Change Your Thoughts, Change Your Riding: A Mindset Shift

by Alison | Apr 13, 2023 | Rider Confidence | 0 comments

04:23 Change your thoughts, change your riding

Understanding how we process sensory information can significantly influence how we experience nerves, anxiety, and fear when riding our horse. We use our ‘internal representational systems’, which refer to the primary ways we perceive and internalise our experiences through our senses, to make provide information about our experiences. Our mind filters and uses this information to make meaning of our subjective experience, as a point of reference for the future.

Our internal representational systems are visual (seeing), auditory (hearing), kinesthetic (feeling), gustatory (tasting), and olfactory (smelling). The processed information from each of these senses will impact how your unconscious mind processes your world and have an impact on how you feel about yourself, your horse and riding.

Visual (Seeing)

If you tend to think in pictures, you might visualise potential problems while riding, like imagining a fall or picturing the horse becoming spooked. These vivid mental images can make you feel more anxious. To manage this, you can refocus your mind on visualising exactly what you actually want to happen, in as much detail as you can. Your mind really doesn’t know the difference between what’s real and what’s imagined, and will respond to precisely what you tell it! So using this to your advantage and use your brilliant imagination to create a visualised scenario where things happen exactly as you want them to, and where you manage any surprises with ease and confidence.

Auditory (Hearing)

If you’re sensitive to sounds, the external noise of the horse’s hooves, your horse’s breathing, or sounds from the environment will all add to how you experience riding your horse. Internal sounds, such as your self-talk are also an important factor, since we often don’t realise quite how we speak to ourselves in our mind! Listening to calming music (where it’s safe to do so, obviously!), and positively managing your self-talk before and during your ride will help boost your confidence.

Kinaesthetic (Feeling)

If you are someone who is highly attuned to your feelings and emotions, you might be acutely aware of every physical sensation in your body and how it makes you feel. You might be aware of a knot in your stomach, tightness in your throat, or a very real feeling of having your legs turn to jelly! These type of physical sensations quickly transmit an alert to your mind, triggering nerves, anxiety and even fear. Practising deep breathing or other relaxation techniques can help you manage these physical sensations and reduce your anxiety.

Gustatory (Tasting)

As riders, the sense of taste is one we don’t often think about, and it’s closely tied to memory, where certain flavours can trigger emotional responses. I know of riders who chew minty gum before they ride (never chew gum while riding, as it is a choking hazard), and that minty sensation on their tongue can anchor feelings of readiness and confidence. Being mindful of what you eat or drink before riding and choosing flavours that you find comforting or refreshing can help trigger a shift in how you feel.

Olfactory (Smelling)

Certain smells can evoke powerful emotional responses. I don’t know about you, but I love the slightly warm, sweaty smell of horses who have just worked (that sounds weird, doesn’t it?!). As a child, I dreamed of the smell horses, of leather tack, and even now the first fly spray of the summer brings a reminiscence of happy hacking days. Find those smells which make you feel good and remind you of happy times, then make use of these whenever you can.

Recognising which of these sensory inputs resonates with you most will provide you with simple tools to improve your riding confidence. By consciously adjusting how you seek out and use these sensory inputs, you can help yourself feel more in control and less anxious while riding.

Preferences

While each of us might have a preference for one or more internal representational systems, such as visual, auditory, or kinesthetic, it’s important to note that we don’t exclusively use just one; our mind gathers and uses information from all of them. Think of it like having a favourite tool in a toolbox; even though you might prefer one tool, you still use the others when the situation requires it.

For instance, even if you primarily process your experience in a primarily visual way by imagining scenarios and pictures in your mind, your mind will still also pay attention to what you hear, the physical sensations you feel, the tastes and smells that surround you. Each sense provides a different piece of the puzzle, contributing to a fuller understanding and experience of your environment.

This means when you’re riding your horse and trying to manage anxiety, even though you might focus on using your preferred sensory channel, such as visualising calm and successful rides, you’ll also benefit from tuning into the sounds that calm you, the feel of the horse beneath you, and even calming scents or flavours. Using a combination of all your senses can help create a richer, more grounded experience that can be more effective in managing your nerves.

