What do mindset naturals do that we can emulate?

I wanted to talk today about what mindset naturals are doing inside their head. The rest of us have to learn by trial and error; that’s potentially a long and laborious process and so I want to give you the shortcuts to begin to run those patterns naturally too.

Very often, if you know someone who’s a confident rider, has great self-belief, and is blocking out any imposter syndrome or self-sabotage, that person will find it difficult to tease out exactly how they strategise and run those patterns. It’s simply too unconscious and automatic for them to discern.

However, I’m going dissect these things out so we can all learn to do them. 

It’s possible to emulate the mindset naturals in such a way that what starts as a new habit, eventually, with practise, becomes something we do unconsciously. Firstly, mindset naturals create goals.

They may or may not write them down, but they have a strong identification of their goal. Their goal is realistic and sufficiently challenging so that they don’t lose attention. They don’t give up, even if they encounter setbacks, they don’t think that it’s something that they can’t pursue or ever achieve. They have an inner knowing that it may take time and effort and there may be disappointments and frustrations, yet these are part of the process.

They have a clear understanding of what success and failure mean to them. They see both as motivational. They consider failure only a form of feedback; nothing more and nothing less. They know that stretching a comfort zone will inevitably lead to a “failure” and they are fine with that.

To a master of mindset, you’re either winning at something or you’re learning, and having that kind of disposition helps because when you focus on simply achieving and winning and gaining rosettes and going up the levels, those are big, big steps. And throughout the big, big steps, we all fail. Being able to control your emotional state and look at things more dispassionately is an enormous asset for progression.

Tips for Goals

• Set goals we know we can achieve, even if that’s a quiet admission because we’re stretching ourselves. 
• Write your goal down because the goal-setter is the conscious mind and the goal-getter is the unconscious mind. We need to have the unconscious mind fully on board too.

Writing the goal down slows down the process and this means that as you’re writing it, you’re thinking, you’re contemplating, you’re ruminating and maybe you’re getting some inspiration. You don’t have to write reams. 

The unconscious does love it to be very sensory, so that means describing with the five senses, if possible

• What are you seeing when you get the goal? What are you hearing? What are you feeling inside? What are you touching? And maybe what are you smelling and tasting 
• you need to have a sensory link for the unconscious mind to be hooked and that means it’s also that it’s receptive to your ideas

The second thing that mindset naturals do, is that they have strong mental imagery. They can use visualisation well and more than that, they don’t just visualise once.

It’s part of their training. They spend time and effort repeating it, maybe daily. Using imagery is a wonderful means of connecting with the unconscious mind. It gives your mind your instructions and the mind receives a visualisation more readily than thoughts in words. 

Tips for mental imagery

• The more sights sounds, emotions, tastes, touches that you put into the visualisation, the more it becomes a rich environment for your unconscious mind to draw on and to use as a template. 
• Practice daily  https://www.podbean.com/ew/pb-8ed4g-144b048

Mindset naturals have a strong physiology. In NLP, physiology doesn’t mean your internal organs, it means body language, posture and breathing. 

Tips for physiology 

• Think about a rider you admire. How do they sit? Where are their hands? Where are their elbows? Where are their shoulders? And you do this in very, very fine detail. Do an analysis. How close are their legs to the horse’s sides? How much do they put their heels down? How much are they looking up and around? What’s the angle of their head? Is it tipped back? Is it tipped forward? Where are their eyes? 
• Think about the muscle tension in each of their major muscles, and which muscles need to be switched on and which need to be switched off, and model this

Having good physiology, taking note of our body language, how we hold ourselves, our facial expressions, the tension in our muscles and our breathing, affects how we think. There’s a connection between physiology and our emotional status. 

Tips for riding

• Watch videos of equestrians that you admire and watch them and their body language throughout. If they’re competing, what happens if something goes wrong, watch their body language. Do they wince? It would be unusual to see them wince, wouldn’t it?

It’s unusual for them to grimace. It’s unusual for these things to happen because they keep that body language strong and they keep going right to the end of the show. 

The next thing that I want to talk about is being in the zone, the peak performance zone. 

Everything is quiet. Everything goes calm. There’s an air of confidence. And it’s time to ride. Switching into the quiet stillness of being in the zone is quite easy to practice.

Tip for being in the peak performance zone

• learn how to go into peripheral vision. https://www.podbean.com/ew/pb-xi6vq-146519b

Mindset naturals are aware of their limiting beliefs and their negative emotions, and what causes them stress. And they eliminate these things. They deal with them in the moment or they find coping strategies. See Time Line Therapy® For Equestrians

They’re also quite aware of when they’re self-sabotaging. They understand that they are having faulty thoughts or limiting beliefs. They know what the invisible barriers are to their success.

They start to believe in themselves by grouping all the successes over the years, in their mind. They bring those memories to the forefront of their mind by recalling them.

In so doing all of these things, the natural mindset riders are able to maintain their motivation. they make active decisions to let go of mindsets that don’t serve them, being defeatist and thereby stop blocking themselves to ensure their motivation stays strong