What Confident People Focus on Instead of Winning with Ballerina Isabella McGuire Mayes

Be honest: the high of a big win never lasts as long as you’d like. You nail the presentation, land the promotion, post something that takes off… and a week later, you’re already chasing the next one.

Ballerina Isabella McGuire Mayes has found a steadier kind of confidence. And she found it in ballet, where perfection is always the goal, and every class ends the same way: imperfect.

Isabella is a coach, a podcast host and the founder of ISABELLA, an online ballet platform for dancers of every age and level. After auditioning three times, she was accepted to Russia’s legendary Vaganova Academy at 15, the same school that produced Nureyev and Baryshnikov. She graduated top of her class and danced with two major Russian ballet companies before a string of serious injuries brought her home.

Teaching, however, is what brought her back to ballet. Today, through ISABELLA, her podcast “A Dancer’s Mindset,” and intensives that sell out in minutes, she’s working to change the culture of ballet itself.

In this conversation, Isabella shows me why ballet, an extreme example of perfectionism, might be the best place to learn where real confidence comes from. And her lessons reach far beyond the studio, into how we lead, coach, prioritize, and give feedback.

In this episode you’ll learn:

➡️ Why confidence from winning comes in peaks and valleys (+ where the steady kind comes from)

➡️ The 75/25 rule for process vs. performance

➡️ How to give honest feedback that people can actually hear

➡️ Why confidence has to come before feedback can land

➡️ Why great coaches show you how (+ why most leaders stop at what)

➡️ What a 12-year-old Instagram star taught Isabella about our obsession with winning