All In Your Head

I thought I'd kick off this blog with a segment about mental health and the power of your mind. It's really cheesy, but it's very important in the long run. The brain is a powerful muscle and sometimes it does things that we are not aware of.

I'll start with a personal example. A couple months ago I was at a horse show and everything was going pretty decent. My first class was a jumping one. If you don't know what a class is, it's where you compete against other riders who are on your level and you're competing in the same type of competition.

In a jumping class, you memorize the course and then you jump it and if you miss a jump or go to the wrong one then you are disqualified. Well, I knew my course, but when I went in ring, my brain had a malfunction and I went to the wrong jump. Naturally, I was fairly upset and overall not happy. At my next show, I thought everything would be fine again, but I focused so much on trying to memorize the course to make sure I didn't mess up again, it caused me to forget the basic fundamentals of riding.

When you let one failure get in your head and allow it to mess with you so much, to the point where you can't even think about it clearly, that's when it becomes a problem. Your confidence might shoot down and that's not good. If you have a failure, you need to get back up and try again. Learn from your mistakes and try to fix them, but don't keep them at the forefront of your mind because then you'll only fail again.

I'm learning that lesson the hard way. Because I let that one failure get in my head, I messed up a really easy course that I should have aced. It wasn't difficult and I'd done things like it a million times. But that one failure messed with my head and made what should have been simple, really complicated and caused me to more-or-less hallucinate. I thought I was going faster than I really was, I disregarded the basic foundations for good riding, and I even almost did what I was trying so hard not to do, which was miss a jump. And because I didn't place that show, I lost any chance of qualifying for region finals individually this season.

So whatever happens, don't let one mishap ruin everything. Make the mistake, learn from it, and then put it in it's proper place. Don't let the mistake define who you are and what you do. Sometimes, it's good to just breathe, because a lot of times, the stress is just all in your head.