Ingredients for Equestrians
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Free ebook Achieve your horse riding goals |
As equestrians and horse riders, we are required to have an extensive array of skills in mind, body and spirit. Having these skills brings the best out of yourself, and therefore your horse. The better you perform in yourself (in every aspect), the better your horse will. Your performance, in mind and body, has a consistent and direct flow on effect on your horse. Many horse riders make the mistake of focusing more on the horse’s ability and performance, then neglect their own.
When you consider yourself as a horse person and rider, your goals and dreams, these ingredients are key factors you will need to adopt in into yourself in order to achieve your goals, big and small. The therapies offered by Remedial Equestrian Therapies all fundamentally include these ingredients within them. Your awareness of the ingredients will make you conscious of what you need inside yourself, the significance of what you require and what you need to do to achieve it. To use a cooking metaphor, you cant bake a cake if you don’t know the ingredients, and you can’t make the cake right if you have ingredients missing.
Remedial Equestrian Therapies provides therapies which are specifically designed to effectively accompany you on your horse riding journey. These therapies combined together, teach, strengthen and contribute to you achieving riding success. The following ingredients are key components at the core of Remedial Equestrian Therapies, and are all equally required for you to become the best rider you can be, and achieve your individual horse riding goals.
As equestrians and horse riders, we are required to have an extensive array of skills in mind, body and spirit. Having these skills brings the best out of yourself, and therefore your horse. The better you perform in yourself (in every aspect), the better your horse will. Your performance, in mind and body, has a consistent and direct flow on effect on your horse. Many horse riders make the mistake of focusing more on the horse’s ability and performance, then neglect their own.
When you consider yourself as a horse person and rider, your goals and dreams, these ingredients are key factors you will need to adopt in into yourself in order to achieve your goals, big and small. The therapies offered by Remedial Equestrian Therapies all fundamentally include these ingredients within them. Your awareness of the ingredients will make you conscious of what you need inside yourself, the significance of what you require and what you need to do to achieve it. To use a cooking metaphor, you cant bake a cake if you don’t know the ingredients, and you can’t make the cake right if you have ingredients missing.
Remedial Equestrian Therapies provides therapies which are specifically designed to effectively accompany you on your horse riding journey. These therapies combined together, teach, strengthen and contribute to you achieving riding success. The following ingredients are key components at the core of Remedial Equestrian Therapies, and are all equally required for you to become the best rider you can be, and achieve your individual horse riding goals.
Having a good mindset
Limiting beliefs creates a mindset where you end up believing that you can’t do things, so you don’t. If you have a good mind set, you adopt strategies that assists you in overcoming your limiting beliefs. Therefore, you believe “I can and I will”. Your mindset, thoughts, emotions, behaviors and beliefs have incredible power over your entire life, including your riding. With a good mindset, you will imagine and create possibilities instead of focusing on roadblocks.
When you believe you are getting no where, this indicates a fixed mindset and limiting beliefs. With a fixed mindset, comes limiting beliefs, which will tell you that the situation you are currently in, is the way it is, there is nothing you can do and it will never change no matter what you do. With a growth mindset, you will find ways to create change and implement strategies for personal development. It is obvious which type of people are successful and achieve goals.
Having limiting or empowering beliefs is the key factor in which mindset you choose to have. Limiting beliefs will stunt your growth because it confines you to the belief that your situation won’t change, and therefore, you are unlikely to seek strategies for self development. When you begin to believe in your capacity to change, grow, and develop new skills (and consistently work at theses), you will find that you can, indeed, achieve greatness.
Part of having a good mind set also involves overcoming a fear failure, you need to be willing to make mistakes, and learn from them. It is common to not succeed due to a fear of failure, or success. Either one will keep you from doing things that need to be done. Making mistakes is a necessary part of the process of learning, growing, overcoming challenges and create your own success. If you believe you are going to fail, you probably will, because you won’t develop the skills you need. Taking risks can be scary, but stagnation is worse, especially with horses, because if you’re not progressing, then you’re failing anyway. Stagnation with horses can easily lead to bad habits and behavioral issues. When dealing with horses, you always need to learn, and grow. Horses always have a way of bringing up new and exciting challenges for you, as a rider, need to learn how to over come.
Having a good mindset involves bringing positivity into your life, no matter how small that positivity is. Positivity breeds more positivity; so finding the silver lining in situations, learning, and growing will start to guide everything you do. A positive frame of mind will invite success into your life.
Know yourself and self-awareness
The relationship you have with yourself is one of the most important relationships in your life. Self-knowledge is the main ingredient in leading the life you want. self-knowledge involves having awareness in your - Strengths and weaknesses, thoughts, emotions, behaviors, motivation, habits, values and beliefs. A lack of self-awareness easily leads to struggling to regulate your own thoughts, feelings, and behaviors as well as assert self-control when required. A high level of awareness of yourself will help you recognize and make any changes necessary. Knowing your strengths and weaknesses is also part of this.
Self- awareness, and knowing yourself, equips you with the skills which will allow you to constantly look at improvement in all areas of your riding. It assists you in getting into the frame of mind needed to successfully complete a task of challenge. It will assist you in having effective thought patterns. If you don’t have self-awareness, you don’t know where you are at mentally or emotionally, therefore you won’t know how to change your frame of mind and emotional state, (or even be aware that you need to) in order to overcome challenges. This leaves you like a leaf in wind, leaving things to chance, and therefore reactive, rather than proactive and responsive. Things can easily spiral out of control when this occurs. Having self-awareness facilitates success by putting you in the driver’s seat, and allowing you to make informed decisions, potentially solving issues before they even arise.
Learn from your mistakes
We all make mistakes, it is a part of life, and riding. Making a mistake is not a failure. You can't learn anything from a mistake until you admit that you've made it. How you view your mistakes determines the way that you react to them, and what you do next.
When you admit and understand what you did wrong, you can then adapt your actions, behaviors, and beliefs so that you grow, and don't make the same mistakes again. This often entails learning a new skill, or adaptation of an old one. This increases your ability, makes you a better person, and rider.
In order to learn from your mistakes, you are required to have the ability to listen, look, feel, interpret, learn, reflect – having the ability to apply and build on these to achieve desired outcomes. Having the ability to learn from mistakes also develops and strengthens your ability to effectively problem solve, and therefore overcome challenges.
Self worth
Self worth is the sense of one's own value as a human being, it is the internal sense of being good enough, for who you are, not for what your do, or what anyone else says.
Self worth is different than self-esteem and self confidence. Self-esteem and self confidence, relies on external factors, what you do, such as successes and achievements to define worth and can often be inconsistent, leading to you struggling with feeling worthy. A high degree of self-worth naturally enhances your self-esteem, thereby providing you with the self-confidence needed to follow through with decisions and actions.
Low self-worth is having a general negative overall opinion of yourself, judging, or being overly critical, and placing a general negative value on yourself as a person. When Low self worth operates in your life (and your riding), you will find yourself being unfairly critical of yourself and your abilities, brush off compliments or positive qualities, focus on mistakes (but not learn from them and grow), what you didn't do, or what other people seem to do or have that you think you don’t.
Low self worth has many negative effects on your riding, and therefore your horse’s performance. Feeling inadequate or just plain disappointed in yourself and riding, being overly hard on yourself and seeking perfection is not conclusive to success. You literally get in your own way and sabotage your own success.
When you value yourself for who you are, you feel secure and worthwhile. You have generally positive relationships (including the relationship with your horse) and feel confident about your abilities. You are also open to learning and feedback, which can greatly assist you acquire and master new skills.
Self confidence
Self-confidence is an attitude about your skills and abilities, the belief that you can do things well, and overcome any challenges that confront you. It means you accept and trust yourself and have a sense of control in your life. Self confidence allows you to live with a sense of trust about who you are and how you engage with others, including horses. You have the ability to trust your fundamental skills and what you are made up of on the inside. You can believe in who you are, are able to be level headed and steady under pressure. Self confidence allows you to celebrate achievements you make, as well as the achievements of others. You can admit if you do something wrong, and also when you need help. You can acknowledge, own, learn, and grow from any mistakes you make, and play fair with yourself and others.
Self confidence is derived from experiences, achievements, modelling other people who have succeeded in the area you want to, imagining yourself being confident, confident body posturing, how you talk to yourself, beliefs you hold about yourself, and feedback from others.
Self-confidence also brings about more happiness. Typically, when you are confident in your abilities you are happier due to your successes. When you are feeling better about your capabilities, the more energized and motivated you are to take action and achieve your goals. When you are confident, it transfers to your riding, and subsequently, your horse.
Compassion and empathy
Compassion towards others is a sympathetic consciousness of others' distress together with a desire to alleviate it. Having compassion also means that you offer understanding and kindness to others when they fail or make mistakes, rather than judging them harshly. Finally, when you feel compassion for another (rather than mere pity), it means that you realize that suffering, failure, and imperfection is part of the shared human experience. This also includes compassion towards your horse.
Self-compassion involves acting the same way towards yourself when you are having a difficult time, make mistakes, or notice something you don’t like about yourself. Instead of mercilessly judging and criticizing yourself for various inadequacies or shortcomings, self-compassion means you are kind and understanding when confronted challenges and mistakes. Utilizing self-compassion involves asking yourself – What do I feel, how can I comfort and care for myself right now? Validating your experience and emotions, discovering ways to solve issues.
Having compassion greatly enhances self-worth, self-esteem, self-confidence, improves the quality of relationships (with yourself, your horse and other people). It means you are not arrogant, yet you know your own worth. There are numerous proven benefits of both self-compassion and compassion toward others, such as increased happiness, improved medical outcomes, reduced stress, resolves conflict, builds healthy relationships.
Consistency
Being consistency means to behave in a way that matches your past decisions or behaviors. Inconsistent behavior is unpredictable, may be considered irregular or illogical for the situation, or not keeping with the standards of behavior for a given set of circumstances.
Consistency is critical in order to create space for effective learning environments and relationships of any kind. Including the relationship you have with yourself, others, and your horse.
Consistency facilitates trust, a knowing that you can have expectations and that they will be predictable and understandable. This increases respect, which in turn increases performance, and decreases the amount of behavioral problems that may manifest.
Consistency requires a long-term commitment from you, involving sustained effort in behaving in a repeated, reliable way in order to achieve your goals. Consistency in mind and body (mentally and emotionally), routines, communication, sleep, exercise, and daily routines are just some examples of where consistency is necessary. Horses require consistency, (that makes sense to them) in all aspects of their lives, including all your interactions with them.
Being trustworthy
Being trustworthy means that others are able to believe in the probability that you will behave in ways that are expected. Being trustworthy involves honesty, and gives others a feeling of confidence and security in you, that you are kind, ethical, competent and predictable in who you are, what you say, what you do and what you ask of others. Being trustworthy builds strong, solid and healthy relationships (with humans and horses).
Self-trust means consistently staying true to yourself, you look after your own needs and safety, and treat yourself with kindness, patience love and compassion. You believe in, and refuse to give up on yourself. You are aware of, and honest with your own thoughts and feelings. You have strong ethics, personal standards and values. Self trust is vital for self worth and self confidence.
