Dr Jenny: ‘The More Skills We Have, The Less Fear Bothers Us’
The horse lover and US-based sports psychologist reveals how to manage fear and perform under pressure, plus why we should sometimes be totally selfish
Photo courtesy of Jenny Susser. Dr Jenny was Team Sport Psychologist for the American dressage team at the 2012 summer Olympics
When she first became a sports psychologist, Dr Jenny Susser, or “Dr Jenny”, could not have envisaged she would end up working with equestrians. As a former All-American swimmer and athlete, she says for her, sports psychology lived elsewhere, and that for some people horse riding didn’t even really qualify as a sport.
“Working with equestrian athletes wasn’t even on my radar, it wasn’t even a thought,” she explains. “Actually, when I was in graduate school, I really wanted to work with pro football.”
It was around this time that Jenny took up riding again after a decades-long break and – in her words – became “re-smitten”.
But it wasn’t until she met American dressage rider and Olympian Lendon Gray, and started coaching children at Lendon’s Dressage4Kids, that Jenny became open to the idea of working with equestrians.
“I did stuff for Lendon for years and just absolutely loved it, she is just an extraordinary human being,” she tells me.
“Then people started asking me for individual sessions and then I started [doing clinics], it kind of, was, by accident.”
Since then, equestrians have come to dominate the work Jenny does as a sports coach. She works with riders of all levels from amateur to professional, and is currently an Equestrian Masterclass instructor for the educational website Noellefloyd.com. In 2012, she served as Team Sport Psychologist for the American dressage team at the Olympics in London.
So what exactly do most riders need help with?, I ask.
“There are two reasons why riders call me,” she says, “one is fear, and the other is performance.”
Most of Jenny’s equestrian clients are amateur, female riders aged 35 and over
Equestrians aren’t ready for fear
We talk about fear first, which Jenny explains is actually something that comes naturally as we age due to changes in our brain and hormone levels.
“Equestrians aren’t ready for that mentally,” she says, adding that it can take some time for us to notice and accept fear.
As such, most of her clients are aged 35 and over, but interestingly, they’re mostly female.
“Typically, the fearful rider is the adult, amateur backyard-barn woman who either shows for fun or doesn’t show at all, or is too afraid to show and they’re afraid of their horses,” she explains.
“I’ve had a dozen women who’ve never cantered call me and say ‘I’m terrified I can’t even canter’, and I’ve had a hundred percent success getting them all to canter.”
I wonder why men are not calling her in the same frequency — do they not also experience fear as they get older?
Men are less likely to admit they’re afraid, she says, but also, (at least in her own culture), “men don’t require confidence [in] the way that women have been taught to require confidence in order to perform anything. And so, men just sort of go, ‘oh OK fine, I should be able to do that, I can do that’.”
She adds: “Confidence is like assumed and a given in men, and for women it is not, and young girls are taught and told and programmed … that they need to be more confident.”
In fact, she says, confidence in men is very rarely even talked about.
“I’ve watched countless trainers – Olympic level down to backyard barn-level trainers – I have watched countless riders… and what I see repeatedly is that if a woman is riding and looks doubtful, she has a doubtful moment, she hesitates… a trainer, either male or female, but especially a male trainer, will say ‘be confident’.”
By contrast, she says, “you would never, ever, ever hear a trainer yell across the arena [to a male rider] ‘come on you need to be more confident’… you’d never hear that yelled to a man, it just wouldn’t happen.”
Dr Jenny believes if we can develop better relationships with horses, we can become less fearful
Skills and horsewomanship
Besides age and sex, there are, of course, other reasons why riders might feel fear. Jenny says it is usually a whole medley of things, but that our lack of skills in handling and riding a big, strong prey animal, or our feelings about our skills, will no doubt have a role to play.
“When I ask a woman what she’s afraid of, a lot of times she can’t say it, but as we start to distill it down, what it turns into is: ‘I wouldn’t know how to deal with X situation’.”
And so, one of the best places to start in overcoming fear, she says, is to first look at you’re good at, and then think about what you can learn to do better.
“A lot of times the people that I work with have more skills than they realise,” she tells me, saying these riders are disconnected from their skillset and unable to ‘own’ their skills.
“Then there’s, what are the skills that you actually need? And a lot of times for an adult amateur woman or even a professional woman, they don’t want to push their horses around, they want to have a great relationship with their horse, and so [they’re] trying to figure out: How do I have a great relationship with my horse without being dominating?”
Jenny says she is very encouraged by the shift towards natural horsemanship, ‘horsewomanship’ and positive reinforcement as a route to developing better relationships with our horses, and in turn, feeling less fearful.
