The majority attempt to overcome fear by utilizing their conscious mind. They try and will away their fears, to pay no heed to their fears so that these fears simply fade away. There is one problem with using your conscious mind to fight fears: your gains will be short term, and you’ll soon be back to square one. You can’t create permanent changes unless you work on the one power that truly influences your life: your subconscious mind.

Your subconscious mind is ever alert and registers just about everything you imagine and pronounce. When it registers your thoughts, it attempts to make them become true. The subconscious doesn’t distinguish between good and bad. If you express a desire mentally or orally, your subconscious mind will make an attempt to make that wish come true. It is of small matter that the result may not actually be of benefit.

The issue of changing mental programming makes me think of what Albert Einstein had to say about insanity. If you have been a frightened horse rider, you’ll have programmed your mind to picture the worst and you’ll have been worrying yourself to death over it. Your programming tells you that you’re a chicken and so a chicken you’ll be. The only way you can change this situation is reprogram your consciousness to accept that you are indestructible.

The gigantic merit of redoing your mental programming in preference to relying on will power or never-say-die determination is that reprogramming is far faster and infinitely more permanent. You can reprogram yourself with visualization or self-talk.

Here’s what visualisation is all about. Take three deep breaths and relax.

1. Go thru a mental fill in the blank exercise.

2. I’m wearing_____; my horse’s color is ______, the aromatic flowers close to the podium are _______. Use all of your 5 senses. Rub your hands on your horse, take a whiff of fresh air, tune in on the horse’s gaits. Take a good look at the ring you’re riding in. Get a taste of the salt in the sweat trickling down from your brow.

3. Imagine yourself as being supremely confident, cool and bold. It is easy to do this if you hark back to the times when you actually were like that.

4. Keeping up this routine for a couple of days. They say it takes at least 52 days of repetition to develop new habits.

What you really should know about self-talk is given below.

– Be certain to maintain consistency

– Talk to yourself in the present tense, like you are in possession of the qualities you want. Say things like I’m brave or I am unafraid.

– Say things as far as possible without negatives. For example, say I am fearless, instead of saying I’m really not afraid. The mind doesn’t associate any picture with the word ‘not’, and this suggests that when you assert I’m really not scared, your subconscious mind is registering ‘I am afraid’.

I have purposefully made things sound very simple in this piece. How simple or difficult it actually turns out to be depends on your dedication. If you really want to, you can use visualization as well as self-talk to make yourself whatever you want to be. Turning into a fearless pony rider is just the start.

Horses are Heather Tomspassion and she enjoys sharing her extensive knowledge through her 100s of articles with other horse lovers read more