A very important part of being trustworthy is being honest as well as keeping promises. When you fail to keep a promise, to yourself, others and even your horse, it communicates that you can’t be trusted, and don't value yourself, or them. It indicates that you have chosen to put something else ahead of your commitment. Even breaking small promises, teaches that you cannot be counted on. This, over time, causes fissures to develop in relationships (including the relationship you have with yourself) tainted by broken promises.
As a rider, you want and need your horse to trust you, and you need to be able to trust yourself.
When your horse trusts you, everything is easier. A trusting horse is willing, confident and feels safe to do what is asked, even if it is scary, because he/she is able to trust your judgment. Your horse knows that you are coming from a place of wanting to help, educate, have a strong relationship with respect.
When you keep your promises, and are consistently honest, clear, fair, reliable, predicable, and reasonable, you build trust, in yourself and others (including your horse). This builds solid, positive, productive relationship/s.
Values (what is important to you)
Personal values are the things that are important to you, the characteristics and behaviors that motivate you and guide your decisions. Your personal values determine your priorities, and are a measure you use to tell if your life is turning out the way you want it to. When you llive according to your personal values, life is usually good, you're satisfied and content. But when you are living out of line with your values, that's when things feel wrong. This can be a real source of unhappiness. This is why making a conscious effort to identify your values is so important.
When it comes to your riding, your values affect your riding behavior. If you have strong values when it comes to your riding, making positive and productive decisions becomes easier. When you are clear in what you believe in, and use those values to guide your decisions, your decisions become true to who you are and they are consistent.
When you don’t have a solid understanding of what you believe in, you can end up being taken down any path, and unfortunately, sometimes not the right one. When you don’t have well defined values, making decisions becomes unpredictable and inconsistent.
There are detailed exercises in the ebook “achieve your horse riding goals” that will help you accurately determine both your personal and your riding values.
Personal boundaries
Boundaries are the way you define who you are and separate out what you think and feel from the thoughts and feelings of others. Boundaries are the limits that you create to identify reasonable, safe and acceptable ways for others to behave towards you. When you have healthy boundaries, you can tune into your feelings, identify what is appropriate to you and protect yourself from violations from others. They keep you safe, physically, mentally and emotionally.
When we don’t have strong and healthy personal boundaries, and hold people accountable, we feel used and mistreated. Having personal boundaries means to recognizing the need for a healthy separation between your thoughts and feelings and the thoughts and feelings of others.
Having personal boundaries develops greater self-esteem, self- awareness, well -being, independence, identity.
The benefit of boundaries for equestrians, first and foremost, is safety. for both horses and humans. However, having healthy boundaries with horses has a multitude of benefits. Including; relationship building, trust, reliability, understanding, compassion, consistency. Boundaries enhances the relationship and subsequent performance of both horse and rider.
Stability
To be stable means to be firm, steady, to have the strength and endurance to be free from change or variation. Stability is to have the firmness of resolution or purpose, it is the opposite to fickleness, inconsistency, unpredictability, unreliability.
To be psychologically and emotionally stable means to have the ability to perform in difficult, uncertain or extreme circumstances as successfully as under normal conditions. Emotional stability is a fundamental personality trait that has to do with being even-tempered, particularly in the face of challenges and threats. Without emotional instability, you are prone to being impulsive and likely to make rash decisions without thinking your actions through. This instability means you are not able to effetely adjust your strategy by seeing opportunities that would help you over come challenges. As a rider, your unstable emotions quickly transfer to the horse, causing all sorts of issues for the horse, and therefore the rider again. This problem often spirals into a bigger and bigger problem.
Stability in your body (and your horse’s body) is the resistance to a change in the body's acceleration, or the resistance to a disturbance of the body's equilibrium. Balance within muscle groups and alignment of the skeletal system affect body equilibrium and balance. Small shifts of bones can affect the whole skeletal system.
To have stability and control over your body is important because it allows your body to be capable to perform dynamic movement, where your body requires stable joints, and muscles (which act on each of the joints). Without stability, the body would collapse forwards, backwards and sideways, requiring much more physical effort to sustain a posture or movement.
Stability is vital to horse riding. In order to get the most out of yourself, and your horse, every kind of stability is of utmost importance. Riders know that in order to achieve harmonious performance within any equestrian discipline, horses must be in peak physical fitness and have the correct psychological state. These two factors are equally important and that without both, success is unlikely. The relationship between you and your horse is a very important factor when determining the quality of performance and risk of injury whilst riding. With a strong and stable mind and body, the quality of relationships and performance is significantly increased.
Stress management, knowing how to management thoughts, feelings and actions under pressure
Stress management is your ability to cope with any situation or stimulus that triggers the fight-flight-freeze response.
Stress is a normal reaction the body, mind and emotions have when challenges or changes happen, resulting in physical, emotional and intellectual responses. Your body’s autonomic nervous system controls your heart rate, breathing, vision changes, ability to think clearly and more. The body has a built in stress response; fight-flight-freeze which assists your body face stressful situations. The ability to effectively manage these responses is regarded as stress management skills. Poor stress management narrows your ability to think clearly, function effectively, make good decisions and perform well under pressure. It wreaks havoc on your emotional and mental equilibrium, as well as your physical performance. Long term stress is wide adverse effects on your over all health and wellbeing.
Being able to effectively manage stress, having emotional, mental and physical control skills will greatly assist you in dealing with challenges of all kinds in a productive way. Effective stress management skills have a massive impact on your ability to deal with pressure, fear, anxiety, anger/frustration, disappointment, challenges and adversity.
When it comes to riding and dealing with horses, there are a myriad of sources of stress, challenges and adversity. How you manage these will impact the results you obtain. As with everything when it comes to horses, how you react to stress will always have a direct effect on how your horse responds to both the stressful situation in and of itself, and your reaction as well. When you handle stress effectively, it has a direct run on effect on your horse.
Knowing how to overcome disappointments and set backs
Disappointments and setbacks (in life, and with riding), are inevitable. The emotions that accompany these can be tricky to deal with because every day can bring about new situations to be disappointed over. How you cope with them is often a defining moment in live, and influences your ability to achieve goals. Sometimes, people try to avoid disappointment by underachieving (setting their expectations permanently low) while others seek to avoid it by overachieving (setting their expectations unattainably high). It is very important to learn how to introspect and respond to set backs and disappointment with a positive coping strategy, that seeks to understand what happened, checks whether your expectations were reasonable, reevaluates our perceptions and behaviors, and seeks positive solutions instead of dwelling on the negativity of the situation. You can’t avoid setbacks and disappointments, your response to them is a pivotal point and cross roads of where you will go next. You can choose determination over disappointment. Disappointment and set backs are inevitable, being discouraged, or giving up altogether is always a choice.
The ability to reframe your thinking is vital when facing any kind of adversity in life. To reframe means to choose to look at your circumstances in a different way, with a different perspective, and a different point of view. Seeking ways to learn from the mistakes you made, and in doing so, making you smarter, stronger, more capable. By doing this, the thoughts and meaning that you give to a situation will change as well. It can turn a disappointment, which looked like a stumbling block, into a stepping stone that leads you to a whole new level of success.
It’s important to remember that when you are in the midst of disappointment, it is only temporary and it will pass. The good news is that what you’ve learned about yourself during the experience will help you become more determined, and achieve more in the future.
Looking at different perspectives, ability to be adaptable
The ability to see various perspectives means to be able to look at a situation or understanding a concept from alternative points of view. Adaptability essentially means the ability to be flexible and adapt to changing conditions, factors or environments. Being able to look at many different perspectives, as well as being adaptable is vital when it comes to horses, and riding. Every Equestrian knows that dealing with horses can become a challenging situation at any time.
Adaptability is essential when dealing with horses in all contexts and situations. Horse people know that not all methods work on all horses, in all situations and contexts. So being adaptable, and having a large and varied “tool box” of skills is essential when working with horses. Being adaptable is also important when developing strategies, working on projects and implementing different approaches to achieving goals for all Equestrians.
There are a number of skills associated with being adaptable. The ability to utilize problem-solving skills in order to discover creative solutions to difficult problems. Being able to observe and analyze your approach to overcoming a problem as well as an openness and willingness to adjust your thinking, emotions and behavior. This requires creative and strategic thinking skills. Creative thinking encompasses the capacity to analyze things in a new, open-minded and innovative way.
Adaptability involves cultivating a growth and learning attitude and mindset. Developing a good mindset improves your capacity to take on and over-come challenges, find new ways to expand your knowledge and skills.
What often brings you down or makes you anxious, in difficult or challenging situations, is not necessarily what is actually happening, but how you interpret what is happening. Issues often arise for you when you see things from a negative point of view, and when you don’t realize that this is not the only way to see your current circumstances. People who can shift their perspectives and look at things from different point of view manage difficulties better, see chances and opportunities where others see struggle. It is easier to see things from our own narrow point of view than from a different point of view. Seeing things from a different point of view requires observation, comparison, contemplation, discovery, deducing, communication, interaction, compassion, self awareness and meditation. Being able to see the details and big picture of a situation from many different perspectives gives you a distinct advantage when facing challenges and difficulties. It opens you up to opportunities, learning and skills that assists you in becoming the best you can be.
Accountability and responsibility
Being accountable means that you choose to take responsibility for the outcomes of your words, actions, and behavior. You keep your promises, that you do what you tell yourself you will do.
Responsibility means feeling it’s your duty to manage your own actions, thoughts, feelings and behaviors, and the outcomes of these. That you act morally and personally independently, making decisions without authorization. Personal responsibility involves using common sense, authority, leadership, and maturity; being reliable, trustworthy, dependable, and answerable for what you do.
Utilizing accountability and personal responsibility in your dealings with horses means that you acknowledge what you do, the consequences of your actions, and that you take personal positive action towards amending any mistakes you may have made. You know why you do what you do, and the effects it has, on yourself, and the horse. Taking responsibility and being accountable means, you do not berate or blame when things happen. You can look at the situation, understand what happened and why, and seek to resolve. This is vital when working with horses, as blaming does not result in positive or productive outcomes.
Patience
Having patience means that you have the ability to stay calm, stable and level headed while you are waiting for an outcome that you need or want. Having patience enables you to wait, observe and know when it is appropriate to act, and how to act in a relevant manor. Having patience means you are able to wait, and control your emotions.
Frustration is often the result of a lack of patience. Frustration is a feeling of agitation and intolerance triggered when your needs aren’t met; it’s tied to an inability to delay gratification. When you are able to be patient, you can take a mental step back, and reorganize yourself, instead of aggressively reacting or hastily giving up on something that is frustrating you. Patience allows you to be respectful, and grateful, while investing meaningful time into what you do, without giving up or giving in.
Having patience is necessary when interacting with horses, it is not ideal to be in a hurry. When you are impatient, hurried or stressed, the horse can easily sense it and soon reacts with stress too. Being stressed and hurried leads to badly thought-out instructions from handler/rider to the horse. The horse then responds in confusion, stress and refusal to cooperate. Impatience leads to conflict, and soon horse and rider are in a spiral of frustration.
