The Confident Rider Podcast

Latest Episodes:

The Problem With Goals (And Why They May Not Work For You) Oct 06, 2020

Show notes

It's interesting how, when we're fed something over a period of time, we don't stop to question that there might be another way of going about things. That's certainly been the case for me in the past when it's come to goal setting. Despite recognizing that it's a system that doesn't work for me; despite not having used the traditional model that we are taught for a couple of years now, I never really gave much thought to the fact that a whole new way of planning and creating a framework for yourself to live and ride by was possible.

The reason for this is pretty much everywhere I looked it was all very much the same. If it's a system that works for so many, I thought, it must be me who is the problem.

Set SMART goals! They yell from the rafters.

If you don't write your goals down, you are already behind! The tell you pointedly.

What do the top 1% of the world's achievers have in common? Goal setting! They enthuse.

Side note: Who is this elusive 1%, I ask myself, and who is deciding that?

The other thing? Having worked with literally thousands of riders up until this point, I knew it wasn't working for a lot of them either- so much so, that I have coined a couple of phrases to describe what so many people felt. Goal Shame and Goal Panic (I describe what they are in the podcast).

So, I sat down and got to work. I haven't set goals for years, and yet I have my own successful business, 3 horses in work a husband, and two young children. I took everything I knew and distilled it into a completely different approach that I could share with other people- a non-planning plan- that combined all of the important elements that we need to pay attention to that allow us to be a sustainable presence in our own lives and create a framework for living and riding that allows us to follow our curiosity, tune into our intuition, and is full of the essence of what's important to us.

In this episode, we discuss:

- How your nervous system is impacting your planning style (and your ability to dream and vision ahead in the first place)

- The origins of the traditional goal-setting process (and why it might clash with how you approach your riding life)

- Elements that are important to consider when creating a training framework for you and your horse

I hope you enjoy it!

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Click below to learn all about my JoyRide membership, to help you think, feel, move & ride differently:

https://confidentrider.online/joyride/

For other resources:

Website: https://confidentrider.online/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TheConfidentRider/

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Making Room For The Past: The Processes & Practices Of Integrating Traumatic Stress Sep 30, 2020

Show notes

A week or so back, a message pinged into my inbox from a rider in the recovery period of an accident that was really affecting her riding. She used a really common phrase that I often hear alongside descriptions of traumatic stress which is:

I feel like I'm living in the past.

I know so many of us can relate. It can be upsetting, frustrating, and frightening to find your mind and body looping around in a spin cycle of concern, worry, and anxiety in the aftermath of an injury and what's more, easy to convince yourself that the chances of making it back to a good feeling place are slim to none.

Maybe this is just how it is now, you tell yourself. Maybe this is my lot.

The good news is, this is very far from the truth.

When the body holds trauma, what it is essentially holding is unintegrated activation, energy, and experience. If we think of ourselves as an interconnected puzzle, trauma is a piece of that puzzle that fits in somewhere- we just haven't found out quite where. As a result, it floats in our orbit, out of context with what is happening in our present-day life and wholly misunderstood.

When we experience a "trigger" what we are in the midst of is the invitation of the body to have a corrective emotional experience. An unfinished cycle of activation and energy seeking out completion. It is that missing puzzle piece in our orbit searching for connection and reintegration.

While this experience sounds romantic, it is far from easy. Allowing ourselves to accept and process experiences of the past means that we need to have established a felt sense of safety in the body and have resourced ourselves with the tools and skills to ground and centre in the midst of discomfort. It's a body led experience of increasing capacity and of accepting and allowing for the parts of ourselves and our experiences that felt too hard for us to hold to be welcomed back into the fold.

In this episode, we talk about the nature of injury and how traumatic stress is held in the body. I expand on the hows and whys of what I teach, and the process I follow that allow us to integrate the uncomfortable, expand on the good, and resource us to meet ourselves and our horses in the moment.

