Speaking about your Practice

The aim of this guidebook is to equip you with tools so you can communicate what soft skills you use and how you develop them with participants, collaborators, employers and organisations in the dance sector and beyond. This chapter will prompt you to articulate your soft skills. It will encourage you to see how you may communicate your skills in a variety of ways, to different people. 

The tasks below are to help you articulate your soft skills within the dance field, as well as for potential collaborations and employment in other sectors. The tasks will support you in demonstrating the transferability of those skills and help identify soft skills as important parts of your overall skill set when talking to organisations, collaborators and when promoting yourself.

• Go back to the top two or three skills you identified as possessing in the section Where are You (Now). Can you write or talk through a short description of how these soft skills show up in you, which will make people curious to know more about you? Think of this like a hook to pull people in to your approach and how you apply your dance practice.
• Pitching to a prospective employer/contractor: employers/contractors will often look for your soft skills before deciding (or not) to hire you. Your soft skills will be looked at as part of what you would bring to the role. Here are some examples of where soft skills might be applicable within dance and non-dance settings:
  
  
  • Example (a): A dance organisation is looking to contract a dance artist with the quality of openness for a two year project working with a range of community groups. In terms of soft skills, you could point to your flexibility and adaptability, your ability to deal with uncertainty and complexity, that you are capable of dealing with the unknown and that you have the attitude of curiosity.
    
    Task: Write down at least three examples from your own dance practice containing the soft skills needed for such a project.
    
    
  • Example (b): An non-governmental organisation (NGO) is looking for a community organiser. They are looking for someone with good management skills. In terms of soft skills, you could point to your ability to manage information (including how you make choices, listen, organise information and resources), how you deal with uncertainty and complexity, that you can orient your goals, among others.
    
    Task: Write down at least three examples from your own dance practice containing the soft skills needed for such a job.
    
    
  • Example (c): An events management organisation is looking for someone to be part of a team leading creative workshops within an annual series of events for climate change activists. They are looking for someone with good teamwork skills who can come up with creative ideas for workshops and who can lead these workshops well for non-dancers.
    
    Task: Write down at least three examples from your own dance practice containing the soft skills needed for such an enterprise.
    
    
  • Example (d): You want to retrain as a human rights lawyer. The law school is looking for students who have critical thinking and problem solving skills, who have excellent negotiation and conflict resolution skills and are also good at relating with people.
    
    Task: Write down at least three examples from your own dance practice containing the soft skills needed to convince the law school panel.
    
    
• Go back to the Reflective Task - What do you notice? Using your responses to those questions, write a short paragraph describing your own personal way to activate soft skills in others through your dance practice. This can be a new layer to add when promoting your work and skills to future employers.
  
  
• Now that you have identified specific examples in your work where soft skills were used, re-write your curriculum vitae highlighting soft skills in relation to activities and projects you have done.

The development of soft skills is an ongoing process. This guidebook is here for you to return to as often as you like. As you gain experiences and continue to redefine in what areas you want to apply your skills, you can activate the reflective tools in this guidebook to enrich and clarify how your practice has grown and in what way you would like to further develop.