Perseverance and dedication
perseverance is the tendency to cling to the belief you have in yourself even when faced with challenges that contradicts or disconfirms the basis of that belief. Perseverance separates the people who succeed and the ones who don’t. Those who persevere despite difficulties and setbacks, who never throw in the towel and call it quits when faced with a challenge or adversity. Perseverance is the difference between what makes some people able to keep pushing and complete a task while others habitually fizzle and don't follow through.
Dedication is the act of being fully devoted to something, it is a positive character trait, and a trait that is most likely to lead to success in life. Dedication is a commitment to a particular cause, or course of action.
Perseverance and dedication are corner stones to being responsible and reliable. When it comes to horses, there are plenty of responsibilities to handle, and consistent challenges to work through. There are many benefits to perseverance and dedication, they are traits that allow you put all of your effort into what you are doing. You do not give up, no matter how hard things get. This is the attitude that leads to success. You will have focus and motivation, better time management, more self-discipline, make informed decisions, take calculated risks, and have a greater sense of accomplishment. When things get tough, you will seek answers, learning and solutions, rather than just giving up.
Know your why, and purpose
Knowing your purpose of why you do what you do makes you far more capable of pursuing the things that give you fulfillment. It serves as a point of reference for all your actions and decisions, allowing you to measure your progress and know when you have met your goals. Knowing why you have your goals in the first place gives them meaning to you. Your purpose will assist you in keeping motivated, even when times get tough
When you know your purpose in what you want to do, it gives you clarity, and you are more deeply committed to pursuing your goals. When you have a deeper sense of purpose in what you do, you are better at finding meaning in setbacks you experience along the way. When you know your purpose, you have a feeling of mastery. Anything that goes wrong in your life that is not in line with your values is far easier to let go of. This means that you can learn from hardships and bounce back quickly from adversity. Without purpose, it is very easy to just give up when things get hard.
With horses it is practical to know why you are doing what you are doing at any given time. It shows you have a thorough understanding of what you want and the best way to achieve it. It indicates a sense of calm, patient, compassionate leadership to horses, which they respond to in a positive way.
Motivation
Motivation is the process that initiates, guides, and maintains goal-oriented behaviors. It is what causes you to act upon a want or need. Motivation involves the forces that activate behavior, the driving force behind your actions. Motivation is your desire or enthusiasm to accomplish or achieve something.
Knowing what motivates you can help you keep going. Goal setting (long and short term) is a large part of keeping motivated. Goals that are tied to your values, and purpose and have specific meaning to you. Goals that are specific and relevant to you and your purpose are the most effective at keeping you motivated.
Horses can be a lot of consistent hard work, knowing what keeps you motivated will keep your passion and enthusiasm.
Self Discipline
Having self discipline means you are able to control your impulses and desires, focusing on adherence to a course of action forgoing immediate satisfaction in favor of a greater gain.
Self Discipline requires effort and time, resulting in the power to stick to your decisions and follow them through, without changing your mind. This enables you to choose what you want, and then persevere with actions, thoughts and behavior, which lead to improvement and success. It also gives you the power and inner strength to overcome procrastination, and distractions in order to follow through with what you need to do.
Self-discipline is not a limiting behavior or a restrictive lifestyle. It is a very important ingredient for success. It is perseverance, and the ability not to give up despite setbacks. Consistent self discipline leads to self confidence, self esteem and inner strength, and ultimately satisfaction.
A lack self-discipline often leads to procrastinating and putting your duties aside which can create disarray, when done on a frequent basis. When Ingrained unhelpful habits and an undisciplined mind are not addressed, they eventually prevent you from achieving your horse riding dreams.
Resourcefulness
To be resourceful means you have the ability to act on your own, make decisions, find quick and clever ways to overcome difficulties. Resourcefulness is not about just coping with deprivation; it is a virtue that opens the door to greater accomplishment.
Resourcefulness is about optimizing what you have to work with, it is not just about creating something new; it also applies to making old things work better. To be resourceful requires creativity, energy, intelligence, initiative, pragmatism, risk taking and tenacity. These are all traits which you need to be successful.
To be a successful equestrian you need to know how to optimize your unique talents and skills by harnessing the collective powers of mind, body, and individual resources. The ability to learn, grow and utilize skills is essential for any rider. Making use of high-quality expertise, resulting in concrete strategies that are powerful, easy to apply, and quick to show quality results.
Relationship building
Relationship building is about building productive connections with others and form positive relationships. Having strong relationships gains trust and co-operation, generating greater successful results. It is important to not only have a good relationship with others, but with yourself.
A healthy relationship is one that adds to both parties’ overall well-being, you able to work as a team, and rely on each other. For a relationship to be healthy, It requires in depth understanding, care, respects, communication, trust, honesty, empathy and compassion, and commitment.
Working with horses involves having a working relationship together. How positive that relationship is, will dictate how successful you are together.
Imagination, creativity and curiosity
This means to hold the ability to facilitate the production of original or unusual ideas. It is also
an eager wish to know or learn about something.
Utilizing your imagination and creativity helps to over come fears, generating hope and desire to create something new, have new direction, and to become better. When you continue to conjure solutions to problems, your drive to prove how that solution might work forces you to educate yourself, seek out information, thus boosting what you already know. This helps to transform your dreams into reality.
Having curiosity helps you to become a better problem solver. Curiosity leads to becoming more resourceful. You will ask more questions, such as, what can I do to be better? What are different ways that I can use to solve this problem? As a result, you will naturally ignite you imagination and creativity in order to come up with interesting and innovative ideas. When you are curious, you are not afraid of feeling uncomfortable and facing the unknown, therefore you will take action. You are open to getting out of your comfort zone for the sake of learning. It assist in developing empathy, as, Instead of judging others, you will ask questions and understand where they are coming from.
Curiosity also leads to humility, meaning you don’t think you know everything, you will, instead, consistently seek to learn, grow and look at different perspectives. This makes you more self aware, and therefore more effective in what you do. When you are curious, we are more willing to experiment to see what works and what doesn’t. You will then want to find ways to improve your skills and be a better version of yourself.
These skills give you a distinct advantage when dealing with horses. Horses have the ability to be very challenging. Therefore, to be able to think out side the box and come up with innovate, creative solutions to the benefit of both horse and handler/rider gives you a recipe for success.
Body-mind connection
The mind-body connection is the link between your thoughts, emotions, attitudes, and behaviors with your physical body. The brain and body are connected through neural (nerve) pathways made up of neurotransmitters, hormones and chemicals. These pathways transmit signals between the body and the brain to control everyday functions, from breathing, digestion and pain sensations to movement, thinking and feeling. What you do with your physical body directly impacts your mental state, and what you think and believe has a direct effect on your body. This results in a complex interrelationship between your mind and body. This relationship needs to be as positive as possible for optimum health, wellbeing and performance.
The mind-body connection is a powerful force, and a very useful tool to have. The mind and body are designed to be allies, working in sync to maximize physical, mental health and wellbeing. The body holds your physical health and your ability to function, and move. The mind houses your motivation and instructions to function.
The mind-body connection means that you use your thoughts to influence your body’s physical responses. You process instructions with your mind, and then facilitate those into body movement. Having this skill is highly beneficial in your riding, as your body has direct influence over the horse. As a rider, you communicate directly with your body, to the horse. You expect the horse to respond in specific ways to your body position, movement and aids. These need to be clear, concise, consistent and timed correctly in order for the horse to understand what you are asking and to be able to respond accordingly. When your own body and mind work together, you will be able to communicate to the horse in the most effective and efficient way possible. It stops confusing messages between horse and rider, and produces favorable results.
Understanding horse’s needs, behavior and psychology
In order to interact, ride, handle and communicate with a horse, it is vital to know and understand the psychology that motivates a horse’s behavior. You need to have a thorough understanding of the instinctive behavior’s horses have, their body language, how they think, behave, learn, understand, respond, interact, communicate, their needs, what motivates them, why they do what they do etc in order to be effective when managing, handling, training and riding them.
Horses have specific needs for their over all health and wellbeing, this includes emotional, mental and physical wellbeing and needs. As a equestrian, you need to learn, be aware of, and cater to these needs on all levels, in order to have a happy, healthy positive team mate.
You will not achieve a high level of being in tune with, knowing your horse, and attaining maximum performance from them, if you do not understand them, and take care of their needs. Thorough comprehension of your horses over all needs, behavior and psychology will improve your relationship with your horse and give you the confidence to make better-informed choices about riding, handling, training, competing, their over all management and wellbeing.
Flexibility and Suppleness
Being flexible means you are able to change yourself, mentally, physically or emotionally in order to suit new conditions and situations. You are able to bend easily without breaking, you can modify yourself, change or compromise in order to achieve an outcome.
When you are supple, you are readily adaptable or responsive to new situations, you are capable of bending, twisting and moving with ease, without stiffness or awkwardness.
Having flexibility and suppleness offers many benefits, they allow easier movements while building strength and stability, leading to greater range of motion, improved balance, fewer injuries, and increased performance.
Being mentally, emotionally and physically flexible allows you to cope with stressful situations with a more open mindset, and see things from different perspectives. It’s assists in prevention of becoming emotionally stuck and helps you go with the flow in life. This supports problem-solving capabilities, and enables positive relationship building. Handling and riding horses provide a form of physical and mental exercise which requires you to think on your feet. You need to be able to problem-solve, sometimes within a very short frame of time, as you communicate with your horse and overcome obstacles together. If you have a stiff body and attitude, this quickly transfers to the horse, which can easily lead to problems.
Stamina and endurance
Having stamina and endurance means you have the ability to sustain prolonged physical or mental effort. You have the physical and mental strength and energy to do something that might be difficult and will take a long time, you can keep going, even when tired or facing other unfavorable conditions.
Increasing your stamina helps you endure discomfort or stress when you're doing an activity. It also reduces fatigue and exhaustion. Having high stamina allows you to perform your daily activities at a higher level while using less energy.
As an equestrian, you understand that handling and riding horses requires a lot of work. Having the ability to keep going without exhaustion gives you a distinct advantage. Fatigue can easily lead to feeling a lack of interest and motivation, moodiness and irritability, cynicism, doubt, and pessimism, feeling overwhelmed or stressed. All of which will end up having a negative effect on both you and your horse’s relationship, and performance.
Balance, coordination and proprioception
When you have balance, you can evenly divide and distribute your weight enabling you to remain upright and steady, in equal and correct proportions. Balance is when you are able to maintain an even distribution of weight and energy through your body in static/still and dynamic/movement activities. Coordination is the effective, simultaneous functioning of the brain and the body.
Physical balance is a complex skill that involves the brain, muscles, and parts of the inner ear. If you don't practice and maintain balance, the coordination between these three systems deteriorates over time, making it harder for you to move effectively, perform activities, stay upright and maintain proper posture.
Having mental and emotional balance means you are able to be in a state of mind that is free of afflictive and negative tendencies, where you can realize your potential in terms of wellbeing, wisdom, compassion and creativity. Reaching mental balance does not mean that you are completely void of any negative thoughts and emotions, but having the capability to not allow these to become so overwhelming that is profoundly affects your well being. Balance involves engaging with experiences without making assumptions or harboring preconceived ideas about circumstances that can lead to misinterpretations or distortions of reality. It means being present, living the experience, and seeking learning and solutions to problems.
