Everything we’ve discussed so far puts you in a great position to perform your best in the show ring. Self-assuredness, confidence and fearlessness all reduce performance anxiety and free you to focus on your riding. Boldness and assertiveness, on the other hand, help you become more decisive in the show ring.

Furthermore, conquering self-defeating mindsets keeps negative thoughts and emotions from getting you off your game. And productive training helps you develop the riding skills you need to succeed in competition. But you still have to go out there and get the job done. And that mostly comes down to superior mental performance.

You don’t have to run fast to be a good rider. You don’t have to bench-press four hundred pounds or possess extraordinary hand-eye coordination. Physical talent is your horse’s domain. What you need, instead, is the ability to superimpose your mind on your horse’s body and control his every move. And this is no small feat, especially because you have to connect to his body through his mind, which has all kinds of things going on in it, too.

Succeeding at this takes an ability to sense what’s going on in your horse’s mind and body, make decisions instantly based on your reads, and quickly and accurately communicate instructions to your horse through your aids. You also need to be able to recognize and head off problems in the making and adapt how and when you apply your aids moment-to-moment in response to how your horse is responding. All of these things demand a high level of mental performance.

First, they require efficient mental processing, which means you need to eliminate all of the unproductive thinking, intrusive emotions and other distractions that bog down your mind when you’re afflicted with self-doubt, fears or self-defeating mindsets. And second, they require different kinds of mental skills you can only learn through dedicated practice and show-ring experience.

We’ve already talked about the former. Now let’s spend a minute or two talking about the additional mental-performance skills you have to learn to put your riding skills to good use in the show ring. We organize them into five categories:

• Preparation
• Focus
• Show-ring personality
• Show-ring technique
• Composure

Prepare Yourself for Peak Performance

Improving your performance in the show ring begins with better preparation for a class. Fortunately, the principles we introduced at the end of the previous page for practice preparation apply as well at a show, with a few additional wrinkles.

In truth, the simple act of establishing a preparation routine that gets you centered before a class can, in itself, make you feel better prepared and ready to perform your best. You can build your routine on the following elements:

• Set a challenging, but reasonable goal
• Confirm your overall readiness
• Connect to your horse
• Get physically, mentally and emotionally prepared

First, it helps to come to the show ring with a specific goal in mind rather than with no real idea of what you’re trying to accomplish. Having a clear goal gives you a greater sense of purpose, direction and control over events than you can possibly have if you merely try to win a ribbon in some aimless way. Moreover, it gives you something more concrete to refocus on if you start getting distracted by unwanted thoughts and emotions.

For example, you may focus on performing a certain skill better, dealing with some aspect of your horse’s behavior better, or doing a better job of maintaining your composure. Or, if you’re more advanced, your goal may be to clear your mind of all these things and just let your ride come to you.

The second element of being prepared is to confirm that you’re ready to perform well. One way to do this is to mentally run through what you need to do in the ring, or visualize a successful performance. Either technique builds confidence and reveals any challenges or issues you haven’t anticipated. And you can do the same things for your warm-up, so that you’re prepared to get everything you need from it.

It may also help to think back to your practice sessions and how well you’ve prepared for the show generally. Or, if you’re concerned about one particular aspect of your performance, it may help to remind yourself of a time or two you’ve performed that skill particularly well in the past and what made things go so well.

Your third job is to connect with your horse and get a good sense of exactly where he is in terms of his state of mind, physical condition and behavior (e.g. a bad habit). If he’s good to go, that’s great. But if not, you need to figure out how you’re going to deal with any unexpected challenges before you enter the show ring. Then you need to do what you can to adjust your approach to produce your best possible performance under the circumstances.

Finally, get physically, emotionally and mentally prepared. Make sure your body is warmed up, supple, and relaxed, and that you’re riding with good rhythm. Clear your mind of distracting emotions. Do what you need to do to calm your mind, get focused, tune in to reading your horse and otherwise get to where you can respond quickly and accurately to your reads.

Become a More Focused, Aware Rider

We describe competitive riding as much more of a “read-and-react” sport than other sports. What makes it that way is the fact you have a horse as a performance partner.

In fact, your greatest challenge in the show ring is to read what’s going on in your horse’s mind and body with every stride, so that you can stay a step ahead of him and keep his performance at the highest possible level. That’s why you need to develop not just your riding skills (how to get a horse to perform), but also your performance-management skills, which we’re focusing on in this section and the next two.

Performance management depends, first and foremost, on your ability to focus your attention on what’s most important to achieve the best performance at any given moment. Everything depends on that, because there’s not much you can do about something you don’t even know exists.

For a beginning rider, this mostly just means being as aware as possible of what you’re doing in the ring and how your horse is performing overall. As you acquire more advanced riding skills, though, your focus needs to shift.

As an intermediate rider, you pay more attention to reading what’s going on in your horse’s mind and reacting in time to head off unwanted responses in the making. Your goal is to sense what your horse is going to do next and take corrective action before things get out of hand.

Then, as you move up to advanced levels of competitive riding, all that becomes second nature and you instead focus on helping your horse perform better athletically. If you adhere to the training scale or some equivalent, you now have to learn how to remain especially aware of such things as rhythm, suppleness, contact, impulsion, straightness and collection.

