You Can’t Always Get What You Want: A Rider and Trainer’s Perspective on Dealing with Failure in a Productive Way
Our sport is a tough one. Day in and day out, we choose to participate in competitions where our partner is another animal – one that has his own good days and bad days, thoughts, and sometimes, agenda. The fact that our partner is another sentient being makes for a huge amount of variables and possibilities for the unpredictable. Add that with the fact that we, as riders, are human, and therefore are subject to experiencing our own ups and downs in the sport, and it can really make things interesting. No matter what ring you’re choosing to compete in, at the end of the day, there can only be one winner. Unless they split the class, then there’s two. But you get my point! With class sizes sometimes nearing the triple digits, that makes for a lot of people walking home empty handed.
Sometimes this can be discouraging. We put so much effort, time, and energy into our riding, our horses, and our sport. When things don’t go according to plan, it can be easy to get in our own heads. Because riding can be such a mental game, it’s important to be able to reframe perceived failure in a way that is conducive to growth. When we’re able to perceive our mistakes as simply information and view our errors as learning opportunities, it sets us up to create a constructive experience from an unfavorable outcome. As someone who is a Type A overthinker and overachiever, this has been a game changer not only for my own riding, but the following perspective shifts have helped me to better help my students as well. Keep reading below for some of my favorite mindset shifts that have proved invaluable.
Redefining Identity: This might seem a bit counterintuitive at first, so bear with me. This sport can be all-consuming. From the countless hours spent in the saddle and at the barn, to the huge financial commitment, it takes up a big part of our lives. Which is great! Having a passion, a drive to succeed, and a competitive nature are all good things. Where it becomes problematic, however, is when we tie our value as human beings to our competitive successes, athletic performance, and what we do (either professionally or recreationally) without a grounded perspective of who we are apart from all of that.
When we define ourselves by what we do, it’s all great when things are going well. But what happens when we have a bad day, month, or year? Or when we are hurt or sick and can’t compete for an extended period of time? This is when it can be helpful to recognize that riding is something that we do – but it’s not who we are. True, we are horsemen and horsewomen, and that’s an important component of our lives. However, our worth as individuals is inherent in the fact that we are valuable, unique, human beings and isn’t tied to any sort of achievement or failure. This is important to understand in life, in general, but also when trying to interpret our successes and failures. When we’re able to separate what we do from who we are - it allows us to separate failure from our identity. Which has two major benefits. One, it softens the blow of failure because it’s not a personal attack on our value as human beings. And two, it frees us up to try new things, make mistakes, all without the outcome becoming part of how we define ourselves. This is the only way we can learn – to try, fail, try again, and hopefully continue to grow along the process.
Reexamining Thoughts: Did you know that experts estimate that the human brain thinks between 70,000 and 80,000 thoughts a day? Which is incredible. The problem with that is – not all of those thoughts are true and accurate. However, sometimes we think that just because a thought crosses out mind, we have to believe it. Which – spoiler alert, is not the case. Just because we think something doesn’t mean its accurate.
An important part of this sport is being able to stop the internal chatter, or to spin it in a more constructive manor. When we have a bad day, it’s not uncommon for self-doubt to creep into our minds. It happens to everyone. But those who are most successful in this sport know not to give those thoughts the time of day. We all have bad days. It’s a total normal part of the sport and of being human. And, unfortunately, when things don’t go our way, its easy to latch onto one of the negative thoughts passing through our brain and let it spiral out of control. It’s a mental discipline to not give discouraging thoughts a place to land, but one that’s so invaluable to both our success and our mental health as competitors. When I catch myself giving way to unconstructive thoughts, I first make a conscious effort to tell myself to knock it off. No joke! Like I said, this is a mental discipline, and sometimes that means that it’s hard work.
Then I force myself to think on some constructive ideas in their place. Instead of the thought, “I failed at X, Y, or Z…” or “Maybe you’re not good enough…”, I’ll remind myself of the times I did something well, or think of the positive aspects of said round (more on that below!), or consider ways that I could train differently at home to be better prepared for the next time. This not only stops the negative internal chatter, but it also puts me back in a position of power in the sense that 1) I am in control of my thoughts, and 2) with I am in control of what I do in the future to prepare for next time. When training, I also talk students through this whole process. It takes some practice, but the ability to take control of our thoughts, and choose which ones to believe and which to let go is a key component to resilience, and ultimately longevity and growth in the sport.
Reframing Mistakes: Ever heard the phrase, “if you don’t win, you learn?” It’s so true. And, I would argue that even when we do win, there’s always something to be learned from each and every round. But for the sake of this post, let’s focus on the times that things don’t exactly go according to plan. When that happens, before even discussing what went wrong, I have my students tell me one thing they liked about their round. Even if it’s something small – that puts us in a positive frame of mind to talk about the rest of the course. Then we go on to discuss what we didn’t like. And the lens through which we look at mishaps is as follows: How about we stop looking at all of our mistakes as failures, and instead looked at them as simply information? Perhaps we chipped at the long run to the single oxer across the diagonal. Did we get excited and change our pace as we got closer to the jump? Or was our horse behind our leg the whole course and it just caught up to us there? That’s information on something we can work on for next time!
Often we can have a shortsighted perspective when it comes to our mistakes. We dwell on the mishap and what happened as opposed to what that tells us we need to work on for next time. Horse shows, in addition to being a competition, and to being an enjoyable way to spend a week or weekend, can also serve as a measure of progress. That means, they can function as a good means to gauge how well we have been doing our homework at home based on what we learned we needed to work on at the previous horse show. When we view our errors as learning opportunities as opposed to failures we open up the possibility for growth with each and every round. After all, as the song goes, “You can’t always get what you want. But if you try sometimes, well, you just might find…You get what you need.”
Do you have any other tips for dealing with mishaps in the show ring? Let us know in the comments!