Coordination means that you are able to organize different parts of your complex body so they are can work together effectively, you have the ability to use different parts of the body together smoothly and efficiently. Having coordination in your body means you are able to execute smooth, accurate, controlled movements and positions. Coordination allows you to select the right muscle at the right time with proper intensity to achieve needed action. Coordinated movement allows a mind-body connection where appropriate speed, distance, direction, timing and muscular tension are easily utilized when needed.
Proprioception is your body's ability to sense movement, action, and location. It's needed with every muscle movement you make, without proprioception, you wouldn't be able to move without thinking in extreme detail, about every move you make. An example of proprioception is when you close your eyes and touch a finger to your nose. The position of your body parts, balance and proprioception are closely interlinked. There are sensors in your muscles, tendons, ligaments and other soft tissues that are responsible for communication to your brain about joint position, pressure and muscle stretch. To ensure your body has the ability to move in a precise, balanced, and co-ordinated way, the nervous system is required to constantly receive sensory information to be able to adjust and correct movements. Not everyone has the same level of proprioceptive ability, it requires specific training. If you sustain an injury, your proprioception sensors become impaired, creating an unstable communication pathway between body and mind, this scenario requires rehabilitation of the neural pathways. Proprioception is key to learning new, and improving your movement skills. It is key in muscle (nervous system) memory and hand-eye coordination.
In order to effectively ride horses, good balance, coordination and proprioception are all essential. You need to be able to balance and control your body on top of a moving, (and at times, unpredictable) animal, as well as applying precise and consistent aids. In order to be able to do this, balance, coordination, body control and proprioception in a necessity. The better you are at all these, the greater your, and your horse’s performance will be, and the less likely you will have falls or sustain injuries.
Responsiveness
In order to have good quality responsiveness to any given situation, you need to be able to react in a quick and positive way that is thought out. Having healthy responses means you are alert, curious and have a resourceful mind set. You can potentially anticipate and adapt to existing and future circumstances, thus contributing to better outcomes. Having positive responses contributes to healthy relationships and well being.
In life, a small percentage is about what happens, but a large percentage is how you react to what happens. Meaning, it is not what has happened to you, but how you react to these events that matters the most. When you decide to respond to what occurs, it will shape your feelings, actions and therefore, results. Challenging situations are constantly occurring when managing and riding horses, your responses to any given situation will determine the short, and long term out comes. Remember that horses react to you, your behavior around (and towards) them, and your emotions.
There is a crucial distinction between responsiveness and reactiveness. When you respond, you are in a state of a deliberate pause, and a state of a thought out process. When you react, it is more of an animalistic behavior, logic is thrown out the window, and there is an instant reaction, emotions such as frustration, anger, and fear can easily take over, and you will fail to think things through. Having a non thought out reaction often leads to a knee jerk reaction, oftentimes resulting in undesirable consequences. Reactiveness comes from insecurity and from a self-preservation and survival instinct.
When you have trained yourself to have responsive behavior, you are in a position of a secure, controlled and progressive mindset that seeks solutions. There is a sense of ownership and total responsibility being responsive. You can direct yourself towards a predetermined goal or result. This is a win-win situation for you and the horse which is mutually beneficial.
Synchronization
Having synchronization means that things are happening at the same time, moving at the same speed and rate as something else, being in a state of in tune harmony. The more synchronization is repeated between individuals (such as horse and rider), the more it increases their like, trust, communication, efficiency and knowledge for one another, therefore strengthening their relationship. When things are working in harmony with one another, it means its parts are combined into a pleasant, effective, co-operating working arrangement.
When riding horses, there are many elements that need to be in synch with each other. For example, the rider’s movements need to be in synch with the horse’s movements, the rider’s individual body parts need to work in synch with each other, the riders’ aids need to be timed and applied in synch with the horse’s movement. In order to have clear communication with your horse you have to make sure to be in tune and in synchronicity with them, mentally and physically in order to achieve harmony. This involves the effective working combination of all ingredients listed here.
Relaxation combined with effort
In order to be relaxed, you need to be in a state of calmness and low tension. Effort is the conscious exertion of power or strength.
When riding, your body connects you directly to your horse. To ride effectively you need strength, power, and tone in your body, but you also need finesse. You require tone and control in your body, but not excessive tension or tautness. Riders need to train their body to be able to maintain a state of relaxation combined with effort. This requires strength, control, tone, some tension, and a degree of relaxation all in the right amounts. Excess tension in your body interferes flexibility, ease of movement, balance and communication between you and your horse. Being too relaxed means, you won’t maintain proper balance, control or position. Riders need to learn to use just the amount of effort needed without developing unnecessary tension. The ultimate goal in riding is to achieve a state of being seemingly relaxed, but without any floppiness.
Posture, alignment, straightness
Posture is the position you hold your body. Everyone has different posture types, a “natural” posture. Your natural posture is similar to a horse’s natural conformation.
Your every day activities, what you do with your body on a regular basis, including how you sit, stand, walk and move all effect your posture.
Every posture type has strengths and weakness. Your individual natural posture, combined with your every day activities, means that certain body areas are stronger or weaker, longer or shorter than other body parts. These natural imbalances effect your body, and subsequent performance abilities, even in riding. Imbalances often cause pain and discomfort, and can lead to injuries over time. Knowing your own natural posture means you can also understand where your imbalances are, and how they affect your individual body.
Alignment of your body refers to how your head, shoulders, spine, hips, knees and ankles relate and line up with each other. Your natural postural imbalances will put parts of your body out of alignment. Proper alignment of your body allows for good posture, and puts less stress on your body.
An easy way to understand postural, alignment (and straightness) imbalance is to visualize a tee-pee or circus tent. When there is equal appropriate tension on all sides, it will stand up straight and tall, not lean to one side or sag. If there is too much tension on one side it will lean over. If there is not enough tension or slackness on one side it will also cause it to lean over. These imbalances will put significant strain on other parts. Your muscles and bones work in a similar way. All too often, pain, stiffness, and even injuries you have in your body actually come from misalignment and postural imbalances. When one area of your body is out alignment, it can take the rest of the body with it.
Your body’s posture and alignment directly influences your balance, coordination and body control, and can also affect your thinking and emotions (via your mind-body connection). All this will have an effect on your riding, and therefore your horse. Horse riding requires all the posture and stabilizing muscles to work effectively. These muscles must be in balance in order for you to be able to ride well. These muscles must be in balance to function well. Good posture both on the ground and on the horse needs good alignment (a vertical line dropped down from the ear goes through the shoulder, hip, and heel).
When your body is in good alignment, you require minimum effort to stay in control and sit upright. Ideal static and dynamic posture have a balance between all the front, side and back muscles. Having good posture and alignment is an essential part of being able to ride a horse well.
Strength and tone
Your strength is the physical energy that you have, which allows you to perform movements and actions, against some resistance. Physical strength is measured by the amount of exertion of force your body and muscles are able to apply. Strength encompasses bodily or muscular power and firmness. mental, emotional, moral, and power and courage. Greater muscular strength enhances your ability to perform movements, keep good alignment, maintain balance and stability, and coordinate your body.
Strength also protects your body’s structure. Both you and your horse both have a dominant side, often this matches each other over time. This creates muscle imbalances throughout both you and your horse’s entire bodies and as one side becomes strong, the other lags or even weakens. Having imbalance in a body, whether it be you or your horse, dramatically affects performance and can cause soreness, pain and even injuries over time.
Mental and emotional strength doesn't involve suppressing or denying your thoughts and emotions, or your pain. It is about having the courage, and ability to acknowledging and understand them, and have the skills to make good judgments and decisions, avoid potential problems, or solve problems. Being mentally and emotionally strong isn't about acting tough. It's about being aware of your thoughts and emotions, learning from painful experiences, and operating your life according to your values, and morals.
Having mental and emotional strength is a big part of emotional intelligence. It addresses your thoughts and feelings which create the behaviors you exhibit, that impact on your overall quality of your life. Emotional intelligence involves developing skills and then adopting daily habits that build your mental and emotional muscles, permitting you to transform bad habits that hold you back.
Muscle tone is the tension within a muscle at rest, and it is the measurement of your muscle’s response to an outside force, such as a stretch or change in direction. When your muscles have good and evenly distributed tone, you will have increased stamina, energy, and greater flexibility, with an even distribution of tension throughout your entire body.
Bother strength and tone play important roles in your ability to ride you horse well, with ease, comfort, balance and stability.
Biomechanics
Biomechanics is the understanding of movement in your body, including how muscles, bones, tendons, and ligaments work together to produce movement. It also includes the study of how forces within your body interact with each other, and the physical effects these have when your body moves. Biomechanics examines how your body moves like it does under various conditions.
Every part of your body has a designated job to do by nature, including your muscles. Each part needs to do the job it was designed to do. This creates effective and correct movement patterns. To be able to ride a horse, your body needs to be trained to be able to meet the unbalanced forces generated by the horse’s movement underneath you. Therefore, good horse riders’ biomechanics is about correct use of your muscles and joints to stabilize, balance and move with the horse. This is vital in order to be able to ride well.
Having good biomechanics Increases movement speed, power, energy conservation and efficiency. It also prevents muscle imbalances, reduces wear and tear on joints and ligaments. provides good form and technique. prevents injury and is able to speed up recovery for injuries. Good biomechanics increase your body’s ability to perform well, while reducing risks of injuries.
Health and wellbeing
When you have good health and well-being, it means you are in a state of being able to maintain physical, mental, and emotional stability and balance (homeostats). It is not just the absence of illness or disease. There are various aspects that make up your overall health and welling, including physical, economic, social, emotional, psychological/mental, life satisfaction, engaging activities. It is therefore important to look at these and compare them to your own life and know which areas you may need to put more time, energy and effort into if they are not going so well for you. Your health and wellbeing need as much balance as possible.
Health and well being should be of importance to you, as horse riding and managing takes a lot of work, dedication, time and energy, and money.
Breathing
To breath is to balance the gases in your body, you absorb oxygen into your body as you inhale, and to expel carbon dioxide as you exhale. This is all done through the movement of your lungs. There are muscles have the job of controlling the movement of the lungs are the diaphragm (a sheet of muscle underneath the lungs) and the muscles between the ribs. (intercostals). Your breath stays with you for your entire life, from the moment you are born to the moment you die. Your breath changes with every feeling and emotion you have.
When you are in a relaxed state, your primarily breathe through your nose in a slow, even and gentle way. This state of breathing has a calming effect on the nervous system, and your body’s involuntary functions.
When you are under stress of any kind, your breathing pattern will change. Often when you are anxious, afraid, worried you will take shorter, smaller, more hurried, shallow breaths. In this state, you can make the symptoms of your stress worse. Your shoulders will often tense, rise, and role forward, and you won’t utilize your diaphragm as much to move air in and out of your lungs. Breathing in this way will have a disruptive effect on your body’s ability to balance gases.
