Hypnotherapy for riding confidence
If you fall whilst riding a horse it can be a traumatic experience. Riding confidence is very important for those who compete. Whether it’s Eventing, Polo, Show Jumping, Dressage, Flat course racing, or riding for pleasure. If we lose that confidence the horse will pick it up.
I have been helping people improve their riding confidence since 2007 and have seen many go on to win medals in eventing, show jumping, dressage and more. Being based in The Vale of The White Horse, I am lucky to be surrounded by horse activities.
Scrambling the trauma and lowering general anxiety allows one to build the confidence to trust not only yourself but the horse again. Hypnosis helps place yourself in a relaxed state and review in your mind what you want to happen. It allows you to be in control and visualise how you want your riding, jumping and pre-event to be.
This visualisation helps build the neural networks in the brain, which doesn’t distinguish between real and imagined, so we can build that riding confidence back to where it should be.
What needs to happen to build riding confidence?
- Lowering general anxiety. The stress of life can interfere and decrease your ability to focus and keep control.
- Overcome trauma. Using NLP or BWRT, any traumatic experiences can be scrambled.
- Learn tools for focus and keeping calm.
- Mentally build your own imaginary training menage or school and practice there.
Call me for a chat, and we can see what you can achieve. Ages from 9 to 90!
Case Study 1 – Getting back in the saddle
Using a mix of CBT, NLP, SFBT and hypnotherapy we carried on for a further 6 sessions over 3 months. The joy of getting back on her horse and ride again was making other areas of her life so much better. She claimed feeling more relaxed generally and her riding confidence was 100%. It gave her the courage and encouragement to try riding in unfamiliar places and other horses.
Case Study 2 – Winning dressage competitions
Tanya came to see me about a fungus phobia, the problem were toadstool rings in her horse’s field. As we started the work on the phobia, she realised that she was finding the relaxation CD was helping her riding. She was a lot more relaxed and her horse wasn’t jumping around as much as usual. I pointed out that her horse may be hypersensitive to the small body movements she was making. The horse was interpreting her anxiety as something to be anxious about itself.
After overcoming the fungus phobia after 4 sessions, she emailed me about 6 weeks later to tell me she’d come third in a dressage competition for the first time ever. She now understood how her anxiety was affecting the horse.
For other types of sports performance see here.