Like all life’s endeavours, horse riding performance can be seriously inhibited by fear in the rider’s mind. Over my years of effort to boost my horse riding talents, I have learned the hard way that unless you work out your mind with the same energy you manage to work out your body, you are not going to achieve everything you’d like to.

The rider has a serious mental exercise menu to select from: anchoring, induction of inventive state, psychological rehearsal, using affirmations to eradicate limiting beliefs, perpetual positioning and reframing, just to name a few. There’s an exercise regimen available to almost every single rider. Most riders, though, follow their own mixture of strategies. Here are ten confidence builders for riders.

1. Accept yourself

Realize you are good enough just the way that you are, speaking raw material wise, as there is always scope for improvement in the best of riders. But the essential you have everything wanted to make a great horse rider. And by the way, that goes for your horse, too. He is fine just as he is.

2. Rehearse in the mind

Across the entire world, sportsmen use this technique to condition themselves. They imagine themselves in action, and fine tune every step as they go through the competitive process. They are able to achieve marked improvements in performance this way.

3.Use anchors

Anchors are triggers that create a desired mental condition. While riding, for instance, the simple act of touching your thumb to your index finger while the reins are in your hand might be the anchor that boosts your confidence in the saddle.

4. Maintain a journal

You can gain a lot by maintaining a very regularly updated private journal. When you feel low, you can refer back to your previous glory days to remind yourself that you still have it in you. Frequently, great accomplishments follow spells of depression.

5. Hypnosis

Never undervalue the potency of suggestion. It can work wonders with the sub-conscious. Suggestion is an absolutely essential tool for any person in any field of enterprise.

6. Be thankful

Show some gratitude for all that you have in life, for all of your past achievements and for all the great things that your life has in it. Be grateful for the positives, however big or little they are.

7. Set goals

When you set goals, you are giving yourself something to aim at. You’ve got something tangible to work for, something which will tell you at any point whether you are going the correct way or the wrong one. Don’t be afraid to shoot for the stars. You can land on the moon, and that is something not everyone can boast of.

8. Reframing

By reframing, you settle on what significance an event has for you and how you’ll respond to it on the emotional front. After every competitive event, you can instantly focus on everything that went well, while leaving the errors for later analysis. This is an about turn from our normal tendency to focus on our errors, while ignoring the uplifting fact that we did far more things right than we did wrong. It is an disposition that blinds us up on our own capabilities.

9. Throw off limiting beliefs

Every human being has some very inflexible ideas of himself or herself. We like to think we know ourselves, our capabilities, our limitations. As riders, we have set ideas about riding, horses, trainers, farriers, vets, diets, events, in short , everything connected with riding. We are so set in our ways of thinking we often ignore contrary fact by hiding our heads in the sand. When things go bad, we look for scapegoats: our horses, our gear, the arenas, the weather. We fail to aim the finger at the biggest culprit: we ourselves.

10. Identify your unique style

Your ability to learn and keep, to gain mastery over new talents is directly proportional to your mind’s fitness. The efficiency with which you pursue your ambitions on both the physical and mental fronts is pretty much reliant on the quality of your minds condition.

Get going with your mental conditioning regime today. Getting mentally fit is approached the same as getting physically fit. You work on your mind muscles every day, methodically and with energy. Know yourself, and develop your strong points.

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