Simple Tips

Visual

Focus on shifting your mindset by vividly imagining positive outcomes. Instead of letting your mind linger on potential challenges, picture yourself riding smoothly, handling challenges with ease, and finishing your ride successfully. This practice of visualisation can help build your confidence and reassurance.

Auditory

Integrate calming sounds into your daily routine to help soothe your nerves. This could be as simple as listening to the radio while you tack up, or repeating positive affirmations to yourself such as “I am calm and in control” or “I trust my abilities and my horse.” These auditory cues can help create a mental environment of calmness and positivity.

Kinesthetic

Use physical relaxation techniques to reduce anxiety and physical tension. Before riding, try doing some gentle stretches, deep breathing exercises, or progressive muscle relaxation—where you tense and then relax different muscle groups. This not only relaxes your body but also prepares your mind for a more comfortable and focused ride.

Gustatory

Choose flavours that evoke a sense of calm and enjoyment for you. This might mean having a peppermint or a piece of dark chocolate before you ride or sipping herbal tea like chamomile which is known for its soothing properties. These tastes can trigger positive sensory memories and help calm your nerves.

Olfactory

Introduce a comforting and familiar scent into your riding environment. This could be applying a dab of lavender oil on your wrist or adding a few drops of tea tree oil to your riding gear. The smell of chamomile can also be soothing. These scents can significantly enhance your emotional state by triggering positive associations and reducing stress, creating a more relaxing atmosphere for both you and your horse.

By actively engaging these sensory strategies, you can better manage your emotions and enhance your overall riding experience. Each tip is designed to help you focus, relax, and enjoy your time with your horse, making your rides more pleasant and successful.

In conclusion, understanding how your internal representational systems influence your emotions can help you manage your nerves and anxieyt around riding. By recognising your preferred internal representational systems, you can use different strategies to feel calmer and more in control, so you can become a more confident rider.

Do you find yourself struggling with confidence and battling negative thoughts while riding your horse? If so, know that it’s not uncommon. However, the good news is that you can change your horse riding mindset and transform your experience in the saddle.

In this article, we’ll explore the critical role that mindset and thoughts play in horse riding. We’ll discuss how limiting beliefs can hold you back and provide strategies for challenging negative thoughts. We’ll also offer tips for improving your riding skills and building your confidence through a strong mental approach.

By understanding how your mind works and learning how to manage your thoughts effectively, you can overcome anxiety, regain lost confidence, and become a more skilled and confident rider. So, if you’re ready to transform your horse riding experience and take control of your mindset, read on to discover how you can change your approach to horse riding.

Thoughts

If we want to make changes to how we feel and think about riding our horses, then we need to think about our minds very differently from what we’ve been used to. It can be such a game changer when you figure out how your mind works, what it’s doing, and why it’s doing it so that you can start to make the changes you want. Remember that if we don’t know how something works or the process or how then we can’t change anything.

We have somewhere between 50,000 and 70,000 thoughts per day. That’s huge, isn’t it? It’s also a phenomenal number of thoughts to be having, and our minds are really clever and filter these thoughts really quickly and without us even realising it, our mind filters these thoughts so that only the ‘important ones’ actually get retained.

But how does our mind know which thoughts are ‘important’? The thoughts which make it through the filtering system are the ones that have a direct impact on our experience.

Think about this… The primary cause of unhappiness is never actually the situation itself, but our thoughts and interpretations about that specific situation. The situation itself is neither good, bad, or indifferent, rather it’s how we perceive that situation that drives our unhappiness and how we feel about it and our stress levels.

Search results

So I want you to think about your mind slightly differently. Your mind is much more like a combination of an internet browser, let’s say Google, and a computer hard drive, which just stores information. I want you to think about it like the Internet. Our mind can ‘cache’ information, which keeps information ‘fresh’ and ‘easy to access’ in the computer memory. It’s the most recent thoughts, beliefs and memories, which are most relevant to our present experience.

For example, if you’ve ever been on a computer or on your mobile to research something, and you start typing in a web address, then your phone or your computer will complete the rest of that web address for you because you’ve used it quite often and it pings up with the whole web address. That information is drawn from your computer’s cache. It’s the most recently accessed information, and our minds will also cache information for easy access. Just like Google or other search engines, we’re all able to search and find the information we need from our minds. What’s more important, however, is how we search for information in our mind, which really matters and makes a difference.