As you advance from level to level, you also need to develop greater and greater awareness of your horse’s readiness to act on your cues. That’s what gives you the ability to improve your touch and timing as you ask your horse to give you his best.

Develop a High-Performance Show-Ring Personality

That addresses the “read” part of the equation. But the “react” part, how you respond to that information and act on it, is equally important. That’s because what you communicate to your horse, and how you communicate it, largely determines how well he performs. We look at this aspect of riding at two levels, one defined by a rider’s overall show-ring personality and one defined by her show-ring technique.

What we mean by the former is that every rider has personality traits that take center stage in the competitive arena. Taken together, these traits give a rider a signature show-ring personality.

We’ve already talked about a rider’s training personality and how it affects how she works in the practice arena. This is much the same thing, except that, in the heat of competition, different personality traits either become more important factors or tend to assert themselves more. For example, when you’re in the show ring, where you fall between these opposing pairs of personality traits could affect your performance quite a bit:

• Charismatic or conservative
• Daring or cautious
• Self-trusting or insecure
• Mentally tough or fragile
• Self-forgiving or perfectionist
• Decisive or indecisive

Let’s look at one of these traits, decisiveness, to give you a better idea of how important it is to manage these kinds of traits and, in the process, develop a higher-performance show-ring personality.

First, it’s really important to be decisive in the show ring. In fact, it’s usually better to be imperfect than indecisive. That’s because talented, responsive horses tend to be sensitive to indecisiveness and can get unsettled and erratic if they feel their riders are uncertain about what to do next. That can create much bigger problems than small mistakes can, such as jump refusals. This is especially true if a horse is already on edge from being in an unfamiliar environment with a buzz of activity.

It’s also worth noting that one reason we see it as so important that you work on all the traits listed above is that show competition may well affect you in a similar way. Just the fact that the stakes are much higher, people are watching and your performance really matters can put you on edge and change the way you ride.

It can make you more insecure or excitable, which almost any horse will pick up on right away. It can make you more indecisive and impulsive than you are in the comfort of your home arena. In other words, performing in the show ring can bring out a “show-ring personality” that differs quite a bit from the one you live with day to day.

Implicit in this is the idea that, while your core personality traits are relatively resistant to change, they do express themselves differently as you move from situation to situation. And, just as a shy person can train himself to be more assertive, you can do something about how your core traits affect your thoughts, emotions and behaviors in the show ring. You can train yourself to respond to competitive challenges in better ways. That is, you can sculpt a “show-ring personality” that helps you perform better in competition.

Bring Your “A-Game” to the Show Ring

You’ve probably spent countless hours refining your riding skills. And in the course of your instruction, your instructor has probably passed along a variety of techniques that help you make those riding skills work better for you.

But what sometimes get overlooked are the special techniques that can help you bring all you’ve accomplished in the practice arena to the show ring. And the reason for this is that you don’t get all that much time in the show ring and, when you do get it, it’s often too hectic for you or your instructor to stop and work on getting your performance back up to where it should be.

The reality is, we all tend to ride at least a little differently in the heat of competition than we do in the comfort of our home arenas. Of course, a lot of this has to do with all the other things we talk about, from inner strength right down to keeping your composure during competition. But instead of just attacking this problem from the standpoint of improving what you’re thinking and feeling, you can also attack it from the standpoint of limiting the degree to which being in the show ring actually changes the way you ride.

In other words, regardless of what you’re thinking and feeling, you can still keep your performance at a high level by limiting the effects of it all on your riding technique. For example, if the pressure of competition routinely makes you ride too fast, you can come up with some special techniques to keep your pace where it should be.

That’s why we plan to spend some time pulling together and presenting techniques that can help you keep your performance at a high level even when the pressure of competition threatens to get you off your “A-game”.

Maintain Your Composure During Competition

Finally, we come to composure, which is about being able to keep your emotions in check when you’re in the heat of competition. This can be a challenge for any rider, because we all have things that get under our skin or make us feel unsettled. Yet we all know how difficult it can be to perform well when emotions take command, disrupt our concentration and provoke us to act impulsively.

Naturally, if you’ve developed the kinds of inner strengths we’ve talked about and conquered self-defeating mindsets, you’ve already made great progress in getting control over the kinds of emotions that can disrupt your performance in the show ring. In particular, you’re far less likely to experience:

• Anxiety or fear
• Insecurity or self-doubt
• Self-consciousness or embarrassment
• Envy or resentment
• Guilt or shame

But that still leaves a lot of others, especially those that reflect how you respond to changing circumstances. These include:

• Excitement
• Dejection
• Frustration
• Anger
• Dislike

Any one of these can disrupt your performance in a big way if you let it. Getting overly excited can get in your way. So can getting dejected about a previous setback, frustrated with yourself or your horse, or angry with yourself, your horse or someone else.

There are all kinds of emotional responses that can work against you. So it’s really important to be able to maintain your composure in the face of difficulties and setbacks. And that’s without even acknowledging the impact your emotions can have on your horse. Horses are extraordinary in their ability to pick up on their riders’ emotions, and can very easily become unsettled and erratic if they sense their riders are distracted or unsure of themselves.

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