Training yourself to be able to control your breathing under stress and press has many physiological benefits including; lowering your blood pressure and heart rate, reducing the levels of stress hormones in your blood, reduced lactic acid build-up in muscle tissue, allowing your body to balance the levels of oxygen and carbon dioxide in the blood, improved immune system, better health and wellbeing.
There are a variety of different breathing techniques that all have different effects upon your body. Learning different breathing techniques that you can utilize in any given situation to help achieve a desired result is highly advantageous.
Precision
Pure precision means to be exact and accurate, however, in real life, Pilates and horse riding it is about carefully practicing and focusing on technique, using your awareness, balance, control, and flow, to coordinate movement in a seamless manner. To strive for accuracy using focus and clarity in order to perform movements, rather than focusing on the movement itself.
When it comes to horses, precision can be applied in a variety of situations and contexts In order to understand this, you need to have knowledge on how horses think, behave, communicate, and learn. Horses respond to where you stand in relation to them, your specific body language in relation to them, how, where and pressure and type of touch you use on them, tone of voice (not just how loud or soft), all of this requires precision and consistently for your horse to learn exactly what you want from them. The more highly trained you want your horse to be (in any discipline), the more precision you will need to utilize in your communication and training with them.
Having a good mindset
Limiting beliefs creates a mindset where you end up believing that you can’t do things, so you don’t. If you have a good mind set, you adopt strategies that assists you in overcoming your limiting beliefs. Therefore, you believe “I can and I will”. Your mindset, thoughts, emotions, behaviors and beliefs have incredible power over your entire life, including your riding. With a good mindset, you will imagine and create possibilities instead of focusing on roadblocks.
When you believe you are getting no where, this indicates a fixed mindset and limiting beliefs. With a fixed mindset, comes limiting beliefs, which will tell you that the situation you are currently in, is the way it is, there is nothing you can do and it will never change no matter what you do. With a growth mindset, you will find ways to create change and implement strategies for personal development. It is obvious which type of people are successful and achieve goals.
Having limiting or empowering beliefs is the key factor in which mindset you choose to have. Limiting beliefs will stunt your growth because it confines you to the belief that your situation won’t change, and therefore, you are unlikely to seek strategies for self development. When you begin to believe in your capacity to change, grow, and develop new skills (and consistently work at theses), you will find that you can, indeed, achieve greatness.
Part of having a good mind set also involves overcoming a fear failure, you need to be willing to make mistakes, and learn from them. It is common to not succeed due to a fear of failure, or success. Either one will keep you from doing things that need to be done. Making mistakes is a necessary part of the process of learning, growing, overcoming challenges and create your own success. If you believe you are going to fail, you probably will, because you won’t develop the skills you need. Taking risks can be scary, but stagnation is worse, especially with horses, because if you’re not progressing, then you’re failing anyway. Stagnation with horses can easily lead to bad habits and behavioral issues. When dealing with horses, you always need to learn, and grow. Horses always have a way of bringing up new and exciting challenges for you, as a rider, need to learn how to over come.
Having a good mindset involves bringing positivity into your life, no matter how small that positivity is. Positivity breeds more positivity; so finding the silver lining in situations, learning, and growing will start to guide everything you do. A positive frame of mind will invite success into your life.
Know yourself and self-awareness
The relationship you have with yourself is one of the most important relationships in your life. Self-knowledge is the main ingredient in leading the life you want. self-knowledge involves having awareness in your - Strengths and weaknesses, thoughts, emotions, behaviors, motivation, habits, values and beliefs. A lack of self-awareness easily leads to struggling to regulate your own thoughts, feelings, and behaviors as well as assert self-control when required. A high level of awareness of yourself will help you recognize and make any changes necessary. Knowing your strengths and weaknesses is also part of this.
Self- awareness, and knowing yourself, equips you with the skills which will allow you to constantly look at improvement in all areas of your riding. It assists you in getting into the frame of mind needed to successfully complete a task of challenge. It will assist you in having effective thought patterns. If you don’t have self-awareness, you don’t know where you are at mentally or emotionally, therefore you won’t know how to change your frame of mind and emotional state, (or even be aware that you need to) in order to overcome challenges. This leaves you like a leaf in wind, leaving things to chance, and therefore reactive, rather than proactive and responsive. Things can easily spiral out of control when this occurs. Having self-awareness facilitates success by putting you in the driver’s seat, and allowing you to make informed decisions, potentially solving issues before they even arise.
Learn from your mistakes
We all make mistakes, it is a part of life, and riding. Making a mistake is not a failure. You can't learn anything from a mistake until you admit that you've made it. How you view your mistakes determines the way that you react to them, and what you do next.
When you admit and understand what you did wrong, you can then adapt your actions, behaviors, and beliefs so that you grow, and don't make the same mistakes again. This often entails learning a new skill, or adaptation of an old one. This increases your ability, makes you a better person, and rider.
In order to learn from your mistakes, you are required to have the ability to listen, look, feel, interpret, learn, reflect – having the ability to apply and build on these to achieve desired outcomes. Having the ability to learn from mistakes also develops and strengthens your ability to effectively problem solve, and therefore overcome challenges.
Self worth
Self worth is the sense of one's own value as a human being, it is the internal sense of being good enough, for who you are, not for what your do, or what anyone else says.
Self worth is different than self-esteem and self confidence. Self-esteem and self confidence, relies on external factors, what you do, such as successes and achievements to define worth and can often be inconsistent, leading to you struggling with feeling worthy. A high degree of self-worth naturally enhances your self-esteem, thereby providing you with the self-confidence needed to follow through with decisions and actions.
Low self-worth is having a general negative overall opinion of yourself, judging, or being overly critical, and placing a general negative value on yourself as a person. When Low self worth operates in your life (and your riding), you will find yourself being unfairly critical of yourself and your abilities, brush off compliments or positive qualities, focus on mistakes (but not learn from them and grow), what you didn't do, or what other people seem to do or have that you think you don’t.
Low self worth has many negative effects on your riding, and therefore your horse’s performance. Feeling inadequate or just plain disappointed in yourself and riding, being overly hard on yourself and seeking perfection is not conclusive to success. You literally get in your own way and sabotage your own success.
When you value yourself for who you are, you feel secure and worthwhile. You have generally positive relationships (including the relationship with your horse) and feel confident about your abilities. You are also open to learning and feedback, which can greatly assist you acquire and master new skills.
Self confidence
Self-confidence is an attitude about your skills and abilities, the belief that you can do things well, and overcome any challenges that confront you. It means you accept and trust yourself and have a sense of control in your life. Self confidence allows you to live with a sense of trust about who you are and how you engage with others, including horses. You have the ability to trust your fundamental skills and what you are made up of on the inside. You can believe in who you are, are able to be level headed and steady under pressure. Self confidence allows you to celebrate achievements you make, as well as the achievements of others. You can admit if you do something wrong, and also when you need help. You can acknowledge, own, learn, and grow from any mistakes you make, and play fair with yourself and others.
Self confidence is derived from experiences, achievements, modelling other people who have succeeded in the area you want to, imagining yourself being confident, confident body posturing, how you talk to yourself, beliefs you hold about yourself, and feedback from others.
Self-confidence also brings about more happiness. Typically, when you are confident in your abilities you are happier due to your successes. When you are feeling better about your capabilities, the more energized and motivated you are to take action and achieve your goals. When you are confident, it transfers to your riding, and subsequently, your horse.
Compassion and empathy
Compassion towards others is a sympathetic consciousness of others' distress together with a desire to alleviate it. Having compassion also means that you offer understanding and kindness to others when they fail or make mistakes, rather than judging them harshly. Finally, when you feel compassion for another (rather than mere pity), it means that you realize that suffering, failure, and imperfection is part of the shared human experience. This also includes compassion towards your horse.
Self-compassion involves acting the same way towards yourself when you are having a difficult time, make mistakes, or notice something you don’t like about yourself. Instead of mercilessly judging and criticizing yourself for various inadequacies or shortcomings, self-compassion means you are kind and understanding when confronted challenges and mistakes. Utilizing self-compassion involves asking yourself – What do I feel, how can I comfort and care for myself right now? Validating your experience and emotions, discovering ways to solve issues.
Having compassion greatly enhances self-worth, self-esteem, self-confidence, improves the quality of relationships (with yourself, your horse and other people). It means you are not arrogant, yet you know your own worth. There are numerous proven benefits of both self-compassion and compassion toward others, such as increased happiness, improved medical outcomes, reduced stress, resolves conflict, builds healthy relationships.
Consistency
Being consistency means to behave in a way that matches your past decisions or behaviors. Inconsistent behavior is unpredictable, may be considered irregular or illogical for the situation, or not keeping with the standards of behavior for a given set of circumstances.
Consistency is critical in order to create space for effective learning environments and relationships of any kind. Including the relationship you have with yourself, others, and your horse.
Consistency facilitates trust, a knowing that you can have expectations and that they will be predictable and understandable. This increases respect, which in turn increases performance, and decreases the amount of behavioral problems that may manifest.
Consistency requires a long-term commitment from you, involving sustained effort in behaving in a repeated, reliable way in order to achieve your goals. Consistency in mind and body (mentally and emotionally), routines, communication, sleep, exercise, and daily routines are just some examples of where consistency is necessary. Horses require consistency, (that makes sense to them) in all aspects of their lives, including all your interactions with them.
Being trustworthy
Being trustworthy means that others are able to believe in the probability that you will behave in ways that are expected. Being trustworthy involves honesty, and gives others a feeling of confidence and security in you, that you are kind, ethical, competent and predictable in who you are, what you say, what you do and what you ask of others. Being trustworthy builds strong, solid and healthy relationships (with humans and horses).
Self-trust means consistently staying true to yourself, you look after your own needs and safety, and treat yourself with kindness, patience love and compassion. You believe in, and refuse to give up on yourself. You are aware of, and honest with your own thoughts and feelings. You have strong ethics, personal standards and values. Self trust is vital for self worth and self confidence.
A very important part of being trustworthy is being honest as well as keeping promises. When you fail to keep a promise, to yourself, others and even your horse, it communicates that you can’t be trusted, and don't value yourself, or them. It indicates that you have chosen to put something else ahead of your commitment. Even breaking small promises, teaches that you cannot be counted on. This, over time, causes fissures to develop in relationships (including the relationship you have with yourself) tainted by broken promises.
As a rider, you want and need your horse to trust you, and you need to be able to trust yourself.
When your horse trusts you, everything is easier. A trusting horse is willing, confident and feels safe to do what is asked, even if it is scary, because he/she is able to trust your judgment. Your horse knows that you are coming from a place of wanting to help, educate, have a strong relationship with respect.
When you keep your promises, and are consistently honest, clear, fair, reliable, predicable, and reasonable, you build trust, in yourself and others (including your horse). This builds solid, positive, productive relationship/s.
Values (what is important to you)
Personal values are the things that are important to you, the characteristics and behaviors that motivate you and guide your decisions. Your personal values determine your priorities, and are a measure you use to tell if your life is turning out the way you want it to. When you llive according to your personal values, life is usually good, you're satisfied and content. But when you are living out of line with your values, that's when things feel wrong. This can be a real source of unhappiness. This is why making a conscious effort to identify your values is so important.
