If anxiety affects your performance or enjoyment of riding, hypnosis might be the answer for improving your horse riding confidence and results. So you can enjoy every ride!
Whether you’re suffering from a lack of confidence generally, around specific activities like competing, trail riding or jumping, or feeling anxious after a fall or injury, you’ve probably already realised that positive thinking isn’t enough.
This famous quote is attributed to Sigmund Freud - “The human mind is like an iceberg; it floats with one-seventh of its bulk above water”. This is because what you see, think, feel and do is just the tip of what is going on in your mind. The rest is going on below the surface of your consciousness in your unconscious mind.
“The human mind is like an iceberg; it floats with one-seventh of its bulk above water”. ~ Sigmund Freud
Your unconscious mind stores the memories and emotions - both good and bad - connected to your experiences. Your brain refers to these past experiences in every aspect of your day, without you even knowing about it.
In one sense, this is helpful because it means that once you’ve learned how to do something, you don’t waste time or energy consciously remembering how to do it. You just do it without thinking. Routine things like brushing your teeth or tying your shoe laces. Or how to post the trot.
Our brain likes to keep things simple for us. It also likes to keep us safe. So your unconscious mind sets off alarm bells anytime it thinks you might be putting yourself in danger. That’s great if you’re facing a bear in the woods. Not so great when you want to do well at a horse show or enjoy hacking out with your friends.
It’s the night before the horse show or that planned trail ride, and you can’t sleep because your mind is full of negative thoughts. All you can do is worry about what could possibly go wrong. Things like forgetting your course or test, falling off or some other nightmare situation. By doing this, you’re actually hypnotising yourself into a negative mindset and feeling anxious.
Having a negative mindset and feeling anxious means things are more likely to go wrong. In that state, you’re unable to think clearly, make good decisions or ride at your best. That cycle of negative thoughts creating negative experiences reinforces to you (and your unconscious mind) that what you’re doing isn’t fun - it’s scary or even dangerous.
Hypnosis isn’t magic. It’s something we all do many times every day. Being engrossed in a movie or book. Driving to work (and not remembering most of the drive). Hypnosis bypass your conscious logical mind to work directly with your unconscious.
When you have a session with a hypnotist, it’s a collaboration. You work together towards your desired end result.
And you are always in control.
With the hypnotist’s guidance, you can:
- release negative emotions and beliefs from passed events,
- reset your thought patterns,
- change negative language, and
- retrain your mind and body to respond to stress in a different way.
Hypnosis can help riders to…
- get back in the saddle with confidence after a bad fall or accident
- resolve fears of riding on trails
- Eliminate performance nerves
- Improve focus at competitions
- deal with bereavement after losing your horse
- stop suffering with low confidence or panic attacks
Your logical mind can be telling you that you have nothing to fear about riding because you have the skills and the right horse. You know that 99% of the time, you have ridden without anything serious going wrong.
But somewhere along the line, something happened that scared you and your unconscious/emotional mind is sending you all the reasons for not doing something you used to feel confident and joyful doing.
Help is available! Hypnosis can help you to overcome trauma, fears and phobias and rebuild your riding confidence to even greater levels than before. In just a handful of sessions you can be ‘back in the saddle’ and enjoying every ride.
If you want to talk with me about how to build your horse riding confidence or improve your riding performance, schedule a FREE 30 min consultation (Valued at $97).
This is not a sales call and there is no obligation to buy anything.
