Photo: David Kelly
Nicole Stewart is a Performance Coach based near Melbourne, Victoria as well as being an eventing rider. You can follow her eventing career through her blogs here on AEL but in this article Nicole puts her Performance Coach hat on to explain why riders need to get control of their ‘stories’
As the performance coach of Australian Paralympic gold medalist, Joann Formosa, I have come to know that the most valuable asset a rider has is between their ears and in their chest; their mind and heart. My passion is working with riders to help them to believe this for themselves and to give them the tools they need to make use of these assets in a way that they may never have before.
It is commonly accepted that success is 80% attitude and only 20% skill. That is, our success is more dependent on how we perceive and describe our circumstances than on how physically able or skilled we are to deal with them. As riders, we can be extremely skill focused. We are constantly searching for a better lower leg, eye for a distance, softer hand etc etc ... but when was the last time you thought to yourself “Today, I’m going to train my mind!”?
I’d like to share with you one of the main hurdles that I help riders, both elite and amateur, to face during the journey to change their thinking. Human beings have a set of stories we tell ourselves about who we are and why our life is the way it is. We look for evidence to reinforce those stories to ourselves, to prove them. So, regardless of whether or not our story is helping us move forwards or in fact holding us back, it doesn’t matter, we’ll look for evidence to prove it either way.
Equestrian athletes are just the same except that we get to tell stories about ourselves and our horses! We have a story about why our dressage test didn’t go quite to plan, a story about why the owner of that horse is being so difficult and a story about why we always pull rails on that right canter lead. Now, at the time they are told, these stories may appear to be utterly true yet this is beside the point, they are still just that; a story about how we see our present circumstance.
To move forwards and get different results by changing your thinking and the perception of your situation you essentially need to learn to tell yourself a different, more empowering story. This may seem simple to start with however, when you go ahead and do this, it can often be fraught with challenges; this is because your perception is firmly dictated by layers of your experiences, beliefs, fears and guilts.
Taking into account the 80/20 rule that I mentioned above, I am excited that more equestrian athletes are starting to work on enhancing their mental fitness as a small improvement in this area can, without a doubt, yield a greater overall improvement, particularly when an athlete is already quite skilled.
Your stories are there for a reason - they are your subconscious mind’s way of ‘keeping you safe’. However, when we want to grow as people or athletes, it is essential that we get past ourselves and outside of our comfort zones. We begin to do this by learning to see and perceive our environment in a different way; as an opportunity to grow instead of a drawback, as a learning experience instead of a failure, as a temporary challenge rather than a permanent incompetence.
Improving your results with your mindset is an essential growth step for every rider, whether you are elite or amateur. It goes way beyond ‘positive thinking’ and requires an individual to really challenge the beliefs that are the foundation of not only our behaviour towards ourselves and other people, but our horses as well.
You can also find Nicole through her facebook page at Sports Performance Coaching
