If you are really serious about not only enjoying but thriving within the competition environment, you need to pay as much attention to your mental training as you do to your physical training. Often, when it comes to identifying what it is that is letting you down, or what it is you need to improve on, many people will pinpoint themselves as the weakest link in the equation.
The manifestations of this make themselves known in a variety of ways: it might be that you feel so overwhelmed with nerves that any hope of replicating the performances you are enjoying at home in training, go out the window in the competition environment; or perhaps you feel a level of tension that causes you to ride with stiffness and rigidity. Maybe your concern about what other people are thinking occupies your focus to the extent where you can think about little else. But regardless of the specifics, you have two options; you can either fortify your mindset and learn to manage yourself within pressurised environments with your horse, or you can continue to be at the mercy of them.
Let’s look at how you can take an active role in your competition outcomes and develop the kind of mental strength that will allow you to feel bullet proof in the ring.
- Your crystal ball
Many times in our riding life, we experience the same thing happening over and over again to the point where we start to recognise a pattern. You don’t have to be a seasoned competitor to begin to notice familiar threads or default modes of operating that either cause you to feel a certain way or contribute to you experiencing a certain result. Patterns or habits like this are jewels of information that allow you to predict the future in advance. They tell you that if ‘x’ happens, for better or for worse, ‘y’ will be your most likely response or reaction. As a consequence, reflecting on our patterns or habits allow us to not only recognise unhelpful behaviour but also the strategies that we are running in order to experience a certain result.
Grab a piece of paper and reflect back on your most recent competitive experiences. What is it that’s currently working for you? What is it that’s currently not working for you? How is it that you could interrupt this pattern or strategy in the future in order to experience a different result?
- Your competition mindset
Creating your competition mindset is not the result of just one thing; it’s a melting pot of different skills and processes that incrementally strengthen you along the way. Just like building your physical muscles, building your mental muscles takes practice; the more you do it, the stronger you get, both in and out of the saddle.
Your belief systems and consequently your attitude is the hinge point that will allow you to control your internal climate. It’s your attitude that determines your expectations of success, that empowers you to take the necessary actions and that allows you to focus on what needs to be done in any given moment.
Developing your competition mindset is about harnessing the ability to turns things around in your mind as it is about anything else. The hallmarks of pessimism and a negative attitude lie with taking results or experiences and giving them not only a sense of permanency, but also taking them personally; instead, we need to learn to recognise the temporary nature of every experience and result, and take active measures to turn them around. When we operate from this internal space, we can then see setbacks as temporary barriers that we are able to move through, and not as excuses that prevent us from achieving our true potential.
At the end of the day, a negative attitude will always hold you back. Negativity finds a way to feed on itself and introduce more negativity into your brain space. It will motivate your mind to tell you untruths about what you are capable of. It will feed your inner critic.
Positive energy is much better at creating positive momentum; it’s the natural, creative force that we all have at our disposal. Keeping your outlook positive, combined with affirmative action, is always going to ensure that you have the best chances of doing well.
Dedicate yourself to consistently embracing positive thought practices that get you in the zone for competition and you’ll be ahead of the game before you set foot in the ring.
- Know your goals
Essentially, when we enter the competition ring, we want to make sure on a mental level we are operating from an offensive mode and not a defensive mode. To be operating from an offensive position means first up that you are actioning a strategy that has already been pre-determined. You know what your processes are going to be when you enter the arena, and you also hold within you a confidence that you can deal with anything unexpected that might come your way.
When you ride from an offensive position, you are automatically focusing on what it is that you want as opposed to what it is that you are wanting to avoid. Not only does this point you in the right direction mentally but also physically; having a clear idea of what you are wanting to cultivate and create ensures that you are providing clear direction to yourself and your horse in pursuit of the ideal and allows you to make any necessary adjustments in support of that also.
- Know what you can control
So much of what we experience in riding generally, but especially in competitive environments, is outside of our control and influence. Consequently, a magic question for you to carry in your brain space at all times is this:
Is this something that I can control or influence?
If the answer is no, then don’t waste any more time or energy thinking about it. Not only will it not change a single thing about the situation, but it will prevent you from investing your energy in the things you can control and influence in the moment and rob you of the ability of enjoying the moment to the full extent possible.
What I often hear when I tell people that is “It’s not that easy”. That may be true, but it’s also not that easy to have your mind running away with you and dictating how you feel, respond and behave instead of the other way around.
You are in control of this ship, and you always have the choice about where you focus your attention so make sure you do your best to observe each experience and situation for what it is and cultivate the habit of directing your focus towards the most empowering context.
- Control your inner critic
It’s no great surprise that our self-talk feeds directly into our competitive performance outcomes, and is one of the strongest components that we have at our disposal when it comes to creating our emotional state at framework at any one time. It also directly impacts our level of self confidence in any given moment, and riders who are able to keep their minds focused on positive performance cues generally experience success as a result.
With riders that I work with, I get them to develop a performance statement or competition mantra that they can use as a piece of what I call “consciously designed self-talk”. The fewer decisions that you can give yourself on competition day the better, including how it is you should go about managing those internal conversations.
Predefining for yourself a statement or a mantra will allow you to better control the conversations that you have with yourself. When you notice that you self-talk has taken a turn for the worse, press the delete button in your mind and insert your mantra in there instead.
- Kick self-doubt to the curb
Self-doubt begins as a niggle, and the niggle starts with a change in focus. As the saying goes, where attention goes, energy flows. Whatever you focus on, you will find, even if it wasn’t there in the first place. If you begin to doubt yourself, you have consciously or unconsciously, begun to direct your focus to your less desired possibility. The voice in your head starts to ask you a series of disempowering questions and statements, combined with a series of images in your mind such as;
What am I doing here?
That jump looks huge! I’m really not sure I want to do this.
I’m not sure that I have what it takes, I’m really out of my league. What was I thinking?!
Is it getting cloudy over there? My horse hates the rain!
The brain is like a computer. The types of software you load and how you run your systems will essentially determine the answers it provides you with, and when you realise and truly take this on board, then you realise that like anything, the ability to be self-confident is really a skill. It’s a muscle, just like anything else. It’s a set of abilities combined with a set of beliefs, and it’s trained.
If you are wanting to knock self-doubt out of the ballpark, the training comes back to a repetition of the basics; control what you focus on, give your circumstances and situation an empowering meaning and take control of your emotional state and develop rituals to support it.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jane Pike is an equestrian mental skills coach at www.confidentrider.online. She specialises in giving riders the skills they need to ride with confidence and joy, and the mental fitness to be focused, on form and in the zone for competition.
