Strengthen Yourself Mentally and Emotionally This Winter

Use Indoor Days to Boost Your Riding From the Inside Out

When chilly temperatures arrive, we usually spend more time indoors.

During winter months, do you feel like you’re losing ground in your riding?

While there is no substitute for time in the saddle, winter can be a GREAT time to strengthen the mental, emotional, and physical aspects of your riding.

The first step is a shift in perception. Swap the thought, “Winter is the pits!” … for … “Winter is a great opportunity!”

After you giggle for fibbing to yourself, try on these ideas anyway(!):

Map out a mental and emotional strengthening program.

Days huddled by the fire are perfect to reflect upon last season’s gains, your dreams, and where you need to improve. Use this time to get to know yourself again. The first step to getting stronger is to face your weaknesses honestly.

To get going, arm yourself with paper and pencil and answer the following questions:

During pressure situations, like a horse show or whenever you want to be at your best, what outside person, place, horse, or situation triggers an uncomfortable feeling inside? An example might be feeling less than ideal when a certain person watches you ride. Another example might be going to a particular place to ride where you’ve had a bad experience. List them all.

What exactly are the uncomfortable feelings associated with those situations? Are you feeling insecure, defensive, or angry when a certain personal stands at the rail? Are you feeling fearful for your safety or do you just lack confidence overall? The answers to these questions form the starting points for your winter mental and emotional work.

Then, devise a plan to replace unproductive ways of thinking and acting with empowering ones. Challenge your fears and insecurities head-on with an effective plan.

When you reflect on the specific situations that trigger the unpleasant feelings, ask yourself, “What do I have control of?” If you find that you have no control over the person, place, or situation, tell yourself, “Let it go.” Try some humorous visualizations like putting the whole situation in a hot air balloon and watch it float away. Then, mentally practice getting back to the task at hand by asking yourself, “What’s my job?”

Letting go of things over which you have no control, releasing blame, and taking responsibility for yourself are your real jobs. To know and live this is a powerful, productive, and liberating attitude.

Here’s another example. If feeling safe is the issue, you can take control by mapping out a new riding instruction plan for the near future. A feeling of safety is within you. The action you take to remedy this challenge is something you have control over.

What positive emotional replacements could I condition instead of my old weak ways of thinking and feeling? For example, confidence might replace insecurity, while calmness could replace tension. One of the simplest truths of productive thinking (that evokes POWERFUL results) is to focus on what you want instead of what you don’t want. For example, forget the troubling person … (they might be in the hot air balloon anyway (-:) … focus on a wonderful ride in your mind. Get into it!

Spend at least five minutes a day getting into the FEELING of your positive emotion and then another 15-20 minutes visualizing yourself riding with calmness, confidence, and energy. Add emotion, color, size, sights, sounds, smells, and touch to your mental pictures for maximum effectiveness. Get out the magic wand, baby! Go for it!

Keep a daily journal. Each day jot down the new feelings you are activating and how you are doing. This doesn’t have to be a big deal. Make it fun. Daily writing keeps you in touch with yourself. Make some kind of notation … even if it’s only a sentence, “I LOVE winter!"

Map out a physical toughening program. This is the idea you knew would show up sooner or later! You can dramatically improve your confidence with more time in the gym. Here’s the short course:

Priority #1: Abdominal strengthening. Build your skills ideally up to between 50 and 100 curls per day.
Priority #2: Interval aerobic exercise. Raise and lower your heart rate within your personal aerobic training zone for 20-30 minutes, 3-4 times per week.
Priority #3: Overall body strengthening. Alternate strength building exercises every other day between your upper and lower body.
Priority #4: Flexibility training. Do stretching exercises daily.

Enjoy your new found winter treasure of time to do the essential mental, emotional, and physical work that is easily overlooked when you get busy during the rest of the year.

Thirty days of conditioning positive mental and emotional skills will replace old sloppy patterns that hold you back!

As winter thaws you will emerge mentally clear and physically fit. That’s a life treasure, too.