When it comes to your riding, your values affect your riding behavior. If you have strong values when it comes to your riding, making positive and productive decisions becomes easier. When you are clear in what you believe in, and use those values to guide your decisions, your decisions become true to who you are and they are consistent.
When you don’t have a solid understanding of what you believe in, you can end up being taken down any path, and unfortunately, sometimes not the right one. When you don’t have well defined values, making decisions becomes unpredictable and inconsistent.
There are detailed exercises in the ebook “achieve your horse riding goals” that will help you accurately determine both your personal and your riding values.
Personal boundaries
Boundaries are the way you define who you are and separate out what you think and feel from the thoughts and feelings of others. Boundaries are the limits that you create to identify reasonable, safe and acceptable ways for others to behave towards you. When you have healthy boundaries, you can tune into your feelings, identify what is appropriate to you and protect yourself from violations from others. They keep you safe, physically, mentally and emotionally.
When we don’t have strong and healthy personal boundaries, and hold people accountable, we feel used and mistreated. Having personal boundaries means to recognizing the need for a healthy separation between your thoughts and feelings and the thoughts and feelings of others.
Having personal boundaries develops greater self-esteem, self- awareness, well -being, independence, identity.
The benefit of boundaries for equestrians, first and foremost, is safety. for both horses and humans. However, having healthy boundaries with horses has a multitude of benefits. Including; relationship building, trust, reliability, understanding, compassion, consistency. Boundaries enhances the relationship and subsequent performance of both horse and rider.
Stability
To be stable means to be firm, steady, to have the strength and endurance to be free from change or variation. Stability is to have the firmness of resolution or purpose, it is the opposite to fickleness, inconsistency, unpredictability, unreliability.
To be psychologically and emotionally stable means to have the ability to perform in difficult, uncertain or extreme circumstances as successfully as under normal conditions. Emotional stability is a fundamental personality trait that has to do with being even-tempered, particularly in the face of challenges and threats. Without emotional instability, you are prone to being impulsive and likely to make rash decisions without thinking your actions through. This instability means you are not able to effetely adjust your strategy by seeing opportunities that would help you over come challenges. As a rider, your unstable emotions quickly transfer to the horse, causing all sorts of issues for the horse, and therefore the rider again. This problem often spirals into a bigger and bigger problem.
Stability in your body (and your horse’s body) is the resistance to a change in the body's acceleration, or the resistance to a disturbance of the body's equilibrium. Balance within muscle groups and alignment of the skeletal system affect body equilibrium and balance. Small shifts of bones can affect the whole skeletal system.
To have stability and control over your body is important because it allows your body to be capable to perform dynamic movement, where your body requires stable joints, and muscles (which act on each of the joints). Without stability, the body would collapse forwards, backwards and sideways, requiring much more physical effort to sustain a posture or movement.
Stability is vital to horse riding. In order to get the most out of yourself, and your horse, every kind of stability is of utmost importance. Riders know that in order to achieve harmonious performance within any equestrian discipline, horses must be in peak physical fitness and have the correct psychological state. These two factors are equally important and that without both, success is unlikely. The relationship between you and your horse is a very important factor when determining the quality of performance and risk of injury whilst riding. With a strong and stable mind and body, the quality of relationships and performance is significantly increased.
Stress management, knowing how to management thoughts, feelings and actions under pressure
Stress management is your ability to cope with any situation or stimulus that triggers the fight-flight-freeze response.
Stress is a normal reaction the body, mind and emotions have when challenges or changes happen, resulting in physical, emotional and intellectual responses. Your body’s autonomic nervous system controls your heart rate, breathing, vision changes, ability to think clearly and more. The body has a built in stress response; fight-flight-freeze which assists your body face stressful situations. The ability to effectively manage these responses is regarded as stress management skills. Poor stress management narrows your ability to think clearly, function effectively, make good decisions and perform well under pressure. It wreaks havoc on your emotional and mental equilibrium, as well as your physical performance. Long term stress is wide adverse effects on your over all health and wellbeing.
Being able to effectively manage stress, having emotional, mental and physical control skills will greatly assist you in dealing with challenges of all kinds in a productive way. Effective stress management skills have a massive impact on your ability to deal with pressure, fear, anxiety, anger/frustration, disappointment, challenges and adversity.
When it comes to riding and dealing with horses, there are a myriad of sources of stress, challenges and adversity. How you manage these will impact the results you obtain. As with everything when it comes to horses, how you react to stress will always have a direct effect on how your horse responds to both the stressful situation in and of itself, and your reaction as well. When you handle stress effectively, it has a direct run on effect on your horse.
Knowing how to overcome disappointments and set backs
Disappointments and setbacks (in life, and with riding), are inevitable. The emotions that accompany these can be tricky to deal with because every day can bring about new situations to be disappointed over. How you cope with them is often a defining moment in live, and influences your ability to achieve goals. Sometimes, people try to avoid disappointment by underachieving (setting their expectations permanently low) while others seek to avoid it by overachieving (setting their expectations unattainably high). It is very important to learn how to introspect and respond to set backs and disappointment with a positive coping strategy, that seeks to understand what happened, checks whether your expectations were reasonable, reevaluates our perceptions and behaviors, and seeks positive solutions instead of dwelling on the negativity of the situation. You can’t avoid setbacks and disappointments, your response to them is a pivotal point and cross roads of where you will go next. You can choose determination over disappointment. Disappointment and set backs are inevitable, being discouraged, or giving up altogether is always a choice.
The ability to reframe your thinking is vital when facing any kind of adversity in life. To reframe means to choose to look at your circumstances in a different way, with a different perspective, and a different point of view. Seeking ways to learn from the mistakes you made, and in doing so, making you smarter, stronger, more capable. By doing this, the thoughts and meaning that you give to a situation will change as well. It can turn a disappointment, which looked like a stumbling block, into a stepping stone that leads you to a whole new level of success.
It’s important to remember that when you are in the midst of disappointment, it is only temporary and it will pass. The good news is that what you’ve learned about yourself during the experience will help you become more determined, and achieve more in the future.
Looking at different perspectives, ability to be adaptable
The ability to see various perspectives means to be able to look at a situation or understanding a concept from alternative points of view. Adaptability essentially means the ability to be flexible and adapt to changing conditions, factors or environments. Being able to look at many different perspectives, as well as being adaptable is vital when it comes to horses, and riding. Every Equestrian knows that dealing with horses can become a challenging situation at any time.
Adaptability is essential when dealing with horses in all contexts and situations. Horse people know that not all methods work on all horses, in all situations and contexts. So being adaptable, and having a large and varied “tool box” of skills is essential when working with horses. Being adaptable is also important when developing strategies, working on projects and implementing different approaches to achieving goals for all Equestrians.
There are a number of skills associated with being adaptable. The ability to utilize problem-solving skills in order to discover creative solutions to difficult problems. Being able to observe and analyze your approach to overcoming a problem as well as an openness and willingness to adjust your thinking, emotions and behavior. This requires creative and strategic thinking skills. Creative thinking encompasses the capacity to analyze things in a new, open-minded and innovative way.
Adaptability involves cultivating a growth and learning attitude and mindset. Developing a good mindset improves your capacity to take on and over-come challenges, find new ways to expand your knowledge and skills.
What often brings you down or makes you anxious, in difficult or challenging situations, is not necessarily what is actually happening, but how you interpret what is happening. Issues often arise for you when you see things from a negative point of view, and when you don’t realize that this is not the only way to see your current circumstances. People who can shift their perspectives and look at things from different point of view manage difficulties better, see chances and opportunities where others see struggle. It is easier to see things from our own narrow point of view than from a different point of view. Seeing things from a different point of view requires observation, comparison, contemplation, discovery, deducing, communication, interaction, compassion, self awareness and meditation. Being able to see the details and big picture of a situation from many different perspectives gives you a distinct advantage when facing challenges and difficulties. It opens you up to opportunities, learning and skills that assists you in becoming the best you can be.
Accountability and responsibility
Being accountable means that you choose to take responsibility for the outcomes of your words, actions, and behavior. You keep your promises, that you do what you tell yourself you will do.
Responsibility means feeling it’s your duty to manage your own actions, thoughts, feelings and behaviors, and the outcomes of these. That you act morally and personally independently, making decisions without authorization. Personal responsibility involves using common sense, authority, leadership, and maturity; being reliable, trustworthy, dependable, and answerable for what you do.
Utilizing accountability and personal responsibility in your dealings with horses means that you acknowledge what you do, the consequences of your actions, and that you take personal positive action towards amending any mistakes you may have made. You know why you do what you do, and the effects it has, on yourself, and the horse. Taking responsibility and being accountable means, you do not berate or blame when things happen. You can look at the situation, understand what happened and why, and seek to resolve. This is vital when working with horses, as blaming does not result in positive or productive outcomes.
Patience
Having patience means that you have the ability to stay calm, stable and level headed while you are waiting for an outcome that you need or want. Having patience enables you to wait, observe and know when it is appropriate to act, and how to act in a relevant manor. Having patience means you are able to wait, and control your emotions.
Frustration is often the result of a lack of patience. Frustration is a feeling of agitation and intolerance triggered when your needs aren’t met; it’s tied to an inability to delay gratification. When you are able to be patient, you can take a mental step back, and reorganize yourself, instead of aggressively reacting or hastily giving up on something that is frustrating you. Patience allows you to be respectful, and grateful, while investing meaningful time into what you do, without giving up or giving in.
Having patience is necessary when interacting with horses, it is not ideal to be in a hurry. When you are impatient, hurried or stressed, the horse can easily sense it and soon reacts with stress too. Being stressed and hurried leads to badly thought-out instructions from handler/rider to the horse. The horse then responds in confusion, stress and refusal to cooperate. Impatience leads to conflict, and soon horse and rider are in a spiral of frustration.
Perseverance and dedication
perseverance is the tendency to cling to the belief you have in yourself even when faced with challenges that contradicts or disconfirms the basis of that belief. Perseverance separates the people who succeed and the ones who don’t. Those who persevere despite difficulties and setbacks, who never throw in the towel and call it quits when faced with a challenge or adversity. Perseverance is the difference between what makes some people able to keep pushing and complete a task while others habitually fizzle and don't follow through.
Dedication is the act of being fully devoted to something, it is a positive character trait, and a trait that is most likely to lead to success in life. Dedication is a commitment to a particular cause, or course of action.
Perseverance and dedication are corner stones to being responsible and reliable. When it comes to horses, there are plenty of responsibilities to handle, and consistent challenges to work through. There are many benefits to perseverance and dedication, they are traits that allow you put all of your effort into what you are doing. You do not give up, no matter how hard things get. This is the attitude that leads to success. You will have focus and motivation, better time management, more self-discipline, make informed decisions, take calculated risks, and have a greater sense of accomplishment. When things get tough, you will seek answers, learning and solutions, rather than just giving up.
