By Natalie Foxon
Have you ever noticed the stories and excuses you tell yourself leading to a competition? They might be so compelling that you withdraw from the event!
Performance Psychologist Jonah Oliver spends most of his time coaching clients like golfing stars, motorsports teams, and football clubs of various codes.
In partnership with Brett Parbery, he recently created a specific program for riders wanting to improve their performances. Jonah is not one to mess around; he loves nothing more than tackling confronting topics like underperformance, self-sabotage, and excuses.
Safety behaviours
In Jonah’s world, excuses are called Safety Behaviours, and he sees them everywhere.
Safety behaviours might sound like ‘it’s windy, so my horse won’t go well today’ or ‘that judge always scores me low’.
“When you come up with an excuse, you’re trying to minimise the potential psychological pain you may feel,” says Jonah.
“You’re doing it because you’re trying to create an external reason to justify your underperformance.”
Ouch!
“You fear that you’ll not ride to your high standard, and you don’t want that to be about you not being good enough. So if you have something else you blame or attribute causality to, it makes it feel psychologically safer.”
Jonah explains that the problem here is that this behaviour comes at a cost.
“It’s draining! It comes at a cost of your energy and your attention, and you’re being defeatist before you’ve even entered into the arena, right?
All these external reasons are avoidance. Deep down, when you say those things, you know you’re creating a story, and it distracts you from focusing on what matters—riding as best you can.
It’s much better to turn up and say, ‘I’m going to go out there; I’m going to do my thing. I don’t know what score I’ll get, but I know how I will ride. I will show up and be the best version of myself.”

Performance Psychologist Jonah Oliver spends most of his time coaching clients like golfing stars, motorsports teams, and football clubs of various codes.
Ramping up awareness
As the stories start brewing, Jonah says it’s important to notice them.
“It could be something like, ‘I’m noticing my brain is paying a lot of attention to the weather, and I really want to get caught up in it, and I’m checking the weather app 15 times, and then I was about to talk about it’.
That’s that self-awareness piece where otherwise, if you don’t bring some intention to it, then you just get subconsciously sucked into it, and you don’t even realise that you’ve just been hitting the refresh button on the weather app for 10 minutes.
Getting to know your patterning around the stories you’re telling yourself leading up to the competition and on the day is vital.”
When excuses are valid
There’s also the reality that sometimes you’ve got an injury or didn’t get as many hours on the horse as you would’ve liked. So what do we do when life gets in the way?
“It’s about what you do with that, how much power you give that story. Are you already saying to yourself, well, because I’ve got a slightly sore back, I won’t ride well today. You’re already making it into an excuse versus saying, ‘yeah, I’ve had an aching back, but you know what, for the next hour, I’m going to go out there and just ride the best I can, connect to what matters, and just get after it’.
“It may mean you don’t ride completely at your best because you were somehow compromised, but you still hop off that ride knowing that was the best version of yourself that day.”
Jonah’s new program, Resilient Riders: The Psychological Science of Unlocking Your Riding Potential, kicks off on 18 May at www.performanceriders.com