Strategy Call

To book a Dance Strategy Call, go here. To watch a training video: The 2 step Process to Start Competing Better, go here. When we want to motivate ourselves to do better, how do we do that exactly? Most people I talk to use a "whip". They try to be hard on themselves, punish themselves for shortcomings, and use forceful or negative self-talk to get themselves moving. We seem to prefer fear, judgme...

The key to managing your mind might just be found in this concept: you kind of have two brains.  You have a primitive lower brain that is responsible for your survival, and a higher prefrontal cortex that's responsible for planning, organizing and higher levels of cognition. You need both of these parts of your brain.  Your lower brain makes sure you stay alive by tending to the most imp...

How do you become a different version of yourself? How do you actually change? This episode is the third in a series about that very subject. In episode 24 we learned how to identify our patterns that might not be serving us. Episode 25 talked about how to interrupt that pattern, and this episode is all about living into the new version of you. In between a stimulus and response is a pause. That p...

There will always be people who are better than you. They are more talented, they learn faster, they seemingly succeed more than you and everybody else. Our brain thinks this a problem. But it's a problem you can't solve. You can't make it so there is never anyone better than you.  I offer you three tips to deal with this. 1--Accept it. Accept that there are people better than you. It's a fac...

To learn more about how to get more help, click here The greatest tool in your arsenal for personal change is "the pause." When you interrupt an old pattern and pause, you give yourself a chance to make a different choice. In this episode, we follow up from the previous episode where we talked about the model and how to gain self awareness. Once you are aware of your patterns, it's time to interru...

To learn more about how to work together privately, click here. To hack yourself and become the person that you want to become, you need to do three things. First, learn your current patterns for how you show up in the world.  Second, you interrupt the old patterns Lastly, you build the new and live-in to the person that you want to be This podcast focuses on discovering your current patterns...

This is the first in a series of mindset basics that apply to everyone. The first concept/tool I want to offer is that what you think isn't true. We all think that our thoughts are just true. But they are not inherently true. Two people can experience the same facts and come to different conclusions entirely. Each person would think their version is the truth. And it is. To them.  Thoughts ar...

It's time to just speak some truth into you. So many dancers get so hard on themselves and start to forget just how amazing they are. So in this episode I just want to cheerlead you for a minute. It's short and sweet but I want to show you just some of the ways that you are truly exceptional. 

In this follow up podcast episode to #16 Interference, we discuss what to do about the interference you experience in your dancing.  In episode 16 we introduced being aware of what interference are a problem for you, how they affect your life and how you show up, and began dis-identifying, or de-personalizing, with them. In this episode, we discuss what to do next.  Step one--Awareness--...

When a competition is approaching, my friends will ask me, "Are you excited for your next competition?" And while I am usually excited, it is mixed with a hefty side of "I don't feel ready." I kind of laugh and say, "I don't feel ready, but I'll take what I got and see how we do." Truly I am not too upset about this. I used to think it was a problem to not be "ready."  I finally decided one d...

There are lots of things to fear in the ballroom world. Some things my clients offer up in sessions are: forgetting choreography, losing timing, messing up, falling down, fainting, not making finals, not placing, not winning, scoring poorly, judges marks, disappointing coaches and teachers, wasting their time. But I want to simplify this for you. The thing that you really fear isn't any of the abo...