Our goal is to help you perform to the best of your ability in the show ring and become all you can be as a rider. That’s not easy, because a great many things affect your performance.

We’ve just emphasized how important it is to develop riding skills that reflect not just pure technique, but deeper knowledge and intuition as well. There’s just no substitute for that kind of capability.

However, other capabilities come into play as well, and one of the most important of these is inner strength, which you build on eight key pillars:

• Self-assuredness
• Confidence
• Fearlessness
• Assertiveness
• Boldness
• Resilience
• Drive
• Winning attitude

Let’s take a brief look at each of these strengths.

Self-Assuredness: The Central Pillar of Inner Strength

Self-assuredness is the perfect word to describe what we consider the central pillar of inner strength. Here’s how we define it:

Self-assuredness is an unshakable belief in your worth as a person, in your overall competence to succeed in life, and in the virtue of your goals and the way you go about achieving them

We look at it mostly in terms of how it helps you feel that, as long as you do your best and your intentions are good:

• You deserve the respect of others, regardless of your performance
• You have the capability to perform well now and also to grow to meet even greater challenges, even if you experience failures along the way
• Your pursuit of your goals is in no way inappropriate

In other words, you feel like a rock.

And even a lack of confidence in your ability to achieve an immediate goal or perform as well as you’d like in a certain situation doesn’t fuel self-doubt or performance anxiety.

You can still take your best shot and fail without feeling distress, even when performing in front of other people who have a vested interest in your performance.

This is what gives you the freedom to push yourself to the edge of your limits.

Confidence

Feeling self-assured provides a solid foundation for confidence, because it means you feel good about your ability to deal with things.

Yet, in our system, confidence is different from self-assuredness. It’s not so much about feeling secure, competent or worthy as it is about feeling you can accomplish your goals, either within a certain area of your life or in a given situation.

For example, competitive riding is one area in which you might feel especially confident. Work or school, creative pursuits and social life are other such areas. And even if you feel self-assured generally, you likely feel more confident about your ability to produce exemplary results in some of them than you do in others.

Then there’s situational confidence. Let’s say you do feel good about your riding overall. You still may feel more confident about dealing with one kind of situation than you do another. You may feel better about entering an equitation class than an over-fences class. Or better about riding one horse than another.

The point is, unlike self-assuredness, confidence reflects how you see your ability to perform to specific standards or achieve certain goals in given situations. It’s much more results-oriented, and changes as you move from one challenge to the next.

Here’s one more point, though.

You shouldn’t always be confident you’re going to achieve your goals. That would mean you’re not setting high enough goals to stretch your capabilities, but are instead staying completely within your comfort zone. And you can’t grow doing that.

To grow, you need to put yourself into situations in which the outcome isn’t all but certain, and that failure is a real possibility. And that’s why self-assuredness is so liberating.

Fearlessness

Self-assuredness also provides a strong foundation for fearlessness, because it alleviates most of the fears riders face as they enter the show ring, including:

• Fear of experiencing disappointment
• Fear of feeling bad about yourself
• Fear of experiencing embarrassment
• Fear of others seeing you as a failure
• Fear of rejection or loss of interest in you
• Fear of upsetting someone
• Fear of being in the spotlight
• Fear of creating greater expectations (fear of success)
• Fear of incurring retribution (fear of success)

If you can alleviate these kinds of fears, you’re going to be far less prone to performance anxiety and distracting thoughts. Your mental performance will improve as a result. So it’s worth your while to understand them better and work to reduce their grip on you.

Apart from fears associated with competing in the show ring, fear of injury also becomes a factor for some riders, especially for those who compete in higher-risk disciplines such as jumping and eventing.

Because they have a distinctly different character, we treat these fears separately, and focus on:

• A sense of vulnerability associated with speed, height or the sheer power of a horse
• Fear of suffering pain, discomfort or disability as a result of an injury
• Fear of an injury having a significant impact on your life, such as limiting your ability to function in your job, maintain an income, or meet your responsibilities to your family and friends
• Fear of an injury (or re-injury) interrupting or setting back your riding

With a little effort, you should be able to reduce the impact of almost any fear. But it takes more than just being self-assured. Each one of them has its own roots in your subconscious, and these need to be weeded out.

Assertiveness

Self-assuredness also helps you become more assertive with others and stand up for your rights. Still, it’s important to work on fears that make assertiveness more difficult, such as:

• Fear of conflict
• Fear of rejection
• Fear of being seen as aggressive
• Fear of revealing yourself as weak

We’ll be dealing with these anxieties as well, in part because assertiveness can play a significant role in competition as well as in your social dealings.

There are numerous instances where you need to project your will and stand up for your rights in the competitive arena, and even in your own barn.