So rather than relying on only the most recently accessed information, which may or may not be what you’re actually looking for. If you haven’t found the information you need on the first one or two Google pages of your internet search, then your search isn’t right, you’ve not asked for the correct information. So what do you do? You change the search. You change the words that you type into the Google search bar.

Now think about how you manage your mind. Is it anything like that? Has it evolved? Probably not. What do we do when we search for what something means or what our previous experiences tell us? We go to the cache, we go to the most recently accessed information in our mind, and if that’s not always helpful. Perhaps the most recently available information in our mind is negative or it’s a bad experience, and the more we access our mind’s ‘cache’, we reinforce it, we assume that’s going to happen again, and our mind convinces us that’s the only option in how to feel about a particular situation.

For the most part, we assume that what’s readily available is all we’ve got to work. We search our experiences based on what we have always searched for and when the same wrong answers come up again and again, we either keep trying and get the same results or we dismiss them entirely. And in doing so, we keep ourselves stuck.

It’s not what we have in our heads, that’s the problem. It’s how we use it. And that all starts with our thought.

The problem is, of course, not that we have thoughts. We always have thoughts. The problem is that we believe them and we engage with them and we allow them to shape our lives.

We can’t solve our problems with the same thinking that we used when we created those problems, and the responsibility for that is on us. I can’t fix this for you… you can fix it for you!

Change your search results

So how do we change our search results? The first step is to identify the limiting beliefs. The mindset blocks or the unhelpful stories, which are having the biggest impact on how we feel about writing. In other words, what are the search terms that you are using to interpret your experience? How could you change your search terms or limiting beliefs to offer a different perspective on your experience?

Whilst these limiting beliefs can have a strong effect on thoughts and behaviours, they are often not an accurate reflection of what’s going on around us. Fortunately, limiting beliefs and attitudes are not permanent. We can choose to change the messages played out in our heads using tried and tested techniques for challenging and reframing.

And replacing them with more helpful and more empowering belief systems. And this leads to us feeling more motivated, more confident, more resilient, and better able to cope with whatever happens. And remember, when you first ask yourself these questions, you might come up against your old search results, and it’s important to recognize these unhelpful patterns that have been keeping you stuck.

It is important to do a reality check on your thought processes and beliefs by asking yourself some really important questions.

So let’s do that reality check, shall we?

Reality Check

First question, what is my evidence for and against my thinking? Take the time to think about your answer. When you get really good at this, you’ll be able to do this in the moment on your horse and you’ll be challenging your thinking while you are doing them, if you need to. What is the actual evidence?

Second question, are my thoughts factual or is this just my interpretation of this particular scenario?

Am I jumping to negative conclusions? Am I making assumptions? Am I making connections that aren’t really real, aren’t really true?

Third question, how can I find out if these thoughts that I’m having are actually true or not?

So these questions will help you find better, more helpful search results, which will help you change your perspective and to create more positive, realistic interpretations of your experience so you can make better decisions in the moment based on facts, based on logic, rather than being a victim to your emotions. Your emotions are suggestions that one of your needs is not being met.

You don’t have to believe everything your emotions give you, just as you don’t have to believe everything your mind gives you or your thoughts give you. You get to choose whether you act on those particular suggestions from your thoughts or your mind, or you choose not to based on logical, factual, rational evidence.

There’s so much more to this, we’re looking at the very tip of the iceberg in terms of working with belief systems and values.

I’d like you to create two new planned and useful beliefs or thoughts or phrases which will continue to build your riding confidence, and these are what are going to replace that limiting belief that’s been holding you back.

Transforming your horse riding mindset and building your confidence can have a significant impact on your riding experience, allowing you to enjoy your time in the saddle to the fullest. By challenging limiting beliefs, managing negative thoughts, and improving your skills, you can become a more confident and skilled rider.

If you’re looking for additional support and guidance on your journey to building riding confidence, consider joining my rider confidence membership program, Crack the Confidence Code. As a member, you’ll gain access to exclusive resources, expert guidance, and a supportive community of like-minded riders who are also on a mission to build their confidence and overcome their riding fears and anxieties.

Don’t let limiting beliefs and negative thoughts hold you back from achieving your riding goals. Join Crack the Confidence Code today and start your journey to becoming a more confident and skilled rider! Find out more HERE.

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