Building confidence as a rider

In all of the lessons that I teach, and all of the horses I work with I notice that something that stops most riders from going to the next level is a lack of confidence. For some that means that they won’t canter because they aren’t sure that they can stay on, or they believe the horse will buck. For others it may be avoiding riding on trails, because of uncertainty of the outcome. I would assert that anyone who has spent much time on horseback can relate to the feeling of anxiety rising in your chest, when all you can think about is how to stay on, or how to stop the horse.

There is a very common pattern with my students who are learning to trot for the first time, that if I start them on a horse with a normal to rough trot, at first all they can think about is “this is bumpy, this is really bumpy, I think I might bounce off. How do I stop?” It seems no matter how much I try to prepare them, the flood of information that their brain is trying to deal with is too much, and their survival mode kicks in.

The Yerkes Dodson principle talks about stress in relationship to performance. (Performance in this case would be riding, but this can also apply to your horse’s behavior). It says that to a certain point stress and performance increase together, so to have a certain level of performance you need some stress; however once you reach that “certain point” adding stress decreases performance.

It is important if you are working with confidence issues to keep a certain amount of anxiety, but not so much that performance starts to decline. This means controlling the environment to balance out the amount of stress you are experiencing. If you always stay within your comfort zone, your comfort zone will not expand. At the same time if you stray too far out of your comfort zone at once you can do more harm than good.

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Building confidence as a rider