Besides, developing a more assertive nature, and understanding the difference between assertiveness and aggressiveness, can carry over into your relationship with your horse and improve your performance significantly.

Boldness

Boldness, the predisposition to take on challenges aggressively and act decisively, builds on self-assuredness, confidence and fearlessness. But it takes more than that to act boldly.

The fact is, there are plenty of self-assured people who don’t act boldly or “go for it” when faced with a tough challenge. That’s because a number of other factors come into play, such as:

• Some people lack the motivation and drive to move forward aggressively
• Some just have a cautious demeanor
• Some have an aversion to change
• Some prefer the security and comfort of operating well within their capabilities and not pushing their limits
• Some lack the courage to face their fears
• And some are beset by self-defeating mindsets, such as pessimism, helplessness or perfectionism (a form of which is what we call the “never-ready syndrome”)

All these things undercut boldness. And yet, it’s a key strength for a competitive rider. So it’s important to work on anything that might inhibit you from:

• Taking on promising opportunities and tough challenges that can make or break your season, or career
• Acting decisively in those key moments when quick action can snatch victory from the jaws of defeat

What you’ll find, ultimately, is that acting boldly is, as much as anything, an ingrained habit or behavioral trait. As such, it needs to be developed and nurtured in its own right.

Resilience

The sixth pillar of inner strength in our system is resilience. Like boldness, resilience builds a great deal on self-assuredness, confidence and fearlessness, but entails much more. In particular, it’s highly vulnerable to self-defeating mindsets such as pessimism and helplessness.

Also, if practiced as a skill, resilience will, like boldness, become an ingrained habit over time. Then, when you’re faced with a daunting challenge, it will become almost second nature for you to:

• Remain motivated, and not succumb to apathy
• Maintain a positive, optimistic outlook
• See setbacks and failures as temporary
• See challenges as opportunities, not threats
• Keep negative thoughts from creating additional barriers
• See that success remains possible and within your reach
• Control distressing emotional reactions
• Keep working hard to improve your capabilities to move ahead
• Take control over what you can and develop adaptive strategies for moving forward

Drive

When you’re engaged in something as challenging as competitive riding, you need motivation and drive to overcome obstacles and achieve your goals.

Now, you may think there’s not much you can do to improve your drive. But that’s not the case.

While different riders certainly have different levels of innate drive, there are all kinds of things you can do to become more motivated. Most of them have something to do with one or more of the following contributors to drive.

• Ambition: develop a clearer, stronger vision of your greater potential, what you want to accomplish and what you want to become
• Self-esteem rewards: put yourself in a better position to experience the sense of competency and worth that comes from learning, growing as a person and becoming more of what you can be
• Self-expression/social identity rewards: get yourself into situations and environments that help you express your identity as a competitive rider and feel like you belong to something greater than yourself
• Fun: get yourself into environments that make it easy for you to experience excitement, fun, and love of riding and horses
• Vigor: do what you need to do to feel physically strong, healthy, energetic, fit and otherwise capable of taking on challenges and achieving great things in riding

As with all the other pillars of inner strength we’ve described above, putting some effort into developing greater motivation can pay enormous dividends. This is especially true in terms of the way it makes it so much easier to enjoy everything about competitive riding and persist in the face of difficulty.

Perhaps the most important thing you can do when it comes to keeping your motivation levels high is to get into a barn full of people who deal with all the things we’ve just listed in very positive ways. That’s because barns are contagious environments when it comes to motivation, and a very positive, engaging barn makes it so much easier to look forward to working at your riding and competing at shows.

Winning Attitude

Finally, a winning attitude can make all the difference in the world when it comes to becoming all you can be as a rider. We see the process of developing such an attitude largely as a matter of conquering self-defeating mindsets, such as:

• Pessimism – expecting negative results from future events, which causes you to abandon goals or exercise undue caution
• Helplessness – seeing yourself as unable to accomplish something or do anything about a situation, when you can
• Overgeneralization – jumping to the conclusion that a poor result reveals how things will always turn out
• Catastrophization – exaggerating the negative consequences of an event, even to the point of paralysis
• Obsession – being unable to get a disruptive train of thought out of your mind, which makes good performance difficult
• Perfectionism – being unable to tolerate imperfection, to the point it creates anxiety, cripples your performance, diminishes your productivity or makes you feel you’re not ready to take on a challenge
• Self-esteem oriented mindsets, such as self-blame, self-serving bias and success-based self-esteem

Our Conquer Your Self-Defeating Mindsets workbook goes into these self-defeating mindsets in much more detail.

Next…

Click the link below to learn more about the kinds of skills that can make your training sessions far more productive.

Training Productivity