Happy listening!

xx Jane

Click below to learn all about my JoyRide membership, to help you think, feel, move & ride differently:

https://confidentrider.online/joyride/

For other resources:

Website: https://confidentrider.online/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TheConfidentRider/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/confident_rider/

A Mash Up Session: On Comfort Not Being The Goal, The Joy Of Movement & Grounding In The Midst Of Social Pressure Sep 23, 2020

Show notes

So as it goes, I had a very specific idea in mind for what I was going to talk about in this week's episode, but as soon as I hit record, something very different came out! When it came time to give it an actual title, the only thing I could think of was, well, it's kind of a mash-up of a few different things so I've decided to roll with exactly that- a combination episode of a few different things all rolled into one!

Here's a brief snapshot…

⭐️ The role of social and systemic frameworks and their influence on us "doing the work"

⭐️ Why comfort isn't the goal (I go into this one in quite a lot of detail!)

⭐️ The joy of movement and the role of movement-based practices in my work

I hope you enjoy it!

Click below to learn all about my JoyRide membership, to help you think, feel, move & ride differently:

https://confidentrider.online/joyride/

For other resources:

Website: https://confidentrider.online/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TheConfidentRider/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/confident_rider/

Developing Responsiveness: The Importance of Seeking Out Novelty & Embracing The Unusual Sep 15, 2020

Show notes

Ok team! Let's think about what it means to be responsive and to have cultivated a way of being that allows us to respond appropriately to the moment and doesn't see us stuck in any one spot in our nervous system for longer than we need to be.

What does it mean to respond appropriately? It means that whatever comes into our experience, we are still able to mobilize our body- to stand our ground, to move away if necessary, or even to move towards the object or situation in question should that be required- and simultaneously be able to anchor and centre in the midst of that.

It means there is an intentionality to how it is we are in relationship with the energy- that even if what we are feeling is big and powerful, we are still able to contain it within the edges of our skin, and as a consequence, we can choose to direct how and where that energy is going to be channeled.

Responsiveness, then, requires familiarity and the ability to still have access to our own personal agency under pressure or stress. Familiarity means that we can hold power without it causing us to feel frightened by that experience and move into shutdown (for example).

How do we train for that? By intentionally creating experiences that are novel or unfamiliar so we can observe our responses, learn to control the physiology of the experience (how it shows up in our body), and develop a flexibility and adaptability to the world around us and how we move within it.

We talk about all this and more in this episode!

"I'm afraid to canter": Increasing Our Capacity for Bigger Energies & Experiences Sep 08, 2020

Show notes

Let's talk about nervous system capacity and how it relates to the experience of being afraid to canter. Before we get into it, I just want to put this out there- some of you will explicitly relate to this example and for others, it's not going to register on your radar. If you fall into the latter group, take out "being afraid to canter" and drop in there any challenge of choice that you fill like is a sticking point right now. Chances are the same principles will apply….

Back to the canter…

All of the work that we do with our horses exists on an energetic continuum. The walk, for example, produces less energetic resonance than a big trot or a canter. Typically, we think of the gaits from a rider perspective as very compartmentalized but how I prefer to think of them- and what is infinitely more helpful when it comes to learning how to match them- is to think of them as existing on an energetic sliding slide, beginning with lower power states and moving through to experiences of higher power and energy.

Our comfort level and ability to integrate with the energetic experience our horses offer us is wholly dependent on our capacity to hold that energy. I refer to it as activation and from a nervous system perspective, the amount of activation you can hold in your body equates to how much of the same experience you can handle before the experience gets bigger than you, and consequently, you move into a survival response of flight, fight, freeze or collapse.

In this episode, we are going to talk about exactly this and more including:

The necessary process to increase our ability to hold activation and energy in the body so we can work in higher power states with our horses
The coupling together of that same energy with the feeling of being under threat or in danger (and how to parse those apart)
Relaxation Induced Anxiety: Where the experience of opening and release in the body creates a reflexive response back into tension (and what you can do about it).

I hope you enjoy it!

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Click below to learn all about my JoyRide membership, to help you think, feel, move & ride differently:

https://confidentrider.online/joyride/

For other resources:

Website: https://confidentrider.online/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TheConfidentRider/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/confident_rider/

Riding The Growth Edge: What To Do When You Reach A Stuck Point Aug 22, 2020

Show notes

Stuck points! We all experience them, we all understand them as part of the learning process but what we also know is there's a big difference between reaching a blip point and feeling like you're continually running up against the same brick wall day in and day out.

