Everywhere you go these days everyone is talking about mindset. There is no hiding from it, whether inside or outside the equestrian coaching world. It may seem like it’s either hardcore blinkered positivity in the face of impending doom or a nebulous, wafty idea that is almost impossible to define. Yet, it is the centre-piece of many coaches’ practice, including mine.
Is it just for the elite and aspiring athletes or is it useful to the grassroots riders and happy hackers? Let’s pick the concept apart a bit and you can make you own decision. Your mindset is the result of a number of factors, most of which are outside of your conscious control. It is the sum total of your accumulated life experience, which your subconscious mind has distilled into an easy shorthand to help you navigate life and keep you alive. By this I mean that when your subconscious receives information, it compares it to what has happened before and produces a response, be that emotion or action. This can lead you down a difficult path, making short term, survival decisions or upwards, making long term, strategic decisions anticipating challenges in time to adjust your course.
An aspect of mindset is your beliefs. They are a generalised understanding of what you accept is true about the world and forms a lens through which you interpret the world. They may support and nurture you or they may restrict you. Most people accumulate a mixture of both. You may have noticed that you hold contradictory beliefs according to the context or that your behaviour is contextual, for example, when as an adult when you go home to your parents’ house and regress to being a petulant teenager around your siblings, despite internally asking “What on earth am I doing?”
You may have come across the term ‘limiting beliefs’. They show up as those split-second thoughts that go through your mind that can completely sabotage you. The “I’m not good enough”, “I’m scared”, “I’ll forget the course”, “I still need a caller”. This is your subconscious allowing thoughts to bubble up to your conscious mind that are meant to keep you safe and alive. They are really not helpful when you are about to go in the ring and you think everyone else is very confident and you are quaking in your highly polished boots. You can then end up with the horse feeling the tension you are holding in your body, he then adapts, helpfully, to the way you are moving, doesn’t do so well in the judge’s eye or misses a stride to accommodate you and the whole thing becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy.
There is a school of thought that when things go wrong, some people are pre-disposed to look externally for the answers or blame, while others look internally for the same. Blame is not a resourceful state, but searching for answers both externally and internally very useful. We can be drawn into looking in minute detail at the horse for improvement but taking the time to look internally can be much harder. Ultimately this is where we have most control over the gains to be made.
Your brain is amazing, every day the neural connections change and adapt to the way you think, your environment, experiences, even the way you eat: in fact every piece of information you perceive through sight, sound, touch, taste and smell. This is known as neuroplasticity. You are only consciously aware of a tiny proportion of it. The good news is you can begin to change those unhelpful thoughts into useful ones with mindset work, even if you’re at the stage where, despite being desperate to get back in the saddle, you find every excuse under the sun not to put your foot in that stirrup.
Well trained coaches will have a number of skills and techniques to help you uncover and change what holds you back. They help you to become aware of things you ‘just do’ your values, beliefs, attitudes, behaviours and thought patterns. Finding the right coach for you is essential, so if one isn’t the right fit for you, there will be another that is. Our backgrounds and underpinning experience will influence our practice. It is also entirely possible that you can outgrow one coach and need to move onto another.
My preference is to work holistically with my clients, encouraging a deep understanding of what is happening from a neuroscience perspective and using Neuro Linguistic Programming, Timeline and Quantum Transformation, and other techniques to help my clients make the changes.
The results of this work can be amazing, as I alluded to earlier. As you change the way you think, there is a ripple effect throughout your body. It will be apparent in the way people respond to you and for us, most importantly, the way your horse responds to you. People may find there are changes throughout their life. Sometimes change is not without its challenge but doing this work brings greater resilience to overcome this. Being able to acknowledge setbacks and the emotional response that goes with it, without being floored gets you back to your best so my quicker.
I have been privileged to work with the para athletes supported by the PEF and this has happened a number of times. They are back in the saddle, very much on their own terms and loving it!
A positive mindset does not mean you are oblivious to the reality of life. It does mean that you are able to access the emotional, psychological and physiological resources to be able to overcome life’s challenges as they arise.
Mindset is formed by your beliefs, attitude and the way you think. Together they shape how you perceive and respond to the world. It is demonstrated in your behaviour, decisions, how to perform and whether you see challenges as obstacles that stop you in your tracks or an opportunity. If you are a person that stops to admire the problem rather than searching for the solution, when you are ready, you can change your perspective.
Come and find me on Facebook or Instagram as Riding Beyond Limits Coaching and look out for my workshops and programmes.
