By Rob Van Jacobs
Equestrian sport gives us many opportunities to practice skills that we of course need for the sport, but also skills needed to navigate the world successfully. I wanted to share my thoughts on resilience this month. To be resilient is to be able to recover and bounce back after experiencing challenges. Those who are resilient often need less time to process and understand challenges and are able to put their energy toward recovering and moving forward with greater success in the future.
In my opinion, there’s nothing wrong with taking the required or desired time needed to process a challenge experienced either with your horse or in life. Taking the time needed is far healthier than avoidance. I don’t have a degree in psychology but rather experience in the industry, and have seen the effects of avoidance in different areas. The good news is that we all need continued practice with resilience, and the equestrian sport allows weekly tests in this area and so many others. Every equestrian has strengths and weaknesses in a variety of areas. I believe for me, the best preparation for life after college was the lessons I learned through horses, resilience being one of them.
My past column on adapting relates to this column. From my experience, adaptability and resilience are related and equally important. I have an early equestrian memory that I can look back on and recognize the sport giving me an opportunity to practice resilience: my early years riding at a local lesson barn. I would occasionally ride a mare that was blind in one eye. She was understandably more comfortable leaving the ground closer to the jump. There was a time I asked her to leave the ground too far away from the jump, and she stopped. I flew over her head and neck. I was so determined that I got back on, listened to my trainer and tried again. With my trainer’s help, I worked to understand my mistake and better understand how I could change my canter and/or my track to place her at the jump in a way that was most comfortable for her. I was a young kid, so this was a lot to understand. However, knowing that getting it wrong could lead to me falling off “sharpened me up.”
Every equestrian experiences this in their riding throughout different parts of their journey, and we’re also given the opportunity to practice resilience in our lives outside the barn, whether in school, work or even in other sports and activities. It wasn’t until I got older that I started to understand how the lessons I’ve learned in horses carried over into other areas of my life. In my 20s, I worked for many professionals as their assistant trainer. Bouncing back from challenges in programs where the environment was difficult took a great deal of resilience. At the time, I wasn’t aware I was falling back on the foundational skills I learned early on. Although it’s a skill we practice continuously, to think about how and where it all started for me was fascinating. Where did it start for you?
Something I want to make clear is that I’m not suggesting any of us should ignore the root causes of an issue and attempt to move past the issue too quickly to feel strong and resilient. That would not give us a chance to truly learn from what we’ve experienced and actually overcome a challenge. Nor should we ignore the emotions we have around the issue. It has benefited me to take a moment to process before putting my efforts toward recovering from a challenge. I do my best not to avoid the root cause or the symptom of a challenge; processing these may take time. I believe we all process them in our own ways and at our own levels and capacities. A 19-year-old equestrian will likely have a different level of resiliency than a 50-year-old equestrian, even if it’s the same challenge. My intention is to remind us all, myself included, that challenges give us opportunities to understand ourselves better and also give us an outlet to demonstrate how we’re able to overcome even the most difficult things.
Photo:
Lean into your challenges; there’s a lot to be learned that will make you stronger.
Photo by Grand Pix Photography
