Mental Skills for Dancers

From performance anxiety to perfectionism, from goal setting to eating behaviours, in this course you will learn about 13 mental skills for dancers. Understanding your mental skills can help you become the dancer you’ve always dreamed of being.

“Brilliant CPD, helpful and relevant to all strands of working and learning in the dance world”

Mental skills sit at the heart of human psychology. That’s why, in this course, we begin with an introduction to four areas of human psychology.

Dance Psychology is the study of dance and dancers from a scientific, psychological, perspective. When we apply dance psychology to mental skills for dancers, its aim is to help people be the best dancers they can be.

Mental Skills for Dancers is written and presented by Dr Peter Lovatt. Peter has written two books on the psychology of dance and he taught several courses on Dance Psychology and Mental Skills to students and staff at the Royal Ballet School.

About Instructor

Dr Peter Lovatt

Peter is an award-winning university lecturer with over 25 years of teaching experience. He started out as a teaching assistant at Stirling University in 1993, where he ran seminars on Cognitive Psychology and had his first experience of marking coursework. This was followed by a Psychology Teaching Fellowship at Essex University where he taught Psychology undergraduates, as he completed his PhD. At the same time Peter was also involved with teaching at the Centre for Continuing Education, which provided a range of open access courses for people to complete in the evenings and at weekends. Peter got his first full-time lectureship in 1996 in the Department of Psychology at the University of Greenwich, where he taught Cognitive Psychology and Research Methods. In 1998 he moved to the University of Cambridge, where he taught on the MA in Applied Linguistics and supervised PhD students in the Research Centre for English and Applied Linguistics (Faculty of English). From 2001-2003 Peter was a visiting Lecturer at Birkbeck College, University of London, where he taught the Psychology of Language to undergraduates, and from 2001 to 2004 he held the full-time post of Senior Lecturer in Psychology at Kingston University. In 2004 Peter moved to the University of Hertfordshire to take up the post of Reader in Psychology where, in 2008, he set up the Dance Psychology Lab and established a course in the Psychology of Performing Arts, which included lectures on Dance Psychology. In 2009 Peter’s teaching was Highly Commended in the Vice Chancellor’s Awards. From 2008 to 2019, Peter taught the Psychology of Performing Arts and Dance Psychology at every level of undergraduate and postgraduate teaching (from first year undergraduates to PhD candidates) in the Department of Psychology at the University of Hertfordshire. In 2017 Peter started to teach Dance Psychology at the Royal Ballet School in London. Peter and Lindsey Lovatt co-founded Movement in Practice, and the Movement in Practice Academy, in 2020.

6 Courses

About Instructor

Dr Peter Lovatt

Course Includes