How to improve your mental performance

Goal Setting

• Set goals to provide focus and direction on activities – they help you to build confidence by giving you something to look back on and see what you have achieved.
• Make your goals SMART; that is Specific – saying “I want to do well next season,” is not enough of a motivator. Make sure you are more specific. Measurable – how will you know you’ve achieved that goal? Action Orientated – they have to make you take action and provide a challenge, but at the same time need to be Realistic otherwise you could lose motivation. Finally, they should be Timely – set short, mid and long-term goals so you can see your progression. 

Routine

• Think about your routine on competition day that gives you a structure that you can fall back on no matter what happens. 
• Plan your day so you aren’t competing under time pressure as well as performance pressure: schedule in time for everything – breakfast, travelling, walking the course, going to the loo, studding up, warming up etc.
• Don’t worry about what other riders are doing – your routine is specific to you!

Self-belief

• Be your own best friend – if your best friend came to you with low self-belief about their performance, what would you say to them?
• Go for your dreams and be excited about your performance. You’ve worked and trained hard for this so go and enjoy it. 
• Be realistic – giving yourself realistic goals gives you confidence. 
• Focus on the successes, look back at when it has gone right and look to repeat those. 

Staying in the moment

• Focus and concentrate on the activity you are doing and not what has happened previously or what is coming up ahead. 
• Experience counts for a lot. The more you can get out to practice different situations, the better you will become at handling them. 

Control the controllables

• Focus on the things you can control – you can’t control the weather, the ground or what the dressage judges will think of you, but you can control how you ride, how you think and how you feel.
• Let it go! When something hasn’t gone to plan, let it go, don’t focus on the negatives at that moment in time. 

Managing arousal levels

• You have to work out what is optimal arousal for you – do you need to get ‘psyched up’ or do you need help calming down?
• When you become nervous your breathing can become erratic, therefore introducing techniques that focus on breathing and slowing your breathing down can help you relax.
• Music can help ‘psych you up’ or calm you down, depending on your personal preferences. Singing a song in your head can also help you relax your breathing.
• Mental rehearsal helps you to visualise your performance – but it must be positive e.g. if you’re riding your dressage test it is the best test you can do, your halts are square, the test is accurate etc. 
• Self-talk can be instructional or motivational; instructional self talk is telling yourself to do certain things, for example “sit up” or “look for your line” and motivational self-talk is giving yourself some confidence and belief, for example “you can do this”.