12 Tips For Being The Best Rider You Can Be

Here are some tips you might like to consider if you would like to be the best rider you can be!

1. Decide What You Want To Achieve!

Before you start training and riding your horse it is important that you have a defined goal. Follow your heart. Life’s to too short to spend it doing something with your horse you don’t love.

So what’s your passion, what are your goals and dreams?

• What would you like to reach within 4 weeks, within 4 months, within 4 years?
• If you absolutely knew you couldn’t fail, what would you do together with your horse?

Write it down, and every day make a small step towards that goal.

2. Nurture Your Vision

Keep focused on your goal, visualize your goal and use your imagination.

By closing your eyes and imagining some things – to really see – you will increase the chances that it actually will come your way.

Nurture your vision, daily – see, feel, hear how you will be experiencing the fulfillment of the life you want together with your horse.

3. Believe In Yourself, In Your Horse, and In Your Vision

Nothing can stop the rider with the right mental attitude from achieving a goal and nothing on earth can help the rider with the wrong attitude.

Some riders have strong beliefs that they can’t do something or that their horse can’t do something. But you can’t be a better rider tomorrow, if you are thinking about yesterday’s disappointments all the time.

Before you start training your horse, Choose Your Thoughts!

• You will need to put all your negativity aside.
• See if you can convert negative thoughts into supportive, positive ones.
• Think in terms of challenges instead of problems.
• See possibilities, instead of difficulties.
• Don’t limit yourself by your thoughts.
• Decide every morning: “Today I will be the best I can be”.

4. Create a Plan

If you can dream it, you can do it, but without a plan you’re going to stay where you are.

Create a plan for yourself in order to reach your goal. Create a plan that breaks the goal down into specific steps:

• Which book are you going to read and when?
• Which course are you going to join and when?
• On which days are you going to train your horse and what are you going to teach your horse?

5. Surround Yourself With Great People

Don’t let those who gave up on their dreams influence you to give up on yours.

Gather positive riders around you:

• Spend time with riders who are supportive and for you.
• Enrich yourself by getting to know others who are actively creating the best for themselves, and learn from them.
• Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions.
• Don’t let anyone’s drama or negativity stop you from being the best you can be.
• Don’t lower your standards to accommodate those who refuse to raise theirs.
• Instead wait for people to rise up to your expectations.

Really great people make you feel that you too can become great! So hang out with like-minded riders!

6. Learn From Other Riders

Many of the things you want to know have already been experienced by other riders.

You can achieve much more by studying what others have already done.

Then you can build upon the knowledge you gain from them and it gives you much better results in a much shorter time frame because and you aren’t reinventing the wheel again.

7. Find a Role Model

Seeking the best in others brings out the best in you.

Find someone you admire, or wish you were more like. It could be a rider who always has a smile, or a famous rider who really accomplished his/her dreams.

See what makes that rider so great and try to do what s/he does, read what s/he reads, approach things how s/he approaches things.

8. Take Action and Keep Momentum

The path to success is to take massive, determined action.

By constantly acting, you are automatically gaining more knowledge and experience just by virtue of the response you are receiving from your interactions with your horse.

• Be willing to learn, practice, improve.
• Continue, hold on, keep on going, and never stop moving towards where you want to be.
• Life doesn’t require that we be THE best, only that we try our best.
• Never give up, great things take time!

9. Think and Reflect

Success comes from good judgment. Good judgment comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgment

Whenever you reflect on your own thoughts and actions and the reactions of the horse, you gain a greater sense of clarity about yourself and your horse.

Take action, notice what’s working or not. Look at the consequences and learn from them.

And don’t be hard on yourself, there is no such thing as ‘wrong’ or ‘mistakes’, there are only instructive outcomes. Never think you are not good enough. Just take responsibility when you don’t get the results you want and:

10. Change Your Approach!

Change your approach until you achieve what you want.

When you don’t get the results you want:

• Either you weren’t clear,
• or you didn’t have enough preparation,
• or you asked your horse something he wasn’t ready to do,
• or you asked something with too much pressure on the rein,
• or you stopped breathing, ….

Just laugh at yourself and change your approach.

Welcome your struggles. They make you stronger. They make you smarter. When you overcome them, you always become a better you.

11. Count Your Blessings!

Keep your long-term goals in sight, but focus on the moment and count your blessings every day. At the end of each day ask yourself 5 questions:

1. What did I learn?
2. How can I use any unpleasant experience?
3. What was really great today?
4. What am I grateful for?
5. What did I give and contribute to the life of others?

Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, but don’t compare yourself or your results to someone else’s. You can never be another rider, you can only be a better version of yourself.

One of the marks of excellent riders is that they only compare themselves with themselves and with their past accomplishments and future potential.

12. The Journey Is The Goal

It is not what we get or achieve, but who we become, what we contribute: that gives meaning to our lives.

The final aim is that rider and horse can grow and develop together and be well together!

Focus on continuous physical, mental, emotional and spiritual improvement.

Don’t look for stars and stripes.

Growing and giving is the game!

Try not to become a rider/trainer/instructor of success but a rider/trainer/instructor of value.

“The major reason for setting a goal is for what it makes of you to accomplish it. What it makes of you will always be the far greater value than what you get.” – Jim Rohn

Enjoy your own path! And….