I’ve written before about a time where I fell off one of my horses over a water tray obstacle. I used it as an exercise to work on my own Inner Critic – that demon of self-critical, nit-pickety, perfectionism – that often threatens to derail any of the good stuff, by constantly evaluating everything I do and finding that I just am not quite good enough yet.

Today I want to tell the story of a different fall.

A fall that shocked me to my core, and destroyed my confidence for weeks. Maybe months.

You see, this particular fall happened at a show. My first show at the great height of 80cm.

Sit back with a cup of tea and enjoy – spoiler alert: there’s a happy ending.

As I walked the novice working hunter course at my first show for the year, and my first ever show at 80cm, I remember thinking to myself: “WOW – this course is MASSIVE!”

My nerves were all a-jangle, and I can’t even remember if I practiced my breathing exercises. Outwardly I am usually the picture of calm, while inwardly my butterflies morph into giant flesh-eating moths, and fly around randomly at warp speed.

I watched a few people before me, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that this course was too big for me to handle well. I wasn’t really focused on what I COULD do, only on what seemed really difficult at that time. I started a bit too fast, rather helter-skelter, but managed to ride 1 and 2 reasonably well. We left them standing, intact, in any event. Jump number 3 was a black and white oxer, with milk crates underneath it.

I saw a stride, closed my leg, felt Jazzy surge beneath me…..

…… and the next thing, I was on her head and I knew I was going to buy a piece of turf.

Her whole bridle came off, and she galloped away, terrified of both the jump with the milk crates that she had spotted at the last second, and the dangling bridle that was now chasing her.

I landed on my head, rolled and leapt up. This is usual for me – my first thought is always – is my horse ok? After the compulsory paramedic check, I jumped back on Jazz and went down to the warm up arena to ‘have a jump’. Well, I nearly fell off again because she helicoptered the tiny cross so badly. We had both had a huge fright, and, although outwardly brave, were actually both shivering inside in terror.

It took Jazzy about 2 or 3 jumping lessons to get back to her usual self – bold and brave. It took me much longer. Coach Jess was amazing, never over-facing us, letting me talk and talk, while I processed and tried to get out of my head…

What actually happens to us humans when we have a traumatic experience is quite a complex series of thoughts and feelings, that we all process at different rates and with different emphasis.

Kolb’s Learning Model gives us an indication of the phases of learning, that can be useful to explain the process we go through as we learn and progress:

Concrete Experience

Something happens – good or bad.

Reflective Observation

We think about it and replay the experience from different angles in our mind

Abstract Conceptualization

We play around with various conclusions about why it happened

Active Experimentation

We work on different ways of doing (or avoiding doing) the same thing again.

This is really an over simplification of the entire learning process, and Kolb explains that we have 4 different styles of learning. Although all 4 are essential to a productive outcome, we all favour one in particular, and are usually averse to learning from at least one of the quadrants. When we put this idea into our riding, and in particular riding experiences that leave us feeling traumatized in some way, we see that overcoming things that go wrong with our riding depend on us moving all the way round the model – and not getting stuck halfway.

So, back to me and Jazzy for a real-life example:

The fall constitutes the Concrete Experience. My own natural style is to spend a long time ruminating over the experience in my head (Reflective Observation) and trying to work out what I did wrong and how I could have prevented it, or what might have happened if I had done things differently. (Abstract Conceptualization). This isn’t wrong, in fact it’s an essential part of the process. But when I get fixated on talking about it and replaying it in my head, it prevents me from moving on to Active Experimentation (ie. DOING, instead of thinking about it)

Now, some of you may identify more with getting straight back to DOING, and not spend much time at all on the THINKING or WATCHING - and this also isn’t wrong. But of course, if we rush into the DOING before we have processed the WHY and the POSSIBILITIES, we run the risk of making the same mistake over and over.

The secret to coming back from a fall or a bad riding experience quickly is to learn to identify where you tend to get stuck, and then to gently but firmly encourage behaviours that help you move through the experience holistically, using all 4 learning styles.

That’s the theory anyway.

In practice, I can admit that the first few times are hard. Really hard. But I have definitely seen myself recover quicker from mistakes in my jumping now. My coach has noticed it too, and it makes a massive difference to how I push myself into new, more challenging questions, heights, lines and courses. Often the only thing keeping us stuck and afraid to move forward in our riding is the way that we are processing our learning /anxiety/experiences. So, after my very shaky start to 80cm jumping, I literally flew into 90cm and weirdly enough, it didn’t actually feel high at all. This year marks my step up into 1m classes – a height I last jumped in my early twenties, and truly never thought I would ever get close to again. Just goes to show: never say never to a determined old lady! ;-)