7 Mental Traps...and How to Spring Them

What are mental traps? They are those little mental glitches you fall into again...and again. They rob you of your learning pleasure performance and lets face it sometimes what feels like your sanity. There are likely as many mental traps out there as there are riders. Here are some common traps and deep trenches that can lead you off your game.
1 Keeping Your Eye too firmly on the Prize
Symptoms With this affliction you find yourself spending a lot of time thinking about ribbons and championships. You desperately want to attain the status of an accomplished winning rider. Youve likely been told that great riders think about winning and nothing else. So you decide to keep winning on the brain at all costs. You carefully monitor your points at shows and make sure you compare your progress with other riders. The problem ensues when too much of your focus and energy goes into this tracking when it should be on your ride. Even worse you find your frustration levels rising and emotions interfering the more you see your accomplishments not quite stacking up the way you would like.

Prescription Get your focus back on the elements of an effective ride. These are elements that you can control your pace body position etc. Have faith that the winning part will look after itself if you can keep your mind on your tasks. Every time you find your mind wandering into evaluations of how you are doing bring it back to what you are doing. One effective way to do this is to use cue words that help link you to your current focus words like pace position and feel.
2 Rigid Thinking 
Symptoms Do you always come to the same conclusion when something goes wrong or when you are unsure of the situation?  Maybe you have a habit of calling yourself names or blaming your horse. Many riders suffer recurring issues and fail to resolve them solely because of their thinking style. Their rigid thoughts do not allow for any alternate reasons for the problem at hand.
Prescription Unlock your mind. The next time you run into one of those repeating problems challenge yourself to think of three different explanations for what happened. For example maybe you think your spooking horse problem is the result of your paranoid equine partner. So every time it occurs you curse and correct him to no avail. Stop. Consider