How Do You Get Out of Your Own Way?

A letter on the voice that lives in your head, and why the goal is not to silence it but to change your relationship with it.

I want to write about the second rider in the saddle. The one nobody sees, but who is often talking the loudest.

She is with me every ride. She keeps a running commentary. She notices my tendency to hang on the right rein before I do. She says, mid-corner, that I need more inside leg. She replays the last transition in slow motion while I am supposed to be riding the next one. On a good day, she is a sharp, useful, informed second pair of eyes. On a rough day, she is the loudest voice in the arena, and the horse can feel her, and nobody signed up to ride a duet with the person in my head.

I am blessed, or cursed depending on the day, with an active internal life. Most of the serious adult amateurs I know are. It is part of what makes us serious. The people who took up dressage without a running internal commentary tend to enjoy themselves more and are less critical of their progress. The rest of us are wired the other way, and we hit a plateau at some point that is not really about the horse or the movement or the coach. It is about the second rider, and how much of the saddle she is currently taking up.

The critic is not the enemy

The first thing I want to say is that the voice is not the problem. That voice is what read the books. That voice is what took the correction and made it a habit. That voice is what noticed the right rein got heavy and quietly recalibrated it two strides later. Ambitious riders do not improve without her, and no amount of positive thinking will replace what she actually contributes on a good day.

The problem is not her existence. It is what she is authorized to do, and when.

The voice has two very different jobs, and adult amateurs habitually confuse them.

The first job is quality control. It is characterized as neutral, behavioral, informational: "The half halt was late. The shoulder was down. The change was after the aid." That voice, kept to its job, is useful. It is how we get better. It keeps us honest.

The second job is identity protection. This is the same voice, using the same tone, saying something completely different: "You are not a rider who can do this. You are always going to be the person whose changes are late. This is what you get for thinking you belonged at this level." The words sound like feedback. They are not. They are a different mechanism entirely, running under the guise of the first one, and it is the one that causes us to get stuck or spiral down.

Almost all of the "self-criticism" that costs us in this sport is the second one wearing the clothes of the first. If you cannot tell them apart, the identity voice gets to speak with the authority of the quality-control voice, and the ride goes sideways.

The timing problem

Now name the other trick the voice pulls, because this one is what most riders never notice.

The critic has a schedule, and her schedule is almost always wrong.

She is loudest during the ride, when what you actually need in your body is calm, quiet, presence, and a soft nervous system. She is quietest, or at least easiest to silence, in the hour after the ride, when honest reflection would actually help. She turns up during your worst rides and disappears during your best ones, when you are in flow and can't hear her at all. And crucially, when you sit down to reflect honestly on what happened, she often just refuses to show up with any useful details. She has spent all her energy in the wrong place already.

If you have been riding seriously for a while, you will probably recognize this timing problem. It is a common wiring in achievement-oriented people. The voice arrives without an invitation during performance, and misses her own appointment for the post-ride debrief. It's not that the internal dialog is too loud in general, it's just on the wrong schedule.

Half of the work of getting out of your own way is not making the voice quieter. It is moving her to the right chair and on the right schedule.

What Cindy actually said

I wrote in an earlier letter about Cindy Ishoy's long season of trying to teach her horse the one-tempi changes, and about the sentence she used to describe what carried her through. Persistence. Consistency. And never losing her temper.

I want to come back to that last one, because I do not think she meant only her temper with the horse.

The riders I most admire in this sport, the ones who have been in it long enough and still love it, all seem to share one thing. They do not lose their temper with themselves. Not that they are easy on themselves. Not that they do not notice what needs work. But when the ride does not go well, when the movement falls apart, when they miss the aid, they do not turn on themselves. They stay in the register of information rather than the register of contempt. They preserve the working relationship between the rider and the second rider in the head.

That is a form of horsemanship too. It is subtler and it looks like nothing from the outside, but it is real, and it is what the great ones have. The horse in the saddle is not the only partnership you are running. You are also in partnership with yourself. And a lot of us are miserable partners.

The friend test

There is the diagnostic I have found useful. I did not invent it — some version of it is in every mental performance book worth reading. It goes like this: If a friend just had that difficult ride and came to you upset, would you say to her what you are currently saying to yourself?

The answer, almost always, is not even close. We would never speak to a friend the way we speak to ourselves after a bad ride. We would find the useful piece of feedback and offer it kindly. We would remind her that she has been at this for years, that she loves the horse, that today was one day. We would not tell her she is fundamentally not cut out for this.

The gap between how you would treat that friend and how you are currently treating yourself is exactly the size of the space where you are getting in your own way. Close the gap and you get most of the ride back.

What to actually do

You cannot make the voice go away. Research on thought suppression is uncomfortably clear on this. The harder you try to not think a thought, the more you think it. This is why "just don't be so hard on yourself" has never once worked on anyone. It cannot work. It is asking the voice to solve the problem the voice is creating.

What can work is changing the relationship.

Notice the voice without arguing with her. When she starts up mid-ride, do not fight her, and do not agree with her either. Just note it: "the voice is here again." That small act of noticing is what puts a little distance between you and her, and the distance is where you find room to ride.

Move the appointment. Tell her, out loud in your head if you have to, that she has the floor after the ride, not during it. This is not silencing her. It is scheduling her. If you are like me, she may not entirely comply. She will still turn up in the saddle. But even a partial move helps.

Rewrite what she is saying. When she says "you are terrible at this," that is the identity-protection version. Translate it into the quality-control version: "tell me what specifically was rough, and what I can do about it." She often has real information inside her louder claims. Get her to hand it over in a form you can use.

Ask the friend question. When the volume gets high, run the diagnostic. What would you say to a friend who rode like you just did. Then say that to yourself instead. Not because the softer version is nicer, but because it is more accurate. The friend version is closer to the truth.

The whole point

The whole point of getting out of your own way is not becoming a rider who does not think about riding. That rider does not exist and would not be very good if she did.

The point is that the voice in your head becomes something closer to a working colleague and something less like a hostile roommate. She is still in the saddle. She is still commenting. But you have negotiated the terms. She does not get to speak the way she used to. She does not get to decide who you are based on a single canter transition. She is welcome, and she is on staff, and she reports to you, and she does not run the arena.

That is not silence. That is a working relationship.

And that, more than any specific technique, is how you find the balance and let yourself move forward.