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Can Negativity be Positive?

It’s now been 8 months since I made my foray into sports psychology with Centre10 and it has massively enriched my life. I feel I have made huge strides both as a coach and rider. However, my new approach to horsemanship was put under some strain whilst eventing last weekend at Rockingham. Things didn’t go exactly how I’d wanted them to. And I felt pretty dismal at the time.

I’d headed up to Leicester early to get a few days of really productive training in. My 6YO Jesmond Jasmine (Jazzy) felt tuned up and raring to go for what was her first ‘proper’ BE100. We’d done our homework and I felt ready to go out put it all into practice.

And for 95% of the day I managed that. A good dressage of 29.8 to kick things off. And a lovely clear round cross country to finish the day. But the show jumping threw a bit of a spanner in the works.

8 of the 9 fences were brilliant. With the benefit of hindsight, I can say that it was some of the best show jumping I’ve ever done with Jazzy. But 8 out of 9 fences isn’t usually good enough in this sport.

The fifth fence was triple bar. As I walked the course, I thought to myself ‘have I ever jumped a triple bar with Jazzy?’ My question was answered during my round when she came off the turn, saw it, went a bit green, wobbled and asked, ‘what’s that?’

The correct response in that situation would have been to support her with my leg and say, ‘it’s just a slightly different style of jump, but over you go!’ But instead, I went a bit green with her. I tried to half halt my way out of a situation that was screaming for leg. So, a slightly perplexed Jazzy came gently to a halt in front the fence. 

I covered myself in glory by swearing loudly (apologies to the families with small children spectating). But I managed to pick myself up, get Jazzy motoring and jump the triple bar and the rest of the course. But that one fence added enough penalties to my score to scupper any chance I had of being competitive that day. 

I would like to say that the outcome had no bearing on me emotionally and that I was able to calmly reflect on the fact that most of the course had been great. But in reality, I was livid. I felt I had let myself and Jazzy down. 

I then went down a bit of a mental rabbit hole. Not only was I angry about my performance, I was angry about the fact that I was angry about my performance. I came to the conclusion that evidently the months spent trying to alter my mindset had been in vain. In reality my new mindset just hadn’t had any proper hardship to contend with. I’d had a good start to the season and that had hidden the fact that nothing had changed. It had been easy to claim I’d changed my mentality whilst I was being placed, but it wasn’t until I was sitting near the bottom of the pack that I could really say it had been tested…sounding really rational I know.

I was lucky enough to have my coach Ginnie Turnbull there to pluck me out of this downward spiral. The most important thing she said to me on the day was that it was ok for me to feel angry and disappointed because it showed that I cared. 

I appreciated the sentiment at the time, but it wasn’t until the drive back from the event that I really reflected on the significance of those words.

Why acknowledging and confronting negative emotions is crucial if you want to move on from them.

Negative emotions when you don’t achieve what you want to in sport are vital. They drive you to improve so that you hopefully won’t have to feel them next time. It’s ok to be competitive. To want to win and to be a bit pissed off if you don’t. Without these feelings sport would end up a little bit vanilla.

In my efforts to create a more positive mindset I had forgotten the importance of allowing yourself to feel a bit bitter when things don’t pan out the way that you’re hoping. The purpose of creating a positive mindset isn’t to stop you from ever feeling any negative emotions ever again. That’s both impossible and undesirable. The purpose is to give you the tools to process those natural negative emotions and to move on from them, rather than retain them as unhelpful emotional baggage.

I said in my blog last week that a training and competition journal can act as an emotional outlet for you to vent into. My entry in my own journal for Rockingham doesn’t make for a cheery read. However, an honest appraisal of the events of last week and accepting the fact that it was permissible for me to feel disappointed has helped me to shake the majority of my negative feelings. The cathartic act of writing it down and letting it all out has steered me away from two possible pitfalls of a perceived failure:

  1. Wallowing in my own negativity by letting it consume me.
  2. Repressing my negativity by not confronting it and, thus, storing it up for the future.

In turn, a bit of self-reflection has allowed me to see the many positives that were there to be drawn from the day and to move on from Rockingham ready to be better.

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Our Stories Matter.

I find showjumping incredibly difficult. Up until fairly recently I would joke with my mum at events about how badly the showjumping was going to go that day. I used to head over to the showjumping arena telling myself that I was awful at it. I would warm up telling myself I was awful at it. I would ride around telling myself I was awful at it. And I would head back to the lorry telling myself that – even though I was awful at it – at least it was over for another week.

To nobody’s surprise – except possibly my own – this narrative had rather a negative impact on my ability to showjump.

