Surviving the Wait Before Results

You've danced.

The one thing you actually had control over all day is now completely and permanently behind you.

Now you have to sit in a hall and WAIT.

Sometimes for an hour. Sometimes for six. Sometimes you finish dancing in the morning and don't find out anything until the evening, by which point you've eaten a meal deal you don't remember, walked the same corridor forty times, and replayed your third step so many times it doesn't even look like dancing in your head any more.

Ask most dancers what the hardest part of a feis is and a huge number of them won't say the stage. They'll say this bit.

So let's talk about how to actually survive it.

Why The Wait Is So Much Harder Than The Dancing

It helps to know why this is genuinely difficult, rather than assuming you're just bad at coping.

When you're dancing, you have a job. Your body knows what to do. All that adrenaline and nervous energy has somewhere to GO.

The second you walk off, that job disappears. But the adrenaline doesn't. You're left with a body that's still revved up for something and absolutely nothing to point it at.

Then there's the control thing. Everything before the stage is something you can influence. Your training. Your warm up. Your preparation. Your effort in the moment.

The wait is the one part of the day where nothing you do changes anything at all…and human brains HATE that. So they do what they always do when they're powerless and under-occupied.

They start looking for problems.

What Your Brain Does In The Gap (And Why You Shouldn't Trust It)

Here's what's happening in your head during the wait, and every dancer reading this will recognise at least three of these.

The replay…you go over your set on a loop, and each time round the mistake gets a bit bigger and everything you did well gets a bit quieter, until your entire memory of the performance is one wobble.

The face reading…you start scanning your parents, your teacher, the other dancers, trying to read something into an expression that probably means nothing more than "I need a coffee."

The maths…you start ranking yourself against everyone in your age group based on absolutely no information. You'll do it about dancers you didn't even watch.

The doom certainty. That flat, heavy feeling of KNOWING it went badly, which arrives with total confidence and precisely zero evidence.

Here's the thing you need to know about all of it…

You are the worst possible judge of your own performance from inside it. Always. Dancers regularly walk off convinced they've blown it and recall. Dancers walk off delighted and don't. What it FELT like and what it looked like are two different things, and you only have access to one of them.

So when your brain hands you a verdict during the wait, you're allowed to say: you don't actually know that yet.

Because you don't.

Get Your Body Out Of It First

You cannot think your way calm while your body is still in fight or flight. So deal with the body first, and the head will follow.

Get out of the hall. Even for ten minutes. The atmosphere in a competition venue is a pressure cooker of nerves that aren't even yours. Go outside. Get actual daylight and actual air.

Change something physical. Shoes off. Trainers on. Hoodie on. Little acts of coming out of competition mode tell your body the performance part is over.

Eat something. Properly, not just a handful of whatever's in the bag. Nerves plus no food is a straight route to feeling awful and then blaming the feeling on your dancing.

Move, gently. A walk round the car park does more than an hour of sitting still and stewing. Adrenaline is designed to be used up.

Drink water. Boring. Works.

Who To Be Around (And Who To Avoid For A Bit)

This one matters more than people think.

The wait is when the "how did you get on?" conversations start, and some of those are lovely and some of them will absolutely finish you off.

You're allowed to be selective. Sit with the people who make you feel normal, not the ones who want a full breakdown of everyone's chances. Some dancers need company. Some need twenty minutes on their own with headphones in. Neither of those is the wrong answer, and you're allowed to know which one you are.

Two things worth avoiding entirely until results are out:

The group post-mortem. Standing in a circle dissecting who did what and who's likely to place is a brilliant way to spend three hours feeling worse.

Your phone, if it isn't helping. Watching other people's clips, refreshing social media, reading comments. If it winds you up, put it away. It genuinely will not change the result.

Give The Wait A Job

The most useful trick we know is this: decide BEFORE you dance what you're doing afterwards.

Not vaguely. Actually plan it.

Food, then a walk outside, then a specific film or playlist or podcast on your headphones with the person you find easiest to be around. Something that occupies your hands and your attention.

The reason this works is that you're making the decision while you're calm and rational, so your anxious self doesn't have to organise anything. It just has to follow the plan.

An unplanned wait fills itself with worry. Every single time, so fill it with something else first.

Decide In Advance How You'll Handle Both

Here's the harder one, and the one that actually shrinks the fear.

A lot of the dread in the wait isn't really about not knowing. It's about not knowing whether you'll cope with the version of the news you don't want.

So sort that out in advance.

If it goes the way you hoped: you'll enjoy it fully, without immediately jumping to the next thing.

If it doesn't: you'll be gutted, because you care, and that's allowed. You'll give it its moment. You'll get your comments, and you will find, as you always do, that Tuesday's class comes round and you're still a dancer and you still love it.

You've survived every disappointing result you've ever had. Your track record on this is one hundred percent. The wait is just your brain forgetting that.

The Result Is Already Decided

Here's what I'd love you to take away.

The moment you walked off that stage, the result was already what it was going to be. Everything you do in the hours afterwards changes precisely nothing about it.

But it changes an enormous amount about YOU. How you feel walking into the next one. Whether feis day is something you can enjoy or something you just endure. Whether the sport keeps costing you more than it gives you.

You cannot control the result. You can absolutely control the wait.

Getting good at the wait is one of the quiet, unglamorous skills that keeps dancers in this sport long enough to get where they want to go 💚

Eat something. Get outside. Put your phone down.

You've done your bit.

Feis day is so much easier when you're not doing it alone. Inside the Gold Club, dancers share the nerves, the waits and the results with people who genuinely understand all of it, alongside the mindset work that makes competition day feel survivable in the first place.

Join us here - www.movewithmeg.co.uk/mwmgoldclub