Dance Instructor Blueprint Download

INSERT YOUR INTRODUCTION

Grease the chute...

Try to get in touch with the most important reasons why the reader would really want to overcome the problem (or achieve the goal). 

What would they have or feel after reading this? How would their average dance, or their status, be affected? 

The more pain (or desire) they feel, the more likely they will actually read the entire article. Empathize with them and make them the focus of your article. More Help Here.

DESCRIBE SOLUTION BRIEFLY

You want to explicitly state that the article will solve this problem for them (or at least help with it) instead of assuming they will understand that. This could be as simple as saying "We are going to solve this with a method I call INSERT NAME". 

• This could include a quick overview of all the steps in this section UNLESS the steps are all obvious and the real value of your article is the advice you give within the steps. 
  • If the steps are all obvious to the reader and you point them out at the start of your article, you risk them thinking "Really, that is it?" and losing them before they get to the really valuable information.
• This could include a bulleted list of the most inspiring things they will learn in the article (which doesn't need to correlate with the steps). 
• This could simply be done by using the Table of Contents element below.

Filling out this blueprint will help set you apart from the average dance instructor for several reasons.

Let’s go over them one by one.

When it comes to improving your dancing skills, we won’t focus on normal dance techniques. A specific posture, styling, footwork, move, etc...these are all valuable things to learn and at the same time, they can be learned in many dance classes.

Plus, the precise way you are asked to do these things will often change depending on your teacher. Ideally, this would change depending on the person you are dancing with, not the person who taught you...and that is what we focus on when improving your dancing (see example below). 

Instead of teaching a specific fundamental, we focus on helping you understand the “fundamentals of the fundamentals”…

...or what we call “Universal Fundamentals”.

Good dancers strive to master the fundamentals. Great dancers that stand out amongst the crowd, strive to master the fundamentals of the fundamentals (aka: the Universal Fundamentals).

Your teacher might have taught you a specific way to connect and stated that this connection was a fundamental of the dance. However, you might find other dancers that connect differently and it can feel awkward, less fun, &/or less precise to dance with someone that connects differently than you do.

In this example, the “Universal Fundamental of Connection” wouldn't be a specific way of connecting, but rather it would be to learn how to match up with the connection style of your partner. That way, you can change your way of connecting to suit any partner, no matter what the situation, and always make the dance feel more connected, fun, precise, and of course...less awkward. 

(And yes, this applies to both follows AND leads!)

This is an example of what we call a Universal Fundamental (or a fundamental of a fundamental) and what we believe makes a great dancer stand out amongst the crowd of good dancers. This is the type of information we focus on sharing with you to improve your dancing.

If you want your students to constantly improve, love your classes, and keep coming back for more, we believe there are two key ingredients to make this happen.

1. Improve your students

2. Inspire your students

If you improve your students, but you don't inspire them, dancing will probably never be something they fall in love with and they will likely end up losing interest at some point (or continue but only take the occasional lesson and never really be passionate about improving).

If you inspire your students but you don't consistently and clearly improve their dancing, you may keep them around in the short term, but eventually, they will notice they aren't progressing much and will likely start looking for instruction elsewhere.

Improving OR inspiring your students probably isn't enough to keep them in the long run. It's the combination of both that turns them into raving fans and keeps them coming back for years to come (and spreading the word to all their friends).

So, if these two ingredients are so important....

...then we want to improve and inspire you to include multiple proven methods to improve AND inspire your students in every lesson you teach.

Now, if you are like the majority of teachers we have surveyed, you might be thinking "Hmmm, I don't even know what you are talking about." 

That is perfectly normal. 

But it's time for that to change!

We don't want to help you be a "normal" teacher. We want to help you excel and become a kick-ass successful dance instructor with loads of raving fans that love your lessons and constantly come back for more.

If you want to become in-demand and sought-after (locally or internationally), it often requires more than being a good dance instructor. 

It's about strategies, processes, consistency and percentages.

Think about it.

Which would you be more likely to purchase? Something that has a 10% chance of doing what it says it will, a 50% chance, or a 99.99% chance?

Most people would want the 99.99% option. The higher the percentage, the more in-demand and sought-after that option becomes.

So how can you apply this to everything in your dance instruction.

How can you consistently increase the:

This is why you want to create processes and constantly improve them so they better serve your customers.

