Is negative self talk hurting your riding? We all talk to ourselves. That little voice in our heads, talking us through our day, giving their opinion and often criticising what we do.
On the positive side this voice helps us make sense of our world. These voices can either positively or negatively impact our mindset, our beliefs, our behaviour and our riding!
If you’re a confident rider you’ve learned to tap into these inner voices and use them as your personal cheerleading squad. This posse of voices helps you improve, become better and in turn becomore successful.
These people are disciplined about their thinking. They will correct their thinking, when their inner voice isn’t helping them move forward.
On the other hand people who lack confidence and aren’t making the progress they desire, are not in control of their self-talk and their inner voices are more like a group of bitchy girls, than a cheerleading squad.
These people let their voices, which are largely critical and negative, sabotage them.
One of the most important influences on your riding success is possessing a positive, growth mindset. People who aren’t confident or feel that they are underperforming, need to work hard to manage and change their negative self-talk.
‘Why can’t you just ride the dressage test properly’
‘No-one else is scared of cantering’
‘The fence isn’t that big, you’re a coward’
Thoughts like these are so damaging, but very common.
One easy way to reframe these thoughts is to think of one of the negative thoughts you have. Then imagine saying this to your child or your best friend. You’d be horrified. There’s no way you could say it. So why are you happy to say it to yourself?
These thoughts are damaging in so many ways, if you continuously tell yourself that you’re rubbish and you’ll never be able to hack out on your own (or whatever you’re struggling with), then this will become a self-fulfilling prophecy and you probably will never hack out on your own. Your brain believes that you tell it. So tell it something often enough and it will consider this to be a fact.
When you talk to yourself in a negative way, it triggers negative emotions. You feel defeated, why would you feel positive and confident if you’re thinking you’re rubbish? You wouldn’t. These self defeating emotions might even include shame, which will stop you moving forward. Shame leads to helplessness and worthlessness, which could stop you even wanting to ride.
These thoughts then continue to spiral, taking you deeper and deeper into a negative feedback loop. Say something often enough and new neural pathways are built to support that thought. So, in effect, it’ll become true and you’ll have the neural pathways to prove it! Once these pathways have developed it’s very difficult to change your thinking.
Your negative self talk will also mess with your attributions. Who do you credit your success to? If you have negative self talk, you’ll probably say it was luck or your trainer’s awesome skills. If you fail, oh THAT one will be all on you, your lack of skill, talent, motivation, because you didn’t work hard enough. Mistakes and problems are seen as permanent and global, while strengths and successes are temporary and specific. This tendency for negative attribution will result in you feeling incompetent.
How do your break these cycles of negative self talk?
The most critical of breaking these cycles is to watch your language and be diligent in correcting it. It’s also super important to be kind to yourself. Try treating yourself like a really good friend and put your thoughts through the friend-filter-test. When your negative self-talk tells you that you’re rubbish at a certain thing, catch this thought and correct it with a new, more accurate and less damaging one.
“You’re so rubbish at seeing a stride you’ll never get it’ changes to ‘You’re struggling seeing a stride, but with more practice you’ll be nailing it soon,’
Use Positive Self Talk
The next step is to turn your negative self talk into positive self talk. This is where many people think about affirmations and think affirmations won’t work for them…. and they could be right… It can feel fake to affirm that you’re a great rider, when you’re not quite their yet. Your brain knows there’s no evidence to support this, so it ignores it.
Positive self-talk is not affirmations, it’s based facts based on real world evidence and is realistic. For example, ‘I’m trying my best to improve my skills’ or when you’re riding your horse notice what you’ve done well and make sure you’re not externally attributing your successes.
When something doesn’t go to plan, don’t automatically go to the negative. Look for what went well or better than usual and give yourself credit for that part. It’s important to frame your positive self-talk as possibilities. For example, “I’m working towards having softer hands, today was better than yesterday’.
Capture the positives
It’s quite common to remember our negative experiences, much more than our positive ones. The negative thing your boss said to you weighs heavy on your mind, but you forget the praise almost immediately. This is called the negativity bias. You can add for power to your positive self talk by learning to control the negativity bias. In a study led by Christine Porath of Georgetown, she found that thoughts spoken aloud are 10x more powerful than those left unsaid.
She also discovered that negativity acts a multiplier of 4-7 times in this scenario. This means when we speak negative thoughts aloud, we’re increasing the probability of an outcome different from what we want by nearly 40–70%! This is HUGE!
You can use this to your advantage my writing down the positive things that happen to you and then reading it out loud. You should do this every day and make it a habit.
TRY THIS EXERCISE:
Grab a notebook and make two columns on a page. On the left side write three negative things you often say to yourself. In the right hand column write 3 positive things you could say instead. Your positive self-talk should be realistic and encouraging. You should give yourself credit for your successes and mistakes.
I’d love to hear how you get on giving this exercise a try. Let me know in the comments.