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Tags: Barbara Schulte, Barbra Schulte, Equestrian, Horse Training, Horseback Rider Confidence, Horseback Riding, Mental Training, Mental Training for Horseback Riders, Ride With Confidence, Rider Fear, Riding Horseback, Sports Psychology, Sports Psychology for Horseback Riders

Comments

4 Comments on Strengthen Yourself Mentally and Emotionally This Winter

dawn hill on Mon, 11th Jan 2010 1:53 pm

Barbara,
You always have such logical effective ideas. Thanks for the winter goals in your newsletter. I needed a more positive approach and a plan to overcome my habit of choking when it really counts.
Dawn

Sylvia Howell on Mon, 11th Jan 2010 2:03 pm

Hi Barbara,
Hope your are having a blessed winter!
I have to say once again “THANK YOU!” so much for the super words of advice for building mental toughness this winter, they couldn’t have come at a better time for me. I have your cds The Gift, The Barrel Racing cd and The Gift Book.
My horse and I as a team have improved tremendously in barrel racing competition as a result, winning a lap top pc, a year end saddle, we almost won a horse trailer ,we were just 1 thousandth off. What a great time I’m having. I just have to say that when you start doing good it sure weeds out the people in your life that are your true friends and the ones who perpetrate as “Friends.” Generally in the past this betrayal from “perpetraiting friends” would have sent me in a tail spin of self-confidence almost as if they knew it would do it to me and I wouldn’t perform at my best. I had been do very well until a recent “Best Friend” broke my trust by trying to sabbatoge my horse at a race. I was is in total disbelief that she had done what she had done on the last day of a three day competition. Just to let you in on what she did, my horse is a “bleeder when he runs” and can’t have food 5 hours before competition and this person went out at 3:30am and gave my horse hay, I, by the grace of God I happened to wake up and had a strong feeling to go check my horses at the barn and caught her feeding him. We had words and needless to say I am no longer considering her a friend. As a result, I allowed my focus to remain on the morning and had a very hard time getting into an IPS state and it showed in my race. I kind of regressed and my self-confindenced wained because I thought I was a better judge of character.
All that aside I just wanted you to know that the image of this person in that hot air ballon will work for me!! I have started to reread The Gift and feel as though I will be back stronger by the Grace of God. I have forgiven the person in my mind and may God bless them. Ironically enough this is the same person that led me to listen to your CD’s. God ways are wonderful!!
Barbara, you are such a wonderful inspiration and a Blessing in so many lives. Please keep up the great work!!
God Bless,
Sylvia Howell

Jenny Lance on Wed, 13th Jan 2010 12:19 pm

I love your article on using Winter Time productively. First, it parallels a book I am currently reading called Using Your Brain For A Change. In addition to playing with our horses in the indoor arena, my friends and I are trying to stay fit emotionally, physically, and mentally! I watch Parelli DVDs while I do my Pilates to increase my horsemanship and exercise at the same time! My friends and I also have scheduled a Sunday afternoon “movie and a snack” program where we watch various horse related DVDs. Currently we are working our way through Walter Zettl’s dressage Harmony set. All of this helps take away the winter blues and helps us become stronger during these snowy, cold days!

Francine Acord on Mon, 25th Jan 2010 5:28 pm

Sylvia – I’m very sorry about your experience and comforted at the same time. Everything you said is true – I had a horrible car accident 12 years ago. In 2007 I met a wonderful man whom I married this summer that is helping make all my riding dreams come true (I’m now showing APHA after some of my doctors told me to sell all my horses and give it up 10 years ago-I’ve never minded very well).

One of my best friends of almost 20 years fell at our wedding in August 2009, and later started yelling at me for finding a husband after almost 20 years and she’s upset I’m showing horses and doing well. So, she slapped us with a lawsuit now for neck, back, head and emotional injuries. I can’t help but almost laugh – not from her accident by any means because I never want anyone hurt, but when a person drinks and then doesn’t take responsibility for their own actions, then the reaction to blame someone else for their own consequences and life’s irony’s.

So I’m working on my attitude and looking for the positive in every situation and working on my own “reaction”. In the meantime same situation as you Silvia – she intially turned my daughter on to the barrel racing series many years ago.

The good news is Barbra, I turn to your wisdom & teachings no matter what is going on in my life because bottom line, I need to be prepared for anything in life. And life is “the show pen”. We are only as good as our bad days.

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