This narrative that I’d created about myself wasn’t without logic. You could trace it through my whole riding career. It started with a bad fall I’d had jumping when I was eleven. I didn’t successfully come to terms with how much it had knocked me mentally at the time and so the narrative that I was scared of jumping and awful at it took hold of me. I tried throughout my early teens to force myself to enjoy my jumping, but aged sixteen I concluded that I loathed it and never really wanted to leave the floor again. Thus, I ended up getting an older horse on loan, who couldn’t really leave the floor without coming up lame, which was perfect for me.

I scarcely left the ground for the next four or five years, other than to train for and get through my BHS assessments. And despite my success in those exams, my mentality was ‘I am awful at this, scared of it and I was lucky to pass.’ However, whilst training for my Stage Four, I had the strange experience (for me) of starting to enjoy my jumping. Now this isn’t to say that I didn’t think I was awful at it. But at least I was starting to like it a little, which negated a bit of the fear.

This newfound enjoyment changed something within me, it made me think that this was something I wanted to do more of. And so, I ended up going out and looking for a horse that could facilitate it and ended up purchasing Iris II (Nellie).

Nellie didn’t really care about my narrative; she just took me by the hand and jumped whatever I pointed her at. And this was working fine until I wanted her to make the jump up from novice to intermediate. That extra 10cm was pushing her to the upper limit of her scope and suddenly she needed support from me. However, how could I – somebody who is awful at showjumping – help her to get over these fences? The problem at this point wasn’t physical; I had the technical knowledge and ability, but I’d reached the end of the line for my mindset.

Our lives are defined by the narratives that we tell about ourselves, whether they are overarching narratives that shape our whole existence i.e. ‘I’m just a really positive person.’ Or more specific narratives that inform a small part of our lives i.e. ‘I’m really bad at showjumping.’ The important thing to note is that these narratives don’t have to remain fixed, you can change your narratives and come up with better ones. 

 

How to start to change a narrative

 

  1. You need to identify a narrative: This is often harder than it seems. I’d been telling myself that I was a bad showjumper for so long that it seemed true to me. And was, therefore, something that couldn’t be changed. It took a lot of self-reflection for me to realise that there was no intrinsic reason that I found showjumping difficult and that it was merely a story that I had been telling about myself.

 

  1. Find a way to shift the narrative from being limiting to a one that allows for change: For me this meant changing from ‘I am awful at showjumping’ to ‘I find showjumping difficult, but I’m getting better.’ The former precludes any improvement, if you’re awful at something you’ll always be awful. The latter doesn’t shy away from the fact that I still find showjumping challenging, however, there is the opportunity for me to get better at it.

 

  1. Find supporting evidence for your new narrative: If I had tried to change my narrative to ‘I am the greatest showjumper who has ever lived,’ I would be setting myself up for a failure. Narrative change has to be rooted in reality for it to be successful. ‘I find showjumping difficult, but I’m getting better’ was easily quantifiable for me. I was able to look to my recent past and see that I’d gone from somebody who wouldn’t leave the ground to somebody capable of jumping clear rounds at BE Novice.

 

  1. A narrative change has to be supplemented via appropriate action: Before I changed my narrative, I avoided showjumping like the plague. In order to test the veracity of my new narrative I had to get out there and showjump more frequently otherwise it’d be impossible to ascertain whether I was getting better. This meant seizing opportunities to showjump whenever possible.

 

  1. Be kind to yourself and accept that change is gradual: Although it pains me to admit it, I’m still not a perfect showjumper. I am still capable of getting it wrong before a fence. But it is important to recognise that that’s ok. My new narrative makes allowances for imperfection. And real change will only come through real commitment to change in the face of inevitable setbacks.

 

 

 

 

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Wimbledon Pony Club Showjumping Rally 1st December 2018

On 1st December 2018 Hugh attended a Wimbledon Pony Club Showjumping Rally to coach some of the members. He taught three groups of five riders and focused on jumping a course of showjumps.

On the day Hugh found that the most common problem was horses lacking impulsion and suppleness through their turns. This led to some horses refusing, as they lacked straightness on the approach, and lost the fluidity and rhythm of their round through the turns.

A couple of the horses lacking impulsion were also having to make huge jumping efforts over not particularly large fences as the lack of power in the canter meant horses were burying themselves into the bottom of fences.

Hugh’s training helped to improve this by focusing on transition work, in particular the use of transitions within the canter e.g. working to medium canter, then back, which charged the canter up and eliminated a lot of the issues.

Speaking about the day, Hugh says, “I think a lot of the above problems were because people have a complete lack of “match practice”. The only time that they were jumping courses is when they came to a rally or went to a show, which for a lot of them is infrequent.

This massively increases the pressure when you do get out somewhere. Obviously doing more rallies and shows would help, however, even if you don’t have the space or facilities to set up a whole course of fences you can still set up two or three and keep linking them together until you’ve completed 10 or 12 jumping efforts. This is far more beneficial to you and your horse than just jumping a single fence a few times. It will help you get a better feel for the canter you need to be jumping from in order to go clear.”

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