And what's more, if we do find ourselves stuck in a pattern of behavior without the context of understanding how our nervous system operates, it's very easy to start to internalize experiences as personal flaws or weaknesses, rather than direct expressions of our capacity and our body and minds best attempt to keep us safe.

In this episode, we discuss how it is you can move beyond a stuck point in your riding or training and how it is we can begin to understand our responses and resource ourselves to better deal with challenging or uncomfortable circumstances that habitually send us into flight, fight, freeze or shutdown.

We look at:

The hallmarks of traumatic stress and the common default responses that occur when we are extended out of our zone of "I've Got This"
How showing up is your superpower (and why the key to it involves living with less perfection)
The "dead zone" of awareness and the path between "I'm ok" and "I'm really not ok!"
Looking out for your own calming signals (as well as those of your horse)
Parsing about habitual responses to better understand when to keep going and when to drop it back

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Click below to learn all about my JoyRide membership, to help you think, feel, move & ride differently:

https://confidentrider.online/joyride/

For other resources:

Website: https://confidentrider.online/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TheConfidentRider/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/confident_rider/

Understanding Positivity & Catastrophising From The Level Of The Nervous System Aug 04, 2020

Show notes

Ever thought to yourself, I wish I could think more positively! Or what's more, found yourself catastrophizing about every situation that comes your way until you're mentally drowning in worst-case scenarios? It's a vicious loop to get caught up in and one that can feel almost impossible to step out of.

Most conversations around this topic approach it at the level of the mind, which at first glance makes a lot of sense. After all, if it's the mind that's causing the "issues", surely that's the place that we need to be doing the work?

What if, though, the thoughts that we were having were a symptom of underlying nervous system dysregulation, and we were approaching things from the wrong angle?

Think of it this way: When we are operating from a place of chronic hypervigilance or stress, we are operating from the smoke alarm part of our brain. When we are in that place, we are primarily interested in safety and survival. It makes sense then that if this is where our nervous system is sitting, that our thoughts will be demonstrative of that also. Trying to change your thoughts without addressing the underlying dysregulation then means we are always going to be chasing our tail. At best, our system is always going to override our best attempts in its ongoing quest to keep us safe and we will also be stuck in an ongoing war between what we THINK we should be thinking, how we actually feel, and what we are projecting.

We discuss all this and more in this episode; a bottom-up approach to negative thinking and how it is we might be going about things the wrong way around.

Click below to learn all about my JoyRide membership, to help you think, feel, move & ride differently:

https://confidentrider.online/joyride/

For other resources:

Website: https://confidentrider.online/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TheConfidentRider/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/confident_rider/

Tuning In & Tuning Out: A Broader Conversation On What It Means To Look After Yourself Jul 28, 2020

Show notes

The belief of not being good enough. The endless quest to be "better" than we are now. The constant busyness….

What we understand about all of these things is that they are not specific to only a handful of people but have come to be a predictable part of our shared psyche and habits. Consequently, when it comes to looking at new ways of going about things, we need to go beyond individual assessments and understandings and look at how our community and cultural beliefs are informing us and influencing our understandings and behavior.

It's my belief that we are at a transition point in our collective and individual consciousness which leads to us navigating two different tensions; the one we are emerging from tells us that motivation and empowerment come from continual striving towards a future marker, the belief implicit to this telling us we aren't good enough as we are now; the other calling for more introspection, presence, and responsiveness to the moment. This leads to a struggle between heart and mind as we seek to reconcile the conditioned thoughts that tell us how we should be or how things should look if we were successful according to the traditional paradigm, and a more intuitive sense of our place and how we would like things to be.

In this episode, we look at the intersection of self-care, the concept of flooding, or systemic overwhelm and how this feeds through to how we are showing up for our horses.

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Click below to learn all about my JoyRide membership, to help you think, feel, move & ride differently:

https://confidentrider.online/joyride/

For other resources:

Website: https://confidentrider.online/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TheConfidentRider/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/confident_rider/

Connecting To Your Backbone: A Conversation on Power & Empowerment Jul 22, 2020

Show notes

What's your relationship to mindful anger, aggression, and power? When you read or say those words to yourself, how do they sit in your body?

