06/19/2026
🙌🏻
One of the hardest skills to develop as a rider isn’t turning barrels, reading ground, or finding speed.
It’s learning how to honestly evaluate your own performance.
A run can feel awful because you made one mistake, even though the rest of it was excellent.
A run can feel great because everything flowed smoothly, while the video shows several places where time was left on the table.
The riders who improve the fastest are usually the ones who can remove emotion from the equation and assess what actually happened.
Instead of asking, “Was that a good run?” try asking:
* What did my horse do well?
* What did I do well?
* What cost us time?
* What can we improve before the next run?
Every run doesn’t need to be a celebration, and every run doesn’t need to be a disaster. Most of them are simply information.
The more accurately you can evaluate that information, the faster you’ll improve.
After a run, what’s the first thing you look at: the clock, the video, or how it felt?
