Now let’s turn our attention to mental-performance skills and how they can help you accelerate your development as a rider.

Hardly anybody talks about this, but we all could make better use of our limited training time and achieve our goals faster. We all hit plateaus. We all get frustrated with our lack of progress at times. We all know we could improve the way we work with our horses and instructors. But what separates riders who make consistent progress from those who get stuck in ruts time and again is that they’re more aware of what’s going on and what to do to break through to the next level.

To help you get back on track quickly when your progress stagnates, we’ve looked at seven different aspects of training and how to improve them. They are:

• Training management
• Training style
• Training personality
• Training techniques
• Partnership with instructors
• Partnership with horses
• Preparation

Take Charge of Your Riding

The first thing you need to do to keep your riding program moving forward is to manage it proactively. Basically, this comes down to four things:

• Vision and awareness
• Planning and goal-setting
• Getting yourself into the right situations
• Making things happen

Having a strategic vision is mostly a matter of figuring out what you want to achieve in the end and how best to achieve it. It helps a great deal if you can find a good mentor to help you with this, expose yourself to as much of the world of riding as you can, and break through the tunnel vision that comes from associating with only a small number of equestrians, especially if they’re not especially ambitious or visionary themselves.

Awareness, on the other hand, is more about developing a better understanding of what’s affecting your performance and development. Self-awareness is especially important. But it’s also important to improve your situational awareness, which simply means becoming more aware of all the things going on around you that affect your performance.

Planning and goal setting are things most everyone knows they should do, but few do well. It’s worth it to work on your planning and goal-setting skills, because they’re what will give you a better sense of direction and keep you on the fast track to success.

Getting yourself into the best possible situations for achieving your goals is also essential. Your primary goals will likely focus on your riding, but secondary goals such as making sure you’re in a barn that’s exciting and fun shouldn’t be discounted either.

Finally, you need to make things happen. There’s a lot more to this than we can discuss here, but understand that there are lots of ways to develop the kinds of inner strengths, attitudes and personal skills needed to accelerate your progress.

The bottom line is that it’s really easy to get stuck in a rut and make little progress. But you can take charge and do something about it.

Develop a Flexible Training Style

Most riders aren’t even aware they have natural learning and self-management styles that shape their approaches to training. But we all do. And these styles, if managed correctly, can help you develop faster as a rider.

We can’t really get into learning styles here, such as whether you learn better in a group setting or on your own, with highly structured instruction or with more latitude to discover things for yourself, or in a do-first or think-things-out-first mode. But we can tell you how we look at self-management style. In essence, we see it the same way as we do an instructor’s coaching style, because self-management is essentially self-coaching and the same principles apply for your “inner coach”.

We define four distinct styles that result from different combinations of inner-coach aggressiveness and empathy.

• A relatively passive, non-empathetic inner coach biases you to train and follow directions by the book. As a result, you neither push yourself particularly hard nor adjust your routine to accommodate your mental or physical state (or your horse’s).
• In contrast, a relatively passive, but more empathetic inner coach biases you to take your mental and physical state (and your horse’s) into account as you train and adjust your goals and techniques accordingly.
• On the other hand, an aggressive, non-empathetic inner coach is a demanding taskmaster that biases you to drive yourself and your horse hard, without regard to mental state, physical discomfort or circumstances. This reflects a bottom-line, “just do it” mentality.
• And finally, an aggressive, but empathetic inner coach biases you to push yourself hard and perform especially well, while accounting for and working with what you and your horse are dealing with internally.

One of these four styles will come most naturally to you. However, if you want to accelerate your progress, you need to become more adept at using all four styles and selecting the one that works best for the situation at hand. That’s because each of these styles has its merits and can work best in a given set of circumstances.

Our main point is, you’ll serve yourself well if you develop a flexible self-management style that gives you the greatest range of options for maintaining momentum as your challenges, mental state and circumstances change. The same goes for your learning styles.

Develop a More Flexible Training Personality

Your personality plays a big role in shaping your overall approach to competitive riding. And it‘s reflected in your natural training style as well as in your inner strength and susceptibility to self-defeating mindsets.

But there’s a lot more to it than that, because when your various personality traits collide with the training demands competitive riding places on you, a unique training personality tends to emerge. And how you manage that collision can shape how it evolves.

In truth, all your personality traits probably affect your approach to riding in one way or another. But some certainly have more of an impact than others in a training setting. For example, where you fall along the line that connects each of these opposing pairs of traits can affect your working relationship with your instructor, your horse’s mental state as you ride or, especially, your ability to train effectively:

• Open or self-protective
• Adaptable or inflexible
• Calm or excitable
• Determined or weak-willed
• Intuitive or logical

You probably can pick one word or the other in each line that more accurately describes you (someone else might have a different take on it). And it’s likely you already have some idea of how that trait affects your ability to train effectively. But it’s only through really coming to understand these things and how they affect your training in some depth that you can learn to regulate yourself in a way that accelerates your development.

We’ll make two further points.

First, as good as it may seem, no trait is good when taken to an extreme. If you think about it, you can take any of the words in the list above that you think represents a positive, empowering trait and imagine a situation in which taking it too far would cause you problems.

And second, you need to remain flexible in how you respond to different situations. You can be patient to a fault. There are times to be determined and times to let something go. And so on down the list.

Improve Your Training Techniques

Most riders have good success learning new riding skills over time. But few really learn how to use more advanced training techniques to master skills even faster, and that’s a missed opportunity. Perhaps the best way to give you a sense of the kinds of training techniques we focus on is to give you a few examples, organized by learning stage.