We all have a somatic, or body-based relationship to language, and it's a big part of why the words that we choose matter and how describing something from a slightly different angle can open up a new perspective for us. In the first instance, when I think of anger, aggression, and power, I think of dominance and force. My associations with these words have, in the past, led me to lean away from any demonstrations of them in my own life, rather than towards. After all, if our connections to what they mean don't represent something "positive"; if we don't have healthy role models or cultural contexts for what they represent in an empowering form, why would we seek to include them as part of our experience?

The thing is, the experience anger, aggression and power are part of what it means to be human. Our preference for them doesn't remove them from our lives. If we don't develop a healthy relationship with these parts of ourselves- and it goes without saying not every presentation of them is healthy- then we inadvertently get ourselves into a situation where they are the master of us, rather than us being the master of them.

The key lies in being able to harness the physiology of what it means to hold activation in the system and to be able to contain the energy within the container of our body so we have a choice about how and where to channel it.

When we talk about the mindful versions of anger, aggression, and power, we are talking about your inner connection to determination and strength; a feeling of something in you that connects you to your backbone, and a restoration of integrity and dignity in the body in the face of what can be challenging circumstances.

Within this, we understand that truly harnessing the power of these energies mindfully does not exist at the expense of the less hot emotions, such as kindness, compassion, and love, but in partnership with them.

The ability to cultivate a healthy sense of your own power is an internal circuit system that allows you to step up that allows you to say "come on, I can get through this part that's currently challenging me and do this thing I want to do". It's a necessary, welcome, and intrinsic part of our humanity.

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Click below to learn all about my JoyRide membership, to help you think, feel, move & ride differently:

https://confidentrider.online/joyride/

For other resources:

Website: https://confidentrider.online/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TheConfidentRider/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/confident_rider/

Resetting The Smoke Alarm: Uncoupling Emotional Experiences From Personality & Identity Jul 14, 2020

Show notes

Let's consider for a moment that our nervous system exists on more than just an individual level; it exists on a collective level as well. Not only are we working within the context of our own, personal experience but we are also living within the dynamics of the social and cultural nervous system also, creating a broader ecosystem of feeling, response, and reaction that we are all in constant relationship with.

Having an understanding of how the nervous system functions and the tendencies that we all share that lie under the umbrella of "being human" is vital in order that we can zoom out from our individual experience and recognize the context that informs much of our behaviors and responses. Without context- without recognizing how we are set up to survive and thrive as creatures on the planet- it's all too easy to internalize challenges or feeling states, such as anxiety or fear, and own them as an inherent part of our personality, rather than an understandable response of our nervous system in the face of traumatic stress.

This is where it gets interesting. Let's say that at some time in the past, I experienced a high-stress event, but at the point of high activation there has also been a highly charged emotion attached- say in the case of an accident, injury or trauma- which has not been effectively addressed or integrated, that energy can stay stuck in the body. It's possible then that we find ourselves in a situation- sometimes shortly after, sometimes many years down the line- where we find ourselves skilled and able but having a disproportionate response to something in front of us. One that seemingly has no context and appears inappropriate for the moment. If we have enough reactions of this nature, we internalize the experience and instead of understanding it as a result of chronic stress or trauma, we see it as in intrinsic part of us, or what's more that we are flawed and incapable. Enter: I am a nervous rider I am an anxious rider I'm not very brave … and so on and so forth.

This internalization of experience as some sort of weakness or flaw is problematic in many ways. Firstly, if we believe a "problem" is "inherently part of us", we distance ourselves from the ways and means to move through it.

Secondly, we desensitize ourselves from our intuition and instinct that gives us true and real indications of how to navigate the situation that we find ourselves in.

And thirdly, if you want to fast track to feeling down and out and even hopeless, this is a great way to get you there.

In this episode, I talk all about context and understanding and why both will help you reassess the areas where you may have confused an emotional experience or behavior with a part of your personality or identity.

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Click below to learn all about my JoyRide membership, to help you think, feel, move & ride differently:

https://confidentrider.online/joyride/

For other resources:

Website: https://confidentrider.online/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TheConfidentRider/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/confident_rider/