Regaining Confidence After a Fall
by Daniel Stewart
Christina asks: “I had a pretty bad fall recently and I can’t stop thinking about it. Is there anything I can do to get my confidence back?”
This is one of the most common questions I receive and chances are pretty good that many of you have also asked yourself the same thing at some time in the past. To overcome this challenge we must first identify the real problem: Is it the fall, or the memory of the fall that’s robbing us of our confidence? For almost all of us, it’s actually the memory of the fall that holds us back from moving on.
So, if the negative memory is to blame, how do we solve it? We have two choices. The first is to just stop thinking about it. If you’ve ever tried this you know how impossible it is. Our minds think 20-60,000 thoughts a day and there’s just no way to turn them off no matter how much we might want to. Telling yourself to “stop thinking about it” just seems to make things worse.
Our second choice is to replace negative thoughts with positive ones. This is called thought substitution and takes into consideration that while we can’t stop thinking, we can certainly select the kind of thoughts we think about. For this to work we need to arm ourselves with a short list of pre-selected positive thoughts. The next time the negative memory of the fall comes into our minds, we quickly replace it with one of the positive memories on our list. It may not happen right away, but with a little work the negative memory will slowly fade away because your positive ones will have replaced it.
If you have a question you’d like me to answer visit stewartclinics.com.
Published November 2013 Issue
The Northwest Horse Source is an independently owned and operated print and online magazine for horse owners and enthusiasts of all breeds and disciplines in the Pacific Northwest. Our contemporary editorial columns are predominantly written by experts in the region, covering the care, training, keeping and enjoyment of horses, with an eye to the specific concerns in our region.
