Rider Confidence
You know how to ride. So why aren't you enjoying it anymore?
Losing your riding confidence can be deeply unsettling, particularly when you know your ability hasn’t simply disappeared.
You may have ridden for years. You may compete. You may teach other people. You may know perfectly well that you have dealt with far more difficult situations before.
And yet something has changed.
You start anticipating what might happen. Things you once did automatically require thought. You avoid situations you previously enjoyed, or find yourself negotiating with your own anxiety before you’ve even got on.
The ability can still be there. What has changed is your brain’s prediction of what riding means.
I specialise in helping riders change that automatic response.
Registered BWRT® Advanced Practitioner
Former elite equestrian competitor
Working online with riders worldwide
WHEN CONFIDENCE CHANGES:
Confidence doesn't simply vanish.
It can withdraw when your brain decides that something has changed.
Sometimes the reason seems obvious.
But confidence can also change when nothing dramatic has happened at all.
Repeated criticism can do it. Feeling judged can do it. Taking on more responsibility can do it. A period of stress outside riding can alter how much capacity you have available. Hormonal change can affect how you respond to risk. Sometimes the horse or situation changes just enough for something that used to feel familiar to begin feeling less predictable.
And sometimes a rider genuinely cannot identify a single reason.
That doesn't make the response irrational or imaginary; it means the brain has learned something outside conscious awareness.
-
A fall.
-
A frightening incident.
-
A horse behaving unpredictably.
-
An injury.
-
A difficult new partnership.
This is why simply riding more doesn’t always restore confidence.
If every ride teaches your brain that riding is safe, confidence may eventually return.
But that isn't always what happens.
-
You can have ten perfectly uneventful rides and still spend the eleventh waiting for something to go wrong.
-
You can hack with somebody else and feel relatively comfortable, but remain unable to go alone.
-
You can feel completely capable in a lesson because your trainer is there, then find the fear returns when you're responsible for making the decisions yourself.
-
You can push yourself through something repeatedly while becoming more and more anxious about it.
The brain does not only learn from what happened.
It learns from what it believed was happening while you were doing it.
If you complete the ride while frightened, braced and waiting for disaster, the brain can conclude that its protective response was necessary.
That is why “just keep doing it”, “push through it”, “you'll be fine” or “you just need a few good rides” can sometimes completely miss the problem.
You haven't forgotten how to ride.
This is one of the most important things I want riders to understand:
Confidence and competence are not the same thing.
-
A highly experienced rider can become frightened.
-
A professional can develop a performance block.
-
Someone who has jumped substantial tracks can suddenly struggle over something much smaller.
-
A rider can become frightened of hacking despite having hacked for decades.
None of that automatically means their riding ability has deteriorated.
It means the automatic response has changed.
And automatic responses can change again.
Why I understand this work differently.
I am not approaching rider confidence from the outside.
I was an elite equestrian competitor long before I became a therapist. Years later, despite all that experience, I lost my own riding confidence.
I knew I could ride.
I knew what I had previously done.
I could reason with myself perfectly well.
None of that stopped the feeling.
That experience eventually led me to BWRT®, which changed the response itself rather than asking me to become better at coping with it.
I could ride again without pretending risk didn't exist.
The difference was that my brain no longer treated ordinary riding situations as though I needed protecting from them.
That experience is one of the reasons rider confidence became a specialist area of my practice.
I understand both sides of it: the psychology and the riding.
“I don’t even question my ability any more.”
One of the riders who came to me was competing at 3* level and coaching other riders, yet had reached the point where she could no longer ride confidently towards a showjump in competition.
Her ability had not disappeared.
Her response had changed.
You do not have to learn to live around the fear.
If riding has started to feel smaller, more restricted or less like you, we can look at what has changed and what your brain has learned to predict.
The initial consultation gives us the opportunity to discuss what is happening, what you want to be different and whether BWRT is appropriate for you.