Are you feeling stuck with the progress of your riding? Maybe you are feeling unmotivated or frustrated with your riding and unsure of how to move it forward. Maybe you’d like to take it up a level, to set some big goals and accomplish big things.
The following five skills may surprise you, because they aren’t technical. They don’t have anything to do with how you sit, how you use your aids or even how talented your horse is. These skills are all within you. And when combined and mastered, will allow you to improve your riding and take it to the next level. And they can be learned and applied to all areas of your life.
Awareness
The first skill is Awareness. And without awareness, the other four skills won’t matter, because being aware of where you are, what you want, what you are thinking and what you are feeling is the foundation of everything.
What it means is that you are paying attention to what is TRUE about your riding. You are taking responsibility for what you’ve learned and what you need to work on. You’re paying attention to the results you are getting whether it’s in your practicing, your lessons or in your competitions.
You’re aware of the circumstances that surround your life and affect your riding. You understand what you can control and what is out of your control. You’re aware of your thoughts. You’re aware of when you are staying in the present and the task at hand. And you’re aware of your thoughts when they drift to the past or begin to worry about the future.
You are also aware of what a FACT is and what is a thought about it.
Thought Choice
The second skill is Thought Choice. This is a skill of being able to consciously choose the thought.
We have about 60,000 thoughts per day and most of them are not deliberate choices. Most of them run on a sort of automatic script in the background of our lives. We spend very little time choosing our thoughts, choosing what we want to believe, choosing what we want to think and choosing what makes sense to us.
It’s very important that we develop this skill of choosing our thoughts. And we learn this by practicing. Thought choice is about choosing a thought that you believe that’s better than the thoughts you’re currently thinking so that they have an effect on how you feel and what you end up doing.
Take for example this thought. “I am stupid.” vs “I did a stupid thing”. Thinking “I did a stupid thing” allows you to take responsibility for correcting the action next time rather than by labeling yourself as incapable of making the correction.
Thought choice is not the same thing as repeating an affirmation over and over again and not actually feeling it. Being able to choose and think thoughts on purpose becomes a powerful skill to move you forward.
Processing Emotions
The third skill is the ability to Process Emotions. Processing feelings or emotions is the ability to be aware of the emotion, then to allow you to feel it and to not give into the urge to avoid it and pretend that it isn’t there. It’s the ability to acknowledge it, allow yourself to be uncomfortable with it and then to create a plan to overcome it.
Fear is an example of this. Perhaps you have a fear of jumping your horse. Once you become aware of the fear, you can create a plan to get more comfortable with it. In this example you may begin by trotting over ground poles, and then by trotting cross-rails. You may move to cantering ground poles, cantering cross-rails and then move to trotting small vertical and finally cantering small verticals.
Taking Action
The example above moves us into the fourth skill which is Taking Action. The first three skills are emotional skills. These are foundational skills that you must have, but in order to get the results that you want, you have to be willing to take action.
You have to be willing to risk failure, to never quit and to keep moving forward no matter the set back. It’s the ability to pick ourselves up when we get bucked off, to look at what happened with compassion and curiosity and to allow ourselves to grow and keep going forward until we get the results that we want.
We have to be willing to do the hard things, or there’s nothing that will keep us growing. We can’t get stronger by focusing on easy things. It means that we have to allow ourselves to go through the pain of failure in order to find out how to get the results we want.
We set big goals for ourselves, often not knowing how to get there. Learning how to fail is not something we are taught. In fact, it’s something we are taught to avoid, so we don’t even try, because if we try, we will risk failing. So it makes sense that we work on things that we know we will succeed at, things that are easy.
But if we take action on the things that will challenge us and cause us to grow, we will grow in our riding and in our lives and accomplish those big dreams.
Creating the Result
The fifth skill is the ability to Create the Result. It’s the ability to pull it all together. And to use all the previous skills and produce the result that you want. It’s the ability to be aware of what you want, to choose your thoughts, process your emotions and to devise a plan to achieve it. It’s the ability to have the tenacity to never give up until you get the results you want. To identify where your physical skills may be lacking, what you need to learn and where you need help.
Conclusion
So, how aware are you? How good are you at choosing thoughts that you want to believe in and that serve you? How good are you at processing your feelings and emotions? Are you able process emotion and not give into urges to do things that don’t benefit you? How good are you at taking action? Do you have the skill of producing results?
At this writing, we are embarking on a new year and a new decade. I hope these ideas will serve you well in your riding and in your life in general. These skills are transferable in all things whatever your goals and challenges. I’d love to hear you’re your thoughts on what you’d like to accomplish in the next year and how you’d apply these skills.
If purchasing a horse is in your future, you will want to get the Dream Horse Buyer’s Guide! Its full of amazing information that will help you literally find the horse of your dreams!
Enjoy the Ride!