Sep 1 / Nicole Langi

What If “I’m Not Good Enough” Isn’t a Confidence Problem?

“I suck.”
She says it while tying her shoe.
Not crying. Not looking for reassurance. Almost casually.
Another dancer is stretching beside her.
“I literally can’t turn.”
Five minutes later:
“My legs look disgusting today.”
If you teach teenagers, none of this is particularly shocking.
We hear it so often that the response can become almost automatic.
“No, you don’t.”
“You’re a beautiful dancer.”
“Stop comparing yourself.”
“I wish you could see what I see.”
All said with love.
But what if confidence isn’t where the problem started?
What if, somewhere along the way, a dancer learned to use information about what she was doing as information about who she is?

Dance Teaches You to See Yourself

Dance teachers give children information about themselves all day long.
“Your foot is sickling.”
“Drop your shoulders.”
“Watch your standing leg.”
At first, she doesn’t know the foot is sickled.
The teacher does.
So, the teacher shows her.
A week later, it happens again.
Then one afternoon the teacher starts—
“Your foot—”
—and she fixes it before the sentence is finished.
She has learned to see what the teacher sees.
That is part of becoming a dancer.
And dance gives us another unusual way to do it.
The mirror.
A dancer can feel herself moving while simultaneously seeing what that movement looks like from the outside.
She can see the hip lifting. She can remind herself to find more rotation.
Put her beside three other dancers and she can see whether their arms make the same shape, whether the spacing is even, whether they arrive together.
The mirror is incredibly useful.
So is the teacher.
Both give a dancer information she may not have had on her own.
But children don’t only learn what other people see about their technique.
They also learn what other people see about them.
Researchers studying adolescent development call one version of this reflected self-appraisal: what I believe you think of me. Research comparing adolescents and adults suggests that adolescents’ perceptions of themselves may rely particularly strongly on how they believe other people see them (Pfeifer et al., 2009).
A dancer knows the feeling.
The teacher doesn’t have to say, “Your shoulders.”
She already dropped them.
The teacher doesn’t have to say, “Turn out.”
She heard it anyway.
Eventually, nobody has to say:
You’re not as good as her.
She can do that herself too.

What isn't she noticing while she's watching herself?


There is nothing wrong with seeing yourself from the outside.
Dancers need to.
The distinction is what happens next.
Am I looking to see what my body is doing—or am I looking to decide what my body says about me?
Psychologists use the term self-objectification to describe experiencing the body principally as something to be observed and evaluated for its appearance rather than its effectiveness (Ainley & Tsakiris, 2013).
In one study, women who scored higher in self-objectification were also less accurate at detecting their own heartbeats (Ainley & Tsakiris, 2013).
Dance teachers see the limits of attention constantly.
Stop the class to work on one dancer’s hip and suddenly that hip stays beautifully level.
Turn the music on.
Now there is choreography.
Timing.
Spacing.
Arms.
The dancer beside her.
And there goes the hip.
She didn’t forget.
Her attention went somewhere else.
Research with beginning ballet and modern dancers offers an interesting parallel. In mirrored classes, dancers spent more time discussing specific body parts with objectifying language; dancers training without mirrors spent more time describing kinesthetic sensations. The same study found that body satisfaction decreased over time among students in the mirrored classes (Radell et al., 2020).
So maybe the question isn’t whether dancers should look in the mirror.
Maybe it is:
What isn’t she noticing while she’s watching herself?
The music?
Her breath?
The tension across her chest?
The dancer beside her?
Or the thought that appeared so quickly she barely noticed having it:
Everyone else is better than me.

Keep the Correction Where it Belongs 

A foot is sickled.
That is something we can work with.
A standing heel dropped.
We can work with that too.
Timing was late.
Fix it.
But listen to what happens when a dancer says:
“I’m terrible.”
We have left the turn entirely.
The correction was about something she did.
The conclusion is about something she is.
And our instinct is often to correct that conclusion too.
“I’m terrible.”
“No, you’re not. You’re a beautiful dancer.”
Maybe she needs to hear that.
But notice what we’ve done.
She gave herself a negative evaluation.
We gave her a positive one.
What if, sometimes, she needs something different from another evaluation?
Bring her back.
“What happened?”
I fell out of my turn.
“What happened in the turn?”
I dropped my standing heel.
There.
Now we have something to teach.
A dropped heel is trainable. “I’m terrible” isn’t.
This doesn’t require a dance teacher to become a therapist.
It requires precision.
Keep the correction attached to the thing being corrected.
The foot needs correcting.
The timing needs correcting.
The spacing needs correcting.
The child does not.
And when the thought is bigger—
I’m not good enough.
—we don’t have to convince her it never appeared. She can learn to recognize it.
I just had the thought that I’m not good enough.
The thought is still there.
But now there is the thought—
and there is the dancer who noticed it.