Know your why, and purpose
Knowing your purpose of why you do what you do makes you far more capable of pursuing the things that give you fulfillment. It serves as a point of reference for all your actions and decisions, allowing you to measure your progress and know when you have met your goals. Knowing why you have your goals in the first place gives them meaning to you. Your purpose will assist you in keeping motivated, even when times get tough
When you know your purpose in what you want to do, it gives you clarity, and you are more deeply committed to pursuing your goals. When you have a deeper sense of purpose in what you do, you are better at finding meaning in setbacks you experience along the way. When you know your purpose, you have a feeling of mastery. Anything that goes wrong in your life that is not in line with your values is far easier to let go of. This means that you can learn from hardships and bounce back quickly from adversity. Without purpose, it is very easy to just give up when things get hard.
With horses it is practical to know why you are doing what you are doing at any given time. It shows you have a thorough understanding of what you want and the best way to achieve it. It indicates a sense of calm, patient, compassionate leadership to horses, which they respond to in a positive way.
Motivation
Motivation is the process that initiates, guides, and maintains goal-oriented behaviors. It is what causes you to act upon a want or need. Motivation involves the forces that activate behavior, the driving force behind your actions. Motivation is your desire or enthusiasm to accomplish or achieve something.
Knowing what motivates you can help you keep going. Goal setting (long and short term) is a large part of keeping motivated. Goals that are tied to your values, and purpose and have specific meaning to you. Goals that are specific and relevant to you and your purpose are the most effective at keeping you motivated.
Horses can be a lot of consistent hard work, knowing what keeps you motivated will keep your passion and enthusiasm.
Self Discipline
Having self discipline means you are able to control your impulses and desires, focusing on adherence to a course of action forgoing immediate satisfaction in favor of a greater gain.
Self Discipline requires effort and time, resulting in the power to stick to your decisions and follow them through, without changing your mind. This enables you to choose what you want, and then persevere with actions, thoughts and behavior, which lead to improvement and success. It also gives you the power and inner strength to overcome procrastination, and distractions in order to follow through with what you need to do.
Self-discipline is not a limiting behavior or a restrictive lifestyle. It is a very important ingredient for success. It is perseverance, and the ability not to give up despite setbacks. Consistent self discipline leads to self confidence, self esteem and inner strength, and ultimately satisfaction.
A lack self-discipline often leads to procrastinating and putting your duties aside which can create disarray, when done on a frequent basis. When Ingrained unhelpful habits and an undisciplined mind are not addressed, they eventually prevent you from achieving your horse riding dreams.
Resourcefulness
To be resourceful means you have the ability to act on your own, make decisions, find quick and clever ways to overcome difficulties. Resourcefulness is not about just coping with deprivation; it is a virtue that opens the door to greater accomplishment.
Resourcefulness is about optimizing what you have to work with, it is not just about creating something new; it also applies to making old things work better. To be resourceful requires creativity, energy, intelligence, initiative, pragmatism, risk taking and tenacity. These are all traits which you need to be successful.
To be a successful equestrian you need to know how to optimize your unique talents and skills by harnessing the collective powers of mind, body, and individual resources. The ability to learn, grow and utilize skills is essential for any rider. Making use of high-quality expertise, resulting in concrete strategies that are powerful, easy to apply, and quick to show quality results.
Relationship building
Relationship building is about building productive connections with others and form positive relationships. Having strong relationships gains trust and co-operation, generating greater successful results. It is important to not only have a good relationship with others, but with yourself.
A healthy relationship is one that adds to both parties’ overall well-being, you able to work as a team, and rely on each other. For a relationship to be healthy, It requires in depth understanding, care, respects, communication, trust, honesty, empathy and compassion, and commitment.
Working with horses involves having a working relationship together. How positive that relationship is, will dictate how successful you are together.
Imagination, creativity and curiosity
This means to hold the ability to facilitate the production of original or unusual ideas. It is also
an eager wish to know or learn about something.
Utilizing your imagination and creativity helps to over come fears, generating hope and desire to create something new, have new direction, and to become better. When you continue to conjure solutions to problems, your drive to prove how that solution might work forces you to educate yourself, seek out information, thus boosting what you already know. This helps to transform your dreams into reality.
Having curiosity helps you to become a better problem solver. Curiosity leads to becoming more resourceful. You will ask more questions, such as, what can I do to be better? What are different ways that I can use to solve this problem? As a result, you will naturally ignite you imagination and creativity in order to come up with interesting and innovative ideas. When you are curious, you are not afraid of feeling uncomfortable and facing the unknown, therefore you will take action. You are open to getting out of your comfort zone for the sake of learning. It assist in developing empathy, as, Instead of judging others, you will ask questions and understand where they are coming from.
Curiosity also leads to humility, meaning you don’t think you know everything, you will, instead, consistently seek to learn, grow and look at different perspectives. This makes you more self aware, and therefore more effective in what you do. When you are curious, we are more willing to experiment to see what works and what doesn’t. You will then want to find ways to improve your skills and be a better version of yourself.
These skills give you a distinct advantage when dealing with horses. Horses have the ability to be very challenging. Therefore, to be able to think out side the box and come up with innovate, creative solutions to the benefit of both horse and handler/rider gives you a recipe for success.
Body-mind connection
The mind-body connection is the link between your thoughts, emotions, attitudes, and behaviors with your physical body. The brain and body are connected through neural (nerve) pathways made up of neurotransmitters, hormones and chemicals. These pathways transmit signals between the body and the brain to control everyday functions, from breathing, digestion and pain sensations to movement, thinking and feeling. What you do with your physical body directly impacts your mental state, and what you think and believe has a direct effect on your body. This results in a complex interrelationship between your mind and body. This relationship needs to be as positive as possible for optimum health, wellbeing and performance.
The mind-body connection is a powerful force, and a very useful tool to have. The mind and body are designed to be allies, working in sync to maximize physical, mental health and wellbeing. The body holds your physical health and your ability to function, and move. The mind houses your motivation and instructions to function.
The mind-body connection means that you use your thoughts to influence your body’s physical responses. You process instructions with your mind, and then facilitate those into body movement. Having this skill is highly beneficial in your riding, as your body has direct influence over the horse. As a rider, you communicate directly with your body, to the horse. You expect the horse to respond in specific ways to your body position, movement and aids. These need to be clear, concise, consistent and timed correctly in order for the horse to understand what you are asking and to be able to respond accordingly. When your own body and mind work together, you will be able to communicate to the horse in the most effective and efficient way possible. It stops confusing messages between horse and rider, and produces favorable results.
Understanding horse’s needs, behavior and psychology
In order to interact, ride, handle and communicate with a horse, it is vital to know and understand the psychology that motivates a horse’s behavior. You need to have a thorough understanding of the instinctive behavior’s horses have, their body language, how they think, behave, learn, understand, respond, interact, communicate, their needs, what motivates them, why they do what they do etc in order to be effective when managing, handling, training and riding them.
Horses have specific needs for their over all health and wellbeing, this includes emotional, mental and physical wellbeing and needs. As a equestrian, you need to learn, be aware of, and cater to these needs on all levels, in order to have a happy, healthy positive team mate.
You will not achieve a high level of being in tune with, knowing your horse, and attaining maximum performance from them, if you do not understand them, and take care of their needs. Thorough comprehension of your horses over all needs, behavior and psychology will improve your relationship with your horse and give you the confidence to make better-informed choices about riding, handling, training, competing, their over all management and wellbeing.
Flexibility and Suppleness
Being flexible means you are able to change yourself, mentally, physically or emotionally in order to suit new conditions and situations. You are able to bend easily without breaking, you can modify yourself, change or compromise in order to achieve an outcome.
When you are supple, you are readily adaptable or responsive to new situations, you are capable of bending, twisting and moving with ease, without stiffness or awkwardness.
Having flexibility and suppleness offers many benefits, they allow easier movements while building strength and stability, leading to greater range of motion, improved balance, fewer injuries, and increased performance.
Being mentally, emotionally and physically flexible allows you to cope with stressful situations with a more open mindset, and see things from different perspectives. It’s assists in prevention of becoming emotionally stuck and helps you go with the flow in life. This supports problem-solving capabilities, and enables positive relationship building. Handling and riding horses provide a form of physical and mental exercise which requires you to think on your feet. You need to be able to problem-solve, sometimes within a very short frame of time, as you communicate with your horse and overcome obstacles together. If you have a stiff body and attitude, this quickly transfers to the horse, which can easily lead to problems.
Stamina and endurance
Having stamina and endurance means you have the ability to sustain prolonged physical or mental effort. You have the physical and mental strength and energy to do something that might be difficult and will take a long time, you can keep going, even when tired or facing other unfavorable conditions.
Increasing your stamina helps you endure discomfort or stress when you're doing an activity. It also reduces fatigue and exhaustion. Having high stamina allows you to perform your daily activities at a higher level while using less energy.
As an equestrian, you understand that handling and riding horses requires a lot of work. Having the ability to keep going without exhaustion gives you a distinct advantage. Fatigue can easily lead to feeling a lack of interest and motivation, moodiness and irritability, cynicism, doubt, and pessimism, feeling overwhelmed or stressed. All of which will end up having a negative effect on both you and your horse’s relationship, and performance.
Balance, coordination and proprioception
When you have balance, you can evenly divide and distribute your weight enabling you to remain upright and steady, in equal and correct proportions. Balance is when you are able to maintain an even distribution of weight and energy through your body in static/still and dynamic/movement activities. Coordination is the effective, simultaneous functioning of the brain and the body.
Physical balance is a complex skill that involves the brain, muscles, and parts of the inner ear. If you don't practice and maintain balance, the coordination between these three systems deteriorates over time, making it harder for you to move effectively, perform activities, stay upright and maintain proper posture.
Having mental and emotional balance means you are able to be in a state of mind that is free of afflictive and negative tendencies, where you can realize your potential in terms of wellbeing, wisdom, compassion and creativity. Reaching mental balance does not mean that you are completely void of any negative thoughts and emotions, but having the capability to not allow these to become so overwhelming that is profoundly affects your well being. Balance involves engaging with experiences without making assumptions or harboring preconceived ideas about circumstances that can lead to misinterpretations or distortions of reality. It means being present, living the experience, and seeking learning and solutions to problems.
Coordination means that you are able to organize different parts of your complex body so they are can work together effectively, you have the ability to use different parts of the body together smoothly and efficiently. Having coordination in your body means you are able to execute smooth, accurate, controlled movements and positions. Coordination allows you to select the right muscle at the right time with proper intensity to achieve needed action. Coordinated movement allows a mind-body connection where appropriate speed, distance, direction, timing and muscular tension are easily utilized when needed.
Proprioception is your body's ability to sense movement, action, and location. It's needed with every muscle movement you make, without proprioception, you wouldn't be able to move without thinking in extreme detail, about every move you make. An example of proprioception is when you close your eyes and touch a finger to your nose. The position of your body parts, balance and proprioception are closely interlinked. There are sensors in your muscles, tendons, ligaments and other soft tissues that are responsible for communication to your brain about joint position, pressure and muscle stretch. To ensure your body has the ability to move in a precise, balanced, and co-ordinated way, the nervous system is required to constantly receive sensory information to be able to adjust and correct movements. Not everyone has the same level of proprioceptive ability, it requires specific training. If you sustain an injury, your proprioception sensors become impaired, creating an unstable communication pathway between body and mind, this scenario requires rehabilitation of the neural pathways. Proprioception is key to learning new, and improving your movement skills. It is key in muscle (nervous system) memory and hand-eye coordination.
