Are you giving mixed messages to your horse?

Horse riding can be a source of great pleasure - but can also trigger a lot of anxiety and fear, which can take the fun out of riding or even bring it to a complete halt.

You'll get the best response from your horse by giving clear and concise instructions. A competent riding instructor can teach you how to do this, but if your feeling or intention does not match the physical instruction given, it sends a distinctly mixed message to your horse.

And mixed messages are very confusing. Take jumping - or, to be more precise, not jumping - as an example. Your physical instructions are for your horse to clear the jump. However, in your mind, you may be replaying the last time he pulled out. That is a mixed message - the physical message is to clear the jump, but the mental message is one of hesitation.

The age and experience of your horse will in large part dictate what happens. If he's older and more confident and has solid experience of jumping in the past, he'll probably go over anyway. If you've got a younger, greener horse, he may not be so confident and is much more likely to pull out. Your confidence is rocked again - but so is your horse's.

Watch kids that hare round at breakneck speed, jumping anything without a care in the world. You may even have been like this in the past, but now there is a difference between you and them - your experiences, your memories.

Going back to your riding, if you hadn't got the memory of past falls (either yours of someone else's) or other scary experiences, you wouldn't be worried about something bad happening now. But you're expecting or anticipating having a similar experience, and you're communicating that to your horse.

So what can you do about it? Well, you can't change your past experiences, but you can change how you feel about them. You can do this because you've done it thousands of times already for more minor things. In your life you will have overcome many negative things by consciously or subconsciously changing your focus to something more positive, leaving the negative experience in the past.

When you can remember a past experience or think about a belief you have without feelings of fear or anxiety, you will be able to move forward with ease.

However, where a block is more entrenched, you may need the help of a 'releasing' therapy like The Sedona Method or Thought Field Therapy which are fast and effective ways of unlocking haunting memories. These treatments help you to dissolve the feelings you may have attached to a memory - feelings that return with great intensity every time you're faced with or think about what scares you.

With the block out of the way, your feeling or intention will match the physical instructions you're giving your horse. Because you're no longer focused on what could go wrong, you will automatically give a clear mental instruction to accompany the physical command, and you'll be more likely to get the result you want.

It stands to reason that your horse will feel better and perform better by being around someone who's calm, confident and clear. Don't we all?!