What Does the Mirror Actually Know?

Dance teachers spend years teaching dancers to make incredibly precise distinctions.
Turned in or turned out.
On balance or off.
Early or late.
Perhaps there is one more distinction worth teaching:
What happened to me is not the same question as what am I?
A mirror can tell a dancer something about her line.
A teacher can tell her something about her technique.
A cast list can tell her whether she got the role.
A score can tell her how a particular performance was evaluated.
Her tight chest can tell her something is happening.
The thought I’m not good enough can tell her what she is thinking.
All useful information.
But none can experience being her.
Eventually, every dancer has to leave the mirror anyway.
The lights come up.
She walks onto the stage.
The visual reference she may have spent thousands of hours consulting is gone.
And sometimes something beautiful happens there.
The correction disappears.
The mirror disappears.
The thought How am I doing? disappears.
Sometimes even the thought I am dancing disappears.
The music is still there.
The body is still moving.
Space, light, sound, breath.
And somehow there is simply being.
We call it flow.
Maybe what is interesting about flow isn’t only what appears.
It’s what disappears.
The measuring does.
And the dancer does not disappear with it.
There she is.
So, when a dancer says:
My body is disgusting.
I’m terrible.
I’m not good enough.
Maybe our job isn’t only to give her a kinder answer.
Maybe we can teach her to become as precise about her inner experience as she has learned to be about her technique.
What happened?
What did you notice?
What thought appeared?
And what are you making that mean about you?
Because a correction can tell her something about what she did.
A reflection can tell her something about what she sees.
A thought can tell her something about what she is thinking.
None of them can tell her what she is.
The mirror was never the problem.
The problem is asking a reflection to tell you something it cannot know. 

References

Ainley, V., & Tsakiris, M. (2013). Body conscious? Interoceptive awareness, measured by heartbeat perception, is negatively correlated with self-objectification. PLOS ONE, 8(2), e55568.https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0055568

Pfeifer, J. H., Masten, C. L., Borofsky, L. A., Dapretto, M., Fuligni, A. J., & Lieberman, M. D. (2009). Neural correlates of direct and reflected self-appraisals in adolescents and adults: When social perspective-taking informs self-perception. Child Development, 80(4), 1016–1038.https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8624.2009.01314.x

Radell, S. A., Mandradjieff, M. P., Adame, D. D., & Cole, S. P. (2020). Impact of mirrors on body image of beginning modern and ballet students. Journal of Dance Medicine & Science, 24(3), 126–134.https://doi.org/10.12678/1089-313X.24.3.126

Nicole Langi

Nicole Langi believes that the most important relationship a child will ever have is the one they build with themselves. As the creator of Dance Embodiment and The Storyteller’s Method, she uses movement and story to help children notice what is happening within them—without judging it, fixing it, or becoming defined by it.

For more than twenty years, Nicole has worked as a professional dancer and educator, including teaching on the faculty of the Texas Ballet Theater School and performing with organizations such as the Utah Opera. Along the way, she noticed how quickly children learn to perform, please, and “keep up”—often long before they learn how to understand themselves.

Through her books, stories, and audio experiences, Nicole introduces children to the filters through which they experience life: sensations, thoughts, emotions, and beliefs. Her work gives children and the adults who love them a simple language for noticing what is happening inside.

Because a child can have a thought without being the thought. They can feel an emotion without becoming the emotion. And they can experience a difficult moment without allowing that moment to become the story of who they are.

Nicole’s work helps the next generation build a strong internal foundation—one rooted in curiosity rather than judgment—and stay connected to who they are before the world tells them who to be.

Nicole lives in Texas with her family.

Explore her books, audio experiences, and resources at danceembodiment.com