In order to effectively ride horses, good balance, coordination and proprioception are all essential. You need to be able to balance and control your body on top of a moving, (and at times, unpredictable) animal, as well as applying precise and consistent aids. In order to be able to do this, balance, coordination, body control and proprioception in a necessity. The better you are at all these, the greater your, and your horse’s performance will be, and the less likely you will have falls or sustain injuries.
Responsiveness
In order to have good quality responsiveness to any given situation, you need to be able to react in a quick and positive way that is thought out. Having healthy responses means you are alert, curious and have a resourceful mind set. You can potentially anticipate and adapt to existing and future circumstances, thus contributing to better outcomes. Having positive responses contributes to healthy relationships and well being.
In life, a small percentage is about what happens, but a large percentage is how you react to what happens. Meaning, it is not what has happened to you, but how you react to these events that matters the most. When you decide to respond to what occurs, it will shape your feelings, actions and therefore, results. Challenging situations are constantly occurring when managing and riding horses, your responses to any given situation will determine the short, and long term out comes. Remember that horses react to you, your behavior around (and towards) them, and your emotions.
There is a crucial distinction between responsiveness and reactiveness. When you respond, you are in a state of a deliberate pause, and a state of a thought out process. When you react, it is more of an animalistic behavior, logic is thrown out the window, and there is an instant reaction, emotions such as frustration, anger, and fear can easily take over, and you will fail to think things through. Having a non thought out reaction often leads to a knee jerk reaction, oftentimes resulting in undesirable consequences. Reactiveness comes from insecurity and from a self-preservation and survival instinct.
When you have trained yourself to have responsive behavior, you are in a position of a secure, controlled and progressive mindset that seeks solutions. There is a sense of ownership and total responsibility being responsive. You can direct yourself towards a predetermined goal or result. This is a win-win situation for you and the horse which is mutually beneficial.
Synchronization
Having synchronization means that things are happening at the same time, moving at the same speed and rate as something else, being in a state of in tune harmony. The more synchronization is repeated between individuals (such as horse and rider), the more it increases their like, trust, communication, efficiency and knowledge for one another, therefore strengthening their relationship. When things are working in harmony with one another, it means its parts are combined into a pleasant, effective, co-operating working arrangement.
When riding horses, there are many elements that need to be in synch with each other. For example, the rider’s movements need to be in synch with the horse’s movements, the rider’s individual body parts need to work in synch with each other, the riders’ aids need to be timed and applied in synch with the horse’s movement. In order to have clear communication with your horse you have to make sure to be in tune and in synchronicity with them, mentally and physically in order to achieve harmony. This involves the effective working combination of all ingredients listed here.
Relaxation combined with effort
In order to be relaxed, you need to be in a state of calmness and low tension. Effort is the conscious exertion of power or strength.
When riding, your body connects you directly to your horse. To ride effectively you need strength, power, and tone in your body, but you also need finesse. You require tone and control in your body, but not excessive tension or tautness. Riders need to train their body to be able to maintain a state of relaxation combined with effort. This requires strength, control, tone, some tension, and a degree of relaxation all in the right amounts. Excess tension in your body interferes flexibility, ease of movement, balance and communication between you and your horse. Being too relaxed means, you won’t maintain proper balance, control or position. Riders need to learn to use just the amount of effort needed without developing unnecessary tension. The ultimate goal in riding is to achieve a state of being seemingly relaxed, but without any floppiness.
Posture, alignment, straightness
Posture is the position you hold your body. Everyone has different posture types, a “natural” posture. Your natural posture is similar to a horse’s natural conformation.
Your every day activities, what you do with your body on a regular basis, including how you sit, stand, walk and move all effect your posture.
Every posture type has strengths and weakness. Your individual natural posture, combined with your every day activities, means that certain body areas are stronger or weaker, longer or shorter than other body parts. These natural imbalances effect your body, and subsequent performance abilities, even in riding. Imbalances often cause pain and discomfort, and can lead to injuries over time. Knowing your own natural posture means you can also understand where your imbalances are, and how they affect your individual body.
Alignment of your body refers to how your head, shoulders, spine, hips, knees and ankles relate and line up with each other. Your natural postural imbalances will put parts of your body out of alignment. Proper alignment of your body allows for good posture, and puts less stress on your body.
An easy way to understand postural, alignment (and straightness) imbalance is to visualize a tee-pee or circus tent. When there is equal appropriate tension on all sides, it will stand up straight and tall, not lean to one side or sag. If there is too much tension on one side it will lean over. If there is not enough tension or slackness on one side it will also cause it to lean over. These imbalances will put significant strain on other parts. Your muscles and bones work in a similar way. All too often, pain, stiffness, and even injuries you have in your body actually come from misalignment and postural imbalances. When one area of your body is out alignment, it can take the rest of the body with it.
Your body’s posture and alignment directly influences your balance, coordination and body control, and can also affect your thinking and emotions (via your mind-body connection). All this will have an effect on your riding, and therefore your horse. Horse riding requires all the posture and stabilizing muscles to work effectively. These muscles must be in balance in order for you to be able to ride well. These muscles must be in balance to function well. Good posture both on the ground and on the horse needs good alignment (a vertical line dropped down from the ear goes through the shoulder, hip, and heel).
When your body is in good alignment, you require minimum effort to stay in control and sit upright. Ideal static and dynamic posture have a balance between all the front, side and back muscles. Having good posture and alignment is an essential part of being able to ride a horse well.
Strength and tone
Your strength is the physical energy that you have, which allows you to perform movements and actions, against some resistance. Physical strength is measured by the amount of exertion of force your body and muscles are able to apply. Strength encompasses bodily or muscular power and firmness. mental, emotional, moral, and power and courage. Greater muscular strength enhances your ability to perform movements, keep good alignment, maintain balance and stability, and coordinate your body.
Strength also protects your body’s structure. Both you and your horse both have a dominant side, often this matches each other over time. This creates muscle imbalances throughout both you and your horse’s entire bodies and as one side becomes strong, the other lags or even weakens. Having imbalance in a body, whether it be you or your horse, dramatically affects performance and can cause soreness, pain and even injuries over time.
Mental and emotional strength doesn't involve suppressing or denying your thoughts and emotions, or your pain. It is about having the courage, and ability to acknowledging and understand them, and have the skills to make good judgments and decisions, avoid potential problems, or solve problems. Being mentally and emotionally strong isn't about acting tough. It's about being aware of your thoughts and emotions, learning from painful experiences, and operating your life according to your values, and morals.
Having mental and emotional strength is a big part of emotional intelligence. It addresses your thoughts and feelings which create the behaviors you exhibit, that impact on your overall quality of your life. Emotional intelligence involves developing skills and then adopting daily habits that build your mental and emotional muscles, permitting you to transform bad habits that hold you back.
Muscle tone is the tension within a muscle at rest, and it is the measurement of your muscle’s response to an outside force, such as a stretch or change in direction. When your muscles have good and evenly distributed tone, you will have increased stamina, energy, and greater flexibility, with an even distribution of tension throughout your entire body.
Bother strength and tone play important roles in your ability to ride you horse well, with ease, comfort, balance and stability.
Biomechanics
Biomechanics is the understanding of movement in your body, including how muscles, bones, tendons, and ligaments work together to produce movement. It also includes the study of how forces within your body interact with each other, and the physical effects these have when your body moves. Biomechanics examines how your body moves like it does under various conditions.
Every part of your body has a designated job to do by nature, including your muscles. Each part needs to do the job it was designed to do. This creates effective and correct movement patterns. To be able to ride a horse, your body needs to be trained to be able to meet the unbalanced forces generated by the horse’s movement underneath you. Therefore, good horse riders’ biomechanics is about correct use of your muscles and joints to stabilize, balance and move with the horse. This is vital in order to be able to ride well.
Having good biomechanics Increases movement speed, power, energy conservation and efficiency. It also prevents muscle imbalances, reduces wear and tear on joints and ligaments. provides good form and technique. prevents injury and is able to speed up recovery for injuries. Good biomechanics increase your body’s ability to perform well, while reducing risks of injuries.
Health and wellbeing
When you have good health and well-being, it means you are in a state of being able to maintain physical, mental, and emotional stability and balance (homeostats). It is not just the absence of illness or disease. There are various aspects that make up your overall health and welling, including physical, economic, social, emotional, psychological/mental, life satisfaction, engaging activities. It is therefore important to look at these and compare them to your own life and know which areas you may need to put more time, energy and effort into if they are not going so well for you. Your health and wellbeing need as much balance as possible.
Health and well being should be of importance to you, as horse riding and managing takes a lot of work, dedication, time and energy, and money.
Breathing
To breath is to balance the gases in your body, you absorb oxygen into your body as you inhale, and to expel carbon dioxide as you exhale. This is all done through the movement of your lungs. There are muscles have the job of controlling the movement of the lungs are the diaphragm (a sheet of muscle underneath the lungs) and the muscles between the ribs. (intercostals). Your breath stays with you for your entire life, from the moment you are born to the moment you die. Your breath changes with every feeling and emotion you have.
When you are in a relaxed state, your primarily breathe through your nose in a slow, even and gentle way. This state of breathing has a calming effect on the nervous system, and your body’s involuntary functions.
When you are under stress of any kind, your breathing pattern will change. Often when you are anxious, afraid, worried you will take shorter, smaller, more hurried, shallow breaths. In this state, you can make the symptoms of your stress worse. Your shoulders will often tense, rise, and role forward, and you won’t utilize your diaphragm as much to move air in and out of your lungs. Breathing in this way will have a disruptive effect on your body’s ability to balance gases.
Training yourself to be able to control your breathing under stress and press has many physiological benefits including; lowering your blood pressure and heart rate, reducing the levels of stress hormones in your blood, reduced lactic acid build-up in muscle tissue, allowing your body to balance the levels of oxygen and carbon dioxide in the blood, improved immune system, better health and wellbeing.
There are a variety of different breathing techniques that all have different effects upon your body. Learning different breathing techniques that you can utilize in any given situation to help achieve a desired result is highly advantageous.
Precision
Pure precision means to be exact and accurate, however, in real life, Pilates and horse riding it is about carefully practicing and focusing on technique, using your awareness, balance, control, and flow, to coordinate movement in a seamless manner. To strive for accuracy using focus and clarity in order to perform movements, rather than focusing on the movement itself.
When it comes to horses, precision can be applied in a variety of situations and contexts In order to understand this, you need to have knowledge on how horses think, behave, communicate, and learn. Horses respond to where you stand in relation to them, your specific body language in relation to them, how, where and pressure and type of touch you use on them, tone of voice (not just how loud or soft), all of this requires precision and consistently for your horse to learn exactly what you want from them. The more highly trained you want your horse to be (in any discipline), the more precision you will need to utilize in your communication and training with them.