Self-Sabotage: How Your Mindset Affects Your Equine Business

Photo by Lillie Ratcliffe Photography

This month, business and mindset coach Nicola Kinnard-Comedie is exploring ‘self-sabotage’ and how this might be behind a plateau or any stuck feelings you might be experiencing in business. 

If you’ve ever wondered why you aren’t hitting your goals, or why your business isn’t panning out quite as you’d hoped, then read on… 

Now be honest, do you ever find yourself doing any of the following:

• Putting off dealing with customer emails / messages 

• Procrastinating on admin or business tasks 

• Delaying creating or updating a website 

• Getting stuck in perfection mode

• Writing a post 10 times over and struggling to hit the publish button

• Spending hours creating an article or blog post but not promoting it 

• Changing your branding / logo (again) or struggling to decide in the first place 

• Overthinking every social media post and ending up with no content

• Broken or outdated links on your website

• Reluctance to create an email list

• Hard to find payment links

• Re-inventing the wheel

I bet you are nodding along to come of these, and if so you are not alone, welcome to self-sabotaging – which is quite simply when we are deliberately hindering our own progress. Sounds crazy, right, but we all do it. 

I fell back into this trap quite recently, so it felt like the exact time to write this article. I’m a mindset coach, an NLP coach practitioner, a clinical hypnotherapist, and my mindset holds me back at times! 

Whilst I have been guilty of many of the above over the years, I have worked really hard to shift some old mental programming and felt well on my path. Then a few weeks ago, I found myself being really grumpy and snappy with my husband. Everything he did (or didn’t do) was wrong. Like everything. Even buying me beautiful jewellery for my birthday was wrong. I suddenly realised that something was up – seriously, who moans about a beautiful birthday present? 

Then it hit me – everything in my life was going so well, and clearly I was not comfortable with this. On some level, I must have felt the need to ‘break’ something, which in this case was by being a total witch to my poor husband. Thankfully I realised, issued a huge apology and all was sorted. It was also a useful reminder about how self-sabotage can rear its ugly head when you are least expecting it.   

For me, it all comes back to fear, and finding the block is the best way to move on from these hindering behaviours. 

So what’s the fear that could be coming up for you?

Fear of failure 

Fear of success 

Fear of judgement 

The fear of failure could have you working on your website for 6 months before ever pushing ‘live’. The fear of judgement might have you reluctant to share your articles or social media posts. 

In my experience of coaching hundreds of equestrian business owners, the fear of failure is much less of an issue. As people dealing with horses, we are practiced at ‘failure’ - I ‘failed’ at the mounting block recently as my horse walked past the block and didn’t stop for me as I intended. It’s more often the fear of everything going to plan that holds us back.

In my recent self-sabotaging example, it was the fear of success, and this can’t continue creeping in. Old programming around – ‘it’s too good to be true’, or ‘it won’t last’ reappeared, and I was able to deal with this. 

So when you find yourself lacking focus, doom scrolling on Instagram and pretending that you’re working, remember this; you’re not lazy, or unmotivated, it’s probably stemming from self-sabotage. You can delve deeper into this and see what is really holding you back.

Photo by Lillie Ratcliffe Photography

Nicola Kinnard-Comedie (Msc, BHSAI Int. SM)

is the owner and founder of NKC Equestrian Training, delivering horse care training to horse owners and business and mindset coaching to equine practitioners.

Nicola is a qualified riding instructor and has over 20 years industry experience, and now uses her coaching skills to assist equine practitioners. Nicola decided to combine her experience of equestrian science, sales and marketing, and teach this to others. Nicola works with veterinary physiotherapists, massage therapists, osteopaths and other equestrians across the world to help them build their dream business. Nicola's work focuses on harnessing the power of your mindset, together with cutting edge marketing strategies to support equestrian business owners to realise the business of their dreams.

You can find out more about Nicola here: www.nkcequestrian.com

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This article is from the August issue of Equine Business Magazine