Will 2022 be your best year yet?
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
CHARLIE UNWIN is a performance psychologist and mental coach, who works across sport, business and the military and helps riders to optimise their performance from the inside out in training and competition. His clients won four gold medals in Tokyo last summer, as well as three silvers and one bronze.
MANAGE YOUR INNER GAME
TAKE your best-ever performance and think about it hard – you know you can ride that well because you’ve done it before. But what if you could repeat it every single time? Managing our “inner game” is about consistently recreating our internal conditions to make our external performance the best it can be.
The inner game can be a curious concept to equestrians because, in this sport, the animal forms the focal point and that can draw attention away from what is going on in our heads. However, the horse largely performs as a function of how you perform and what goes on inside our heads affects our outside performance.
“In the high stakes of competition, there are distractions that break our focus”
There are two aspects to this: thinking and feeling. “Thinking” involves training ourselves to focus on the simple things that count –
