bad habits and good horses
One of the elements that horseback riding makes you hyper-aware of is your own personal set of bad habits and their inevitable consequences. Many of my own set of bad habits are linked to nervousness and fear. They are both physical and mental, and in nearly ten years of riding, they come back to haunt me frequently enough to remind me that, like anxiety, it is how you deal with them that makes all of the difference.
My own set of panic buttons usually involve worry for the horse or myself. For some reason, although I am nearly fearless when it comes to cross-country jumps, I often freeze up and freak out when stadium jumping. Even though I know they fall down at the knock of a hoof, they still worry me much more than the big, solid tables and hay racks that I jump outside.
My nervous habits are not unique; I freeze up and become a passenger. Instead of directing the horse, I, in effect, abandon it and leave it to its own devices. Luckily, although there are numerous horses who will pack you over a fence even if you are unsure, there are also horses out there who telegraph loud and clear that if you have any reason to doubt the wisdom of the idea, they have no problem at all waiting until you are very sure it is a good one. These, for me at least, are the horses that teach me to manage my anxiety. In my case, that means actively imagining putting the emotion aside and focusing on the job at hand. Oddly, I have found that I do best when riding a nervous or green horse; the fact that I need to be stronger, calmer, better for the horse, helps me forget my own anxiety about the situation.
The horse I rode in my last lesson, Jenny, is a very sweet little mare. She’s not built ideally for jumping, though, and she needs an accurate ride to the fence to make sure that she gets over it in a way that will make her feel positive about the next one. Of course, a horse that is nervous about its own ability tends to make me feel nervous about its ability as well. We were doing fine until the fence went up to about a meter (3ft), when we both questioned the wisdom of jumping at that height and had a stop. As she hesitated in front of the fence, all of my nervous habits flared up and I flung myself forward in a effort to encourage her to go over the fence. Luckily, she wasn’t fooled, and she stopped to let both of us regroup.
Now, this moment, right after a mistake, is often where I fall apart. I have been known to exhibit a few perfectionist tendencies, and I get very obsessed with what exactly I’ve done wrong. It has taken years (and I still have a long way to go), but I have gotten much better at yanking my focus from the mistake I’m replaying over and over in my head to the task at hand. It still comes back to haunt me after the lesson, but I was able to focus on counting the strides, and we got over the next fence with aplomb, if not with too much grace.
I know that I focus on mistakes, and horseback riding has really brought that to the fore (if only because it’s hard to argue that you were doing something wrong when you end up with dirt in your hair after going over the fence without the horse), and I’ve found that I can use the mental techniques I created to refocus at work and in social situations. Because, well, being an anxious perfectionist isn’t as much fun as it might sound. And Jenny, and other horses like her, has taught me that it’s not the mistakes that count, necessarily, it’s the action you take afterwards.