From creating a syllabus, to teaching lessons, to deciding what to offer and when to offer it, having a process for everything you do allows you to know exactly what you are doing. That way, if you change something,measure your success, which allows you to figure out what works best and then do that instead of just randomly guessing at what will work best and never having confidence in what you are doing. 

Again, we will dive into the details (and give you some proven systems) below but the main thing to realize is that systems & processes will allow you to improve your services (for you and your customers) and make life feel a whole lot easier as well!

Now that you know the what and the why...in this section, we want to teach you how to become a kick-ass successful dance instructor.

We believe there are 3 fundamentals of a kick-ass successful dance instructor.

Our goal with this section is to improve your dancing and help you stand out as one of the great dancers amongst the crowd.

We want you to be the one everyone wants to dance with, the one who everyone talks about, the one who constantly has a waiting list of people dying to dance with you.

To do this, we will start by giving you one of our most powerful methods to drastically improve your dancing, then we will show you some of our favorite examples to implement this method to improve your musicality and your connection.

But first, a warning...

We believe the fastest and most effective way to improve your dancing is to improve your Universal Fundamentals (aka: the fundamentals of the fundamentals).

After all, if improving your fundamentals can drastically improve your dancing, doesn't it make sense that improving the fundamentals of the fundamentals would be even more valuable?

But how do you know if something is a Universal Fundamental?

It is actually quite simple to define.

A Universal Fundamental is a concept, method, or technique that improves your dancing with everyone, all the time, no matter how they dance (no exceptions).

While it is easy to define, it isn't always easy to discover a Universal Fundamental. We will give you some guidance to discover your own Universal Fundamentals below but first, here is how Andrew first discovered the Universal Fundamental of Counterbalance.

To discover more Universal Fundamentals, it could be as simple as looking at the fundamentals you've been taught and re-assessing them to see how they can work with everyone, all the time, no matter how they dance.

However, I know that isn't always easy to do.

So we have developed 3 main guidelines that can help you turn any fundamental into a Universal Fundamental and we've written another article that goes into detail on these guidelines and includes video examples.

If you want help discovering more Universal Fundamentals, check out our article on how to turn any fundamental into your own universal fundamental. Note: We discuss "techniques" instead of "fundamentals" in this article but the process is exactly the same.

A Universal Method of Improving Your Musicality is a method that will improve your musicality in every song.

There are soooo many ways to improve your musicality!

We have 39 (and counting) different methods to improve your musicality and split them up into 5 categories: 

1. overall feel/energy
2. phrasing and structural changes
3. choreography
4. rhythm
5. and miscellaneous 

Each category has at least 6 methods to break down and improve your musicality within that category.

There is so much exciting stuff to learn, we can't even fit it all in one screenshot! Here is an image of just the first category:

​While there are 39+ ways to improve your musicality, one of our absolute favorites is what we call "reactive musicality"...

...and when done really well, we call it "Instant Musicality".

To best explain reactive musicality (aka: Instant Musicality), it helps to compare it to "predictive musicality".

Predictive musicality is where you predict that something will happen in the music and you plan a movement to fit what you predict is going to happen. Predictive musicality is planned before the musical moment.

Reactive musicality is when something happens in the music and then you do something in your dancing to match what happened (technically, after it happened). Reactive musicality happens after the musical moment.

If you react fast enough, you can make it appear like you knew what was about to happen, even if you don't know the song, and even if it is a new style of music that uses a framework that you aren't familiar with (try dancing to a didgeridoo, free jazz, avant-garde jazz, or any of these bizarre instruments).

Reacting at speeds where it appears you knew what was about to happen (even when you didn't) is what we call "Instant Musicality".

How To Improve Your "Instant Musicality"

The key to improving your reactive or Instant Musicality skills is giving yourself situations where you can't predict what is going to happen (or at least it is very hard to predict).

