Nobody Is Actually Teaching You How To Be Confident

You see it in other horsewomen. You want it. But the advice you've been given isn't advice, it's just pressure with better packaging.

You know the woman I'm talking about. She walks up to her horse and something just settles. Her horse mirrors it back immediately. She doesn't look like she's trying. She doesn't look like she's managing anything. She just looks like she belongs there, completely, effortlessly, in a way you can feel from across the arena.

You want that. Every horsewoman in that arena wants that.

And somewhere along the way, someone told you to just be more like her. Fake it till you make it. Believe in yourself. Get back on. Ride through it. Think positive.

How's that working out?

The Confidence Gap Nobody Talks About

The horse world is full of advice about riding. We have clinicians, trainers, coaches, online courses, and YouTube channels dedicated to every technical aspect of horsemanship you can imagine. We have never had more access to instruction than we do right now.

And yet the barns are full of women who show up tight, ride scared, go home frustrated, and wonder what is wrong with them.

The problem is not a lack of riding instruction. The problem is that nobody in the horse world is teaching the other half of the equation. Everyone is training the horse. Everyone is training the rider's hands and seat and legs. Nobody is training the rider's nervous system. And that is exactly where confidence lives.

Confidence is not a personality trait. It is not something you either have or you don't. It is not a mindset you can think yourself into with enough positive affirmations. It is a physiological state that lives in the body. And until you address it at that level, no amount of riding instruction reaches it.

The horse world has a culture of toughness. We push through. We get back on. We don't make a big deal out of the fall, the spook, the bad ride, the year of bad rides. We tell ourselves we are fine and we show up anyway, and there is real strength in that. But there is also a cost.

When a woman keeps showing up to something that frightens her without ever addressing what is happening in her body, she is not building confidence. She is building a tolerance for fear. Those are not the same thing. One opens the door. The other just makes the closed door more familiar.

Telling a scared horsewoman to get back on is like telling a woman with a broken leg to walk it off. The intent is good. The tool is wrong. You cannot ride your way out of a nervous system that has decided the barn is not safe. You cannot positive-think your way past a body that is bracing before your foot hits the stirrup. The solution has to go deeper than the saddle.

What Confident Horsewomen Actually Have

Here is what I have noticed about the women who have that quality — the ones who walk up to their horse and everything just settles. They are not fearless. They have not had easier lives or easier horses. Many of them have fallen harder and come back from worse than the women watching them from across the arena.

Here is what I have noticed about the women who have that quality, the ones who walk up to their horse, and everything settles. They are not fearless. They have not had easier lives or easier horses. Many of them have fallen harder and come back from worse than the women watching them from across the arena.

What they have is regulation. Their nervous system has learned, through practice, intention, and work mostly off the horse, to find a baseline. To return to calm. To walk into the barn, present instead of already braced for what might go wrong.

That is a skill. Not a personality. Not luck. Not something they were born with. A skill that was built, and that means it can be taught.

The Work Nobody Is Assigning

I spent years looking for confidence in the arena. More lessons. Better horses. Different trainers. And every time something shifted in the saddle, it would drift back within weeks. Because the arena was treating the symptom. The source was somewhere else entirely.

The source was in my body in the patterns my nervous system had built up over years of stress, loss, and pushing through. And the work that actually changed things happened off the horse. In the morning, before I drove to the barn. In the quiet before, I reached for the halter. In the daily

practice of learning to regulate my own state so that what I brought to my horse was presence instead of static.

Here is what that work actually looks like in practice:

It starts before you ever leave the house. A few minutes of intentional breath extending the exhale longer than the inhale shifts your nervous system out of fight-or-flight before you pull into the driveway. Your horse reads your state from the moment you walk through the gate. What you arrive with matters more than what you do once you get there.

It continues in how you move before you ride. Not stretching for flexibility, moving to arrive. Releasing the tension that lives in the hips, the shoulders, and the jaw.

The places the body stores what the mind has not yet processed. A horse feels all of it underneath you. Releasing it before you ask anything of him changes the entire conversation.

And it goes deeper into what you believe about yourself as a horsewoman. Not what you think what you believe. At the level below conscious thought, where the real stories live. The ones that say you are not safe here, you are not capable, you have lost something you cannot get back. Those stories do not respond to affirmations. They respond to consistent, intentional inner work that rewrites them at the root.

That is the work nobody is assigning. And it is the only work that produces the confidence you have been watching from across the arena.

Your Horse Already Knows

Your horse is not waiting for you to ride better. He is waiting for you to arrive differently. He has been reading your nervous system every single ride, reflecting back exactly what you brought to the gate, and he has been trying to tell you something the whole time.

The confidence you are watching in other women is not out of reach. It is not a gift some horsewomen were given, and others weren't. It is the result of work that happens before the saddle goes on work that most women have never been shown how to do, because nobody in the horse world has been teaching it. Until now.

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Alicia VanderGriend

Cowgirl Life Co.

Alicia VanderGriend is the founder of Cowgirl Life Co. and a health and wellness coach for horsewomen. She lives on a ranch in Sequim, Washington. Her 90-day program Cowgirl Ignite helps horsewomen build genuine confidence, regulate their nervous systems, and show up as the rider their horse has always been waiting for.

Connect with Alicia on Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube @Cowgirl Life Co.

Take a free quiz, What Your Horse Already Knows About You, at www.aliciavandergriend.com/cowgirlignite-spark-quiz.

This article is from the June 2026 issue of Equine Business Magazine