Helping horse riders over the hurdles in their minds
A confidence building strategy for riders young and old, junior to master.
Whether you are striving to improve your own riding or to support others, your child, your student rider or your riding class — understanding the role of performance coaching techniques, who they are for and how they can be applied is an asset.
Riders, like all athletes, arrive at barriers to their own progress. These are often a mixed tapestry of skill development need, confidence, fixed dysfunctional solutions and emotional sabotage (fear, panic, shame, failure). Performance coaching, in this context, is best understood as raising the awareness in the rider and responsibility to overcome these barriers for themselves, with a little structured help.
I’ve heard many times riders (and parents) talking about their fear of returning to hacking out, or fear of lifting the bar for their eager teenage daughter or anger at repeatedly failing to perform at events as well as at home, in the arena. The primary story being shared is one of failure and negative emotional consequence. A cycle that repeats itself and reinforces itself to form a barrier.
In these situations, the human brain and body call into action mechanisms that protect the rider. Our core drive is to protect ourselves and so negative experiences become something we avoid. We avoid thinking and tackling them except in the moments when the rider pushes themselves, often without being fully aware of all aspects of the challenge and a full commitment to work through them. This is human nature and is the crisis of confidence that is pretty much pandemic in society, so not a failure specific to the rider.
There are very few stories told in our society about how you break through your own emotional walls to success, performance and self-efficacy. Too often we are told to just push on through, face your fears, practice harder and to imagine success. It all sounds quite easy — but the advice rarely comes with a roadmap and so the experience of failure can escalate as your best efforts hit the same wall over and over. We’ve all seen riders experience this break in confidence and drift away from riding, as avoidance takes over, or label themselves as having achieved the peak of their ability.
You likely underestimate how able you are, certainly if you are stuck behind one of these barriers. Your capacity to break through and to grow is astonishing. I can say this without meeting you, as I’ve seen enough people smash down these walls that I am now without doubt.
GROW — Performance Coach Model
In coaching a rider beyond their current limit, one of the tools I can call on is a coaching model referred to as ‘GROW’. The model is really a proposed structure for exploring the mindset and route to growth, with a rider:
G is for Goal setting (short and long-term)
R is for Reality (the current situation)
O is for Options (new strategies, moving forwards)
W is for Will (commitment to do what?)
This is not an agenda for a conversation and should not be treated as such. The skill of coaching is not to offer up these four themes for solutions, but to raise the awareness of the rider to realise for themselves where the barriers exist (in their mind), how these compare to reality, what can be done/explored and how to commit to these. The process of how you coach arrival at these insights is the art of performance coaching, more than the content of what the responses are.
All too often the support of a rider is content focused. Coaches, parents, trainers… they repeat the details to the rider:
“Push through it, you’ll be fine”
“Look how well you did, see how talented you are”
“Your horse will look after you, trust her”
“You used to jump higher than this, you will be fine”
“Everyone believes in you”
and more….
The brain just isn’t designed to hear facts and release us from cycles of doubt. In fact, the opposite effect can happen, where the rider feels that they are failing everybody else in addition to themselves.
To reach beyond this experience a conversation needs to be supported with the intent being to create awareness. It is awareness that creates insight and a new sense of what is possible and how it is possible. The process needs to feel safe, without pressure, supportive and provide confidence in its own effectiveness. In many instances, a coach who is not enmeshed into the previous experiences of trying to solve this problem can be a breath of fresh air and accelerate progress by offering the psychological safety needed to risk a new way of thinking.
G for Goals
All progression requires the mind to be aimed at something. When digging into a rider’s personal barrier, a coach has to be careful not to invite peripheral issues from the life of the rider into the conversation. It is imperative to realise that this is not counselling but performance focused support. All too often I’ve heard of coaches and counsellors alike who struggle on this line and find themselves in hot water, without the skill to unwind. For this part of the model, a rider needs to remove a barrier in their mind and there needs to be clarity about what success would look like, short and long term.
The skill of working up to these goals is not to be underestimated. The primary task is to raise awareness and not to serve any agenda. Rarely is the short-term goal, “to jump higher” or “to hack out”, these represent visualisations of success. Goals that serve long-term success relate to the work that needs to be done, to get there — the work that is often avoided or approached with a myriad of disruptive emotions and thoughts.
R for Reality
Socrates, the ancient Greek philosopher, is well known for his ability to knock any confident speaker off balance with questions that reveal the lack of substance to just about any belief. A similar approach can be taken to reveal to a rider how their current thinking style (whether in words or images) has emerged from negative appraisals of previous experiences that are now maintained by unpleasant emotions and a desire to avoid both.
Socrates was also known for being purposefully controversial and challenging to those around him, we are not aiming for this experience for the rider. Gentle, open and exploring questions are required alongside a shared commitment that this work is necessary to shatter any myths the rider has created about their own riding, their horse and the limits they have created for themselves.
O for Options
Riders will be overprepared with stories of all the many things they have tried and failed at, to right this issue — as evidence that they’re fears are true and you are wrong (the coach). It is valuable to raise awareness of how this mindset in itself is supporting the continued existence of their negative mindset. In life, what got you to this point eventually won’t get you to the next point. We have to adapt, learn, reflect and grow. Reflecting, however, is very difficult in the context of avoidance.
Once awareness has started to form around what the rider wants, how their current situation is blocking them and how the evidence they have about why they can’t succeed is an untested myth — then we can start to put in place new options for progression.
Creating this plan is often outside of the experience of most trainers and parents, as the work I am referring to here is not related to horse rider skill. If it were, I’d be pretty useless as a coach — as my specialism is human growth, not rider training. This plan relates to activities that reinforce the insights we have created and diminish the evidence that underpins any sense of personal failure or limits. This is growth in the true sense, inviting learning and personal reflectiveness that will breach the current barriers and equip the rider to avoid similar barriers in the future.
W for Will
The willingness to follow through on this plan rarely surfaces without support. At this point, the rider is often lacking confidence and fearful that another failure is on the horizon.
It is crucial to avoid an agreement to this plan, in place of a commitment. An agreement can be best understood as a rational decision to take on the plan as it sounds like it makes sense. We agree to many things that we later regret or try to avoid, without any sense of loss when we do.
Commitment is an emotional experience. It reflects engagement to such a degree that the rider wants this change and can see it within reach, through them taking the responsibility themselves to undertake the work needed. This needs to emerge and not be pushed or declared. Only when this happens can growth take place. A skilled coach is most skilled in monitoring and detecting both what is needed to nurture this commitment and when it has emerged. Until then, the work cannot start and sometimes it should be abandoned if this is not achieved — else you are creating a new failure to further support the narrative of failure the rider already has.
Summary
Those supporting developing riders can utilise a structured model to performance coaching, the GROW model. Coaching provides a goal-focused approach to growth beyond dysfunctional methods of coping and problem-solving, to insight and confidence that activates the capability and passion or riders. Rather than being a solution to a problem, the rider can achieve a mindset that avoids similar problems from surfacing again.
Insight into an approach is the first step towards awareness and commitment.