I’ve been an aerial silks instructor and studio owner for 9ish years now and I have only just started thinking about this passion as an entity of its own for the last year or so. Ideas like, who is my ideal student, what are the qualities (other than general awesomeness) that keep bringing students back, and how can I promote the kind of culture that I want to be a part of?.
I went around and asked some of my most favorite families what they like most about coming to Cloud Nine Aerial Arts and one of the most common answers was “my kid has become so much more confident!”
What an amazing by-product of aerial arts that I had totally forgotten about while I was lost in the sauce, trying to find time to post photos to social media and choreograph a thousand aerial competition routines. So I sat down to reflect on the idea of confidence and how aerial can produce confident kids and confident adults.
What the heck even is confidence anyway? I feel like we talk about it all the time without really thinking about what it is to feel or be confident. I asked Courtney, a student of mine and one of my favorite people, what confidence means to her and she said, “confidence is a willingness to be wrong and know that’s ok.”
like… whoa.
Being a confident aerialist or just a confident person is definitely a goal, but for most humans, it doesn’t feel like a constant state of being. Confidence as an individual characteristic is certainly different than experiencing it for certain tasks. I am confident that I can cleanly put on a footlock, or invert, or execute a bazillion aerial skills but I am not very confident that I could knit myself a sweater that resembled a sweater, not today, anyway. So does that mean that I am a confident person?
I think my favorite description of confidence is that feeling of readiness for certain experiences - even those that are brand new to us. That unshakable, “I got this,” when walking into something new or even a bit scary is an amazing feeling and one that I hope everyone experiences from time to time.
As a coach, (and parent, and human) I want my students to feel confident across every situation. I want them to feel like they can achieve anything whether it’s in the air or on the ground. I want them to experience challenges as building blocks on their way to success and mastery. I want them to know that today’s struggles will be their warm ups six months from now. I want them to look forward to challenging themselves because they know that’s how they will get better. Like Courtney said, I want them to know that doing something “wrong,” isn’t the end. If there’s nothing to work for, what’s the point?
When I am teaching new aerial students I often start with two goals for them; get their booty over their head and do ONE climb. I like those goals because for most students they are at least a little bit challenging, and I am confident that I can get them there in their first class. I’ve trained hundreds of students and I have taught those skills thousands of times. I have evidence that I can do it. As students start accumulating wins, they start to have evidence that they can do hard things. Their confidence grows and their challenges can become more intense- and they learn to look forward to challenges because they reinforce their belief that they can overcome obstacles.
Anyone who has been training with me for a while knows that I rarely teach the easy version of a skill first. The easy version is the dessert, but the challenge is what nourishes. Over time, students learn that no challenge is too great, given enough time and effort, we can all do amazing things. We might need tons of time and effort, or we might need to adjust our goals and make accommodations for special needs but we know that we can. Sometimes we choose not to, but that is a choice, not a limitation. When what we thought was impossible becomes possible (or even easy) we can translate that experience to the rest of our lives. We can look toward any situation and know that even if we’ve never been there before, we’ve been challenged before. We have evidence!
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