The first stage of learning is comprehension, or developing an accurate understanding of what a skill entails. Most instructors are good at describing skills. The problem is, 70% of people learn better and faster by seeing something demonstrated than they do by hearing it described. So you’ll make faster progress if you can also master techniques such as:

• Expert modeling: improve your ability to watch an expert demonstrating a skill and see deeper into what she’s doing so well and what the end result should look like
• Non-expert modeling: improve your ability to watch someone else at your level trying to learn the skill and see more accurately what’s helping her learn and what’s getting in the way

Then you move on to the second stage of learning, skill acquisition. Here are a couple of things you can do to speed this process up:

• Chunking: learn how to break down more complex skills into parts you can master individually before re-assembling them into a complete skill later (this can greatly accelerate learning)
• Isolation: similarly, find ways to isolate what you need to work on from everything else associated with a skill and concentrate on it for a while
• Mental rehearsal: improve your ability to mentally practice and memorize skills between practice sessions
• Self-directed practice: improve your ability to practice and learn skills on your own (once you reach a certain point) so that you don’t remain overly reliant on your instructor’s support

The third stage of learning is skill automation, which means learning a skill so well you no longer even have to think about what you’re doing to execute it. And the fourth and final stage is skill application, which means learning how to execute a skill reliably under varying, unpredictable conditions instead of just in a familiar, controlled practice setting.

You can speed up both of these stages, too, by learning how to set up and use:

• Concurrent tasking: force yourself to perform various concurrent tasks (like simple math problems) while practicing a skill to both automate the skill deeper and improve your ability to deal with more important aspects of competition while executing it
• Practice variation: vary practice conditions, have your instructor spring surprises on you and simulate competitive conditions while you practice skills to improve both their automation and application

These, among many others, are the kinds of training techniques that can produce faster, better results.

Build a More Effective Partnership with Your Instructor

If you’re like most riders, your instructor is your primary, if not only, connection to the world of riding. So the more you can swing her relationship with you from instructor to mentor, the more you’ll learn about riding and the faster you’ll develop.

But even if you can’t establish a true mentor/protégé relationship, you and your instructor still need to develop a truly collaborative relationship for you to make good progress. You have to be on the same page, have the same goals in mind and understand each other really well. To achieve this kind of collaboration, you have to hold up your end of the bargain, too, which means you should:

• Find an engaging, altruistic instructor who connects with you as an individual, has a talent for teaching and always seems to be opening your eyes to new things
• Learn as much as you can about her teaching philosophy, methods and styles, and what you can do to make them work even more effectively for you
• Adapt as best you can to her teaching methods and develop the kinds of training skills you need to make them more effective
• Work at improving communication and collaboration lesson-to-lesson, which also require commitment and flexibility on both your parts
• Learn to maintain your composure and keep your working relationship operating smoothly when you’re having difficulty

There’s quite a bit more to it than that, because true training collaboration is an organic process. But even thinking about these kinds of things and seeing your relationship with your instructor in this kind of light will get you off to a good start.

Build a More Effective Partnership with Your Horse

The same goes for your relationship with your horse. After all, you are performance partners in the show ring. So you need to improve your understanding of how you can make this partnership work better.

More than anything, you need to improve your horsemanship. So:

• Learn as much as you can about horses and horse training for your discipline because, after all, you’re training your horse every minute you ride him
• Learn how to work better with your horse in particular, given his unique combination of conformation, talents, temperament, training and personality
• Improve your ability to sense what’s going on in his mind and how best to deal with it
• Constantly adapt your riding style and techniques to your horse’s current training, physical condition and mental state to get the best possible performance
• Learn to maintain your composure and work effectively with your horse when you’re having difficulty
• Work with as many horses as you can to broaden your skills and your ability to deal with new and different challenges

Again, the most important thing here is to be open-minded and flexible when you’re working with your horse. Both are necessary for you to read your horse accurately and tailor your riding to your reads. Far too many riders blind themselves to valuable reads by developing some form of tunnel vision, or by mischaracterizing what they’re sensing. Or they let their emotions cloud how they interpret what’s going on.

One common mistake is to attribute human attitudes, motives and intentions to your horse. They don’t have them, and are just reacting instinctively to whatever they’re sensing. That’s why it makes no sense to get angry at a horse for what he’s doing, or to take it personally.

The other thing to keep in mind is that your horse will tend to react strongly to what you’re communicating through your emotions. Get anxious or frustrated, and he’ll get anxious. Get excited, and he’ll get excited. Get angry, and he’ll either fight or try to get away from you. And so on. So it’s important to be aware of that, and control what you’re communicating unintentionally.

Improve Your Preparation for Practice

Finally, we’ll deal with preparation for practice very briefly. But don’t underestimate its importance. Coming to every practice session well prepared can improve your results significantly, especially if it gets you off to a fast start and, effectively, adds more working time to your lesson.

Besides, you should be following almost the same pre-performance routine when you prepare to enter a class at a horse show. So it makes sense to practice it every chance you get to make it as familiar and effective as possible.

• Come to practice with a specific goal in mind, preferably one you set up with your instructor after your last practice and have thought about since
• Mentally review or rehearse what you’re going to work on or what you worked on last so you can hit the ground running
• Make sure you’re physically, mentally and emotionally prepared to ride (leave the cares of your day behind)
• Get a good sense of what state your horse is in during warm-up and be prepared to adjust for it once practice begins

Next…

Click the link below to learn more about training strategies, techniques and mental-performance skills that can help you take your riding skills to a whole new level.

Peak Performance