Rock Bottom And The Decision That Saved My Riding Career

There was a time in my life when I judged my self worth by how well I rode. I knew myself, as myself, based on my ability to ride well. And that nearly broke me. That amount of self-ridicule and constant comparison, along with the negative voice that lived in my head and told me I wasn’t good enough, brought me to a point of near self-sabotage.

This was a time in my life, at the very beginning of my professional career with horses, that I haven’t talked about often. I was a perfectionist then (I call myself a recovering perfectionist now) and I had built up so much pressure on myself that I started to fall apart. I hyped up this moment, this idea of “turning pro”, and the need to suceed and prove myself had started to consume me. I was watching my mentor ride everyday, which turned inspiration into fear; fear of never being that good, or even good enough. The more anxious I got about it, the more I pushed myself to be better. Despite the number of times you will hear that you need to push yourself to be better, that push for me only created tension, stress, and anxiety, which made me much much worse. The harder I tried to “get right” the more perfect I tried to be the worse the horses went for me, the worse I rode, and the feedback loop started to spiral. I tell you, without hyperbole, that it got to the point where I could not ride when anyone was watching me. I shut down, and in my head all I heard were the negatives. My body froze, my mind went blank, and I stopped riding on feel and instead rode with my panic mode activated. The next thing that happened? I DID ride badly. My horses were stiff and hollow, I missed distances and changes; my riding had never been worse.

This was not just a week, or a month. It went on for months, years actually. You know in the army when they say they break you down to build you up? That’s was I was experiencing. Everything about me broke down. I didn’t go back to basics, I went back to knowing nothing. And to get there I gave up. I really did. I hit the bottom and said I had no more to give. No more anxiety, no more fear, no more self-doubt. I was plumb out. That level of mental exhaustion changes you, if it doesn’t break you first.

I got to a point where I didn’t care anymore. And I had cared a lot. I want to be clear, I didn’t stop caring about or loving horses or riding for that matter, I stopped caring about what others thought. I just stopped comparing myself, shaming my riding, and started caring about how the horses were feeling when I rode. I gave up the idea that I had to be the best, I gave up my self and my self importance on the back of a horse, and I realized that the ride was for them, NOT for me. It had been so many years of carrying this heavy feeling of inadequacy that it was dragging me down. One day, driving down the rode I decided was that I actually wanted to be happy. It was as ordinary and magical as you are imagining it. I wanted to feel happy again; happy with my horses, happy with myself, happy with my life, and happy with my life without the caveating being if I was “good at horses.” I wanted to ride without saddling my horse with my own expectations and fears; that wasn’t fair. I just wanted to focus on my horse, actually feel my horse, and I didn’t want to care what other people thought. I had to tried to push myself, stress myself, and shame myself into being better, and all it did was make me worse. So I decided I would relax, give myself some grace, not try to be the best, just breathe.

That decision saved my riding career.

My riding did not get better until I focused on the horses. Full stop. And that is not as obvious as it sounds. I stopped thinking about how this ride would make me look. I started thinking about every ride, in every circumstance, in terms of how it felt for the horse. That decision was the tip of the iceberg. It opened the door for me to ride with feel, ride with confidence and relaxation, and hone my craft without judging who I was by how good I was.