Here are 6 Extreme Practice Drills to improve your reactive dancing:

1. Have someone randomly change the volume of a song while you dance to it and match the volume changes in your dancing (just as in the first 8 steps of the teaching tip in the yellow section directly above). This is great because you have no idea when the volume changes will happen.
2. Have someone randomly pause and unpause a song while you dance to it. Your goal is to pause and unpause your movement to match the random pauses in the song.
3. Mystery Medley v1: Have someone choose a bunch of songs that they think you will never have heard before and play the first 10 - 30 seconds of each song back to back while you dance to them. Bonus points if the songs are in genres that you aren't as familiar with. Note: The longer you let the song play before switching songs, the easier it becomes to predict instead of react to the song.
4. Mystery Medley v2: Have someone choose a bunch of songs that you have heard before (but they don't tell you which songs) and play the first 5 - 20 seconds of each song back to back while you dance to them. The main reactive practice point for this is catching the song changes. Note: This can make for a fun performance. Here are a few example performances from Andrew.
5. When you are watching the news, try matching the rhythms of the words being said with your movement.
6. When you are out on the town, match the random sounds you hear (a clock striking twelve, a car driving by, someone laughing, etc).

If you want more drills to improve your Instant Musicality, or a how to guide for creating your own Mystery Medleys in iTunes, or a script that automatically creates random Mystery Medleys (on a PC), join our Dance Ninjas Dancer Training and you'll get all that and a whole lot more.

Which method below do you think would create a kick-ass dancer faster?

1. Taking dance classes whenever you are inspired to do so.
2. Assessing your skills and lack of skills and creating a strategy for knowing what you need to learn next. Then taking a class that is designed to improve that specific skill.

It is probably obvious that #2 is much more likely to improve you faster, right?

But most dancers slow their progress by taking lots of random classes and piecemealing it all together. Whereas, if you take the time to create a strategy, your improvement will likely skyrocket and feel like you are improving light years faster than normal. 

That is why we recommend you create your own "Kick-Ass Dancer Strategy". This will help you understand your skills and lack of skills so you can then search out classes to improve the specific skills that will propel you forward the fastest.

SHOW THEM HOW TO CREATE THIS STRATEGY

Our goal with this section is to improve your teaching and help you turn your students into raving fans that keep coming back to your lessons for many years to come (even when it is raining outside and they just had a long day at work).

We want you to be the one everyone wants to learn from, the one everyone raves about, the one who constantly has sold out classes and is getting hired to teach all over their scene, state, country, or even all over the world.

To do this, we will start by.

​

To improve your teaching skills, you want to constantly be learning more:
Methods to improve your students
Methods to inspire your students (which will ensure they LOVE your classes)
If you want to have kick-ass students that are passionate about becoming better dancers, BOTH improving and inspiring your students is key.

If you improve your students, but you don't inspire them, dancing will probably never be something they fall in love with and they will likely end up losing interest at some point (or continue but never really be passionate about improving). 

If you inspire your students but you don't consistently (and ideally drastically) improve their dancing, you may keep them around in the short term, but eventually, they will notice they aren't progressing much and will likely start looking for instruction elsewhere.

Whereas...
Implementing these two things will keep your students coming back to your classes year after year!
Plus, organizers who might hire you to teach at big workshops are much more likely to hire you if they are impressed by how awesome your students are AND your students RAVE about your classes.

Plus, it is fun to get to dance with awesome students and it feels great when they LOVE your classes!

Therefore...
It's extremely valuable to have multiple methods to improve and inspire your students!
That way, you can pick and choose the best methods for each class situation, offering them variety in their learning experience so they stay interested, and covering the same topics in different ways that work for different people.

And again, it all starts by learning one method...and you can get away with teaching quite a few classes with just a few methods.

To learn two methods to improve your students and two methods to inspire your students...

...watch the video below or read the slides and transcript here.

Start by answering these two questions:

1. How many specific methods do you have to improve your students?

0? 1? 5? 25? 50?

2. How many specific methods do you have to inspire your students? 

0? 1? 5? 25? 50?

When we ask this question in surveys, often teachers don't know what we are talking about, and out of those that do, even those teachers often only have a few methods for each. We believe this could be dramatically slowing the growth rate of your students and we want to help you change this.

Enter your summary text here...

1. Make sure to reiterate the "why" from #1 above so you re-inspire them to take action
2. Give them a summary - include the "what" of each step to make it easy for them to implement (assuming you used a content pattern which has steps).
3. Tell them what to do next - This may or may not be your CTA depending on the article. 

Remember to add a CTA:

• Sign up to get an ebook, webinar, lead magnet, or free trial/course that fits with this blog topic
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