Are you a rider who is struggling with nerves around riding? Maybe you experience anxiety or you have that endless reel of what ifs going around your head? What if it goes wrong? What if my horse spooks? What if I fall off? 

I know how that feels. I’ve been there and I’ve got three key questions that are gonna help you start to step out of that place of anxiety and worry and fear and help you to move forward towards a future and a way of riding and a way of experiencing riding your horse.

So let’s dive in. When we struggle with nerves and anxiety, it can seem like the confident version of ourselves is a long way off in the distance. It might be that you’ve been confident in the past, and you’ve had a break from riding or you’ve had a bad experience, and now your confidence is at rock bottom, or it may be that you’ve never managed to experience being a, a confident rider. Either way, it doesn’t matter. 

You can go from where you are right now to becoming a more confident and calm and positive rider. And I know that’s possible cause I’ve done it, even when that confidence feels a long way off and almost out of reach.

I want you to think about these three different questions that you can ask yourself and reflect on to help you get your mind to work with you, to work for you and to help you get to where you want to be (rather than serving you up all these negative thoughts and really often quite uncomfortable emotions).

Question One

So the first question I want you to ask yourself is what do you want to be able to do? What is your best case outcome? If you could, in a moment of nerves and anxiety around riding, if you could click your fingers and magic up the best possible scenario, what would the best possible outcome for you and your horse be?

What would that look like? What would that sound like? What would it feel like? Spend a little bit of time just exploring; you could close your eyes and imagine it. You might get a note pad and jot down your best possible scenario. It’s important to really dial into the details, to figure out what your best dream ride or outcome would be, because when you start to explore the best case outcome, you start to feed your mind a completely different story. 

Question Two

The second question is  how do you want to feel? What are the emotions that come up for me? What thoughts will be going through your head? What beliefs will you have? What are those things that I believe to be 100000000% true about yourself and your horse, what will those beliefs be in the future? How will they be different to the old version of you?

Question Three

The third question is how do you want to experience riding? If you could wave a magic wand, how would you want each and every ride to be? Whether that’s riding at home, riding in an arena could be hacking out, could be having a lesson, jumping at a competition, riding a dressage test or going on an endurance ride. What do you want that experience to be like for you? 

Further, what do you want that experience to be like for your horse? When we can begin to let go of the old stories and the old thoughts and beliefs that have been holding us back, we can begin to direct our mind to what we actually do want to happen (because we can spend an awful lot of time thinking about what we don’t want to happen… that bit is easy!).

You’ll find that when you start to think in this way, then that becomes our new reality by creating new habits of thinking and creating new neural pathways in our brain. By focusing on what we want to happen rather than what we don’t want to happen, you start to open up the possibilities and look for those opportunities that are gonna help you get towards that goal of that amazing ride, that incredible experience, the fun, the joy and the wave of brilliant emotions that you get when you’ve done something which you didn’t really think that you could. And that’s amazing isn’t it? 

So remember you don’t need to be any more confident than you need to be. You get to decide how confident you want to be. You get to decide what experiences you want to have with your horse. So start focusing on that, start focusing on how confident you want to be the experiences that you’re going to have with your horse and how amazing that’s gonna feel when you get.

What happens next is totally up to you; the future is in your hands.