“I hope that as we can advance our knowledge and the way that we… work with and be with, and teach and train our horses. If we become better at that, then I think that will change the fear profile.”
She clarifies: “The more skills we have, the more equipped we are, and the less fear bothers us. Fear is always going to be the response or the reaction, right, because we’re wired for fear, it’s a survival mechanism, so we’re always going to have that.
“However, the things that trigger fear in you, are dependent upon, your skillset, your abilities, your capacities.”
Dr Jenny often helps her clients reconnect with the skills they already have
Managing our nervous system
Jenny also believes we can learn to regulate our autonomic nervous system in moments of fear and high stress.
“When your sympathetic nervous system gets triggered, then you lose blood flow to your frontal lobe, you lose cognitive and executive functioning,” she explains.
“If you’re in sympathetic, if you’re in reaction, if you’re in survival mode, you can’t think, you can’t process, you can’t be curious, you can’t be creative, you can’t be generous, you can’t be any of those things.
“The best example of that is someone doing a dressage test where they have a reader, and they go off course anyway… they call it ‘amygdala hijack’. It’s not just your amygdala, but that’s my favourite example and every equestrian that you tell that to is like: ‘Oh my god, yeh’.”
Another problem, Jenny believes, is horse buying, which she thinks is partly due to “a glitch” in the industry (at least in the US), which sees trainers scrambling to make ends meet and customers seeking “flashy” horses that can be too much for them.
“Adult amateur women buy the wrong horse all the time,” she tells me.
Dr Jenny says learning to how stay focused under extreme pressure can help with performance
Focusing under pressure
When it comes to performance coaching, Jenny attracts a very different type of client.
“They don’t have fear, they’re typically a trainer or a professional or a high level adult amateur trying to win a national championship or something like that, so the fear isn’t a part of it,” she explains.
“They have a distinct skillset, they feel… connected to their horse and how they ride, and they’re good in the saddle… However, what I find, is that most people… don’t know how to prepare to perform under pressure.”
This is typically where she’ll help athletes in other disciplines (activities where fear plays a smaller role) such as swimming, baseball and tennis – she’s even coached an opera singer.
To help clients perform better, the first thing Jenny does is ask questions such as: what are you preparing for and why, how do you need to prepare, what’s the goal, what’s the outcome, what’s the trajectory, where’s the end point, what’s the path and what’s in the way?
“I’m always trying to figure out what skillsets do they have mentally, and then what skillsets are they lacking and how do we grow them and develop them.”
I ask her what is it that most people are lacking. She says if she had to pick one word that summarises the key to performance, it would be ‘focus’.
“However, there are literally, scientifically, 11 million bits of information competing for your focus every second of every day, so it is managing distractions and being able to recover your focus repetitively, frequently, reliably, predictably, and when it is under extreme pressure. Those are the skills that I help people build to increase their performance.”
I confess to Jenny that I find competitions extremely nerve-wracking, but I’ve done so few, maybe I’m just out of practice?
“That’s what most people say: I find it difficult and I’m out of practice, so the more you do it, the better you get.”
But she stresses again that you also need a distinct set of skills that allow you to manage your mind. Hoping to squeeze more out of her, I push: So how exactly do you do it? (What are these secret skills?)
“Well this is my life’s work,” she replies with a laugh, saying it would be like me trying to teach her yoga in one phone call.
Dr Jenny says yoga is a great opportunity for equestrians to be completely selfish for a short period of time each day
“There’s a ton of things, right, so breathing is essential for getting your mind back, it’s one of the quickest ways to return blood flow to the frontal lobe, which is how you recover your cognitive and executive functioning. [There’s also] goal setting, visualisation…”
But she reminds me that all of these things — goal setting, visualisation, meditation and breathing – are things that people need to learn and develop when they are calm.
“And you make those strong, so that then you can use them when your autonomic nervous system elevates.”
She also tells me that nerves essentially all start with a negative thought, making me reflect on the power of positive thinking.
“Everything starts as a thought and it cascades from there… when we say ‘nerves’... it's a bad thought that results in a bad feeling.”
Yoga and being selfish
I could talk to Jenny all day, but alas, I need to let her go. Before we hang up, she tells me that everyone has a different recipe for what makes them feel confident, but for her, preparation of mind, body and spirit is key.
“I just did a TedEx talk and thank God I had my preparation game because it was really, it was one of the most challenging and most pressurised events I’ve ever done.”
Interesting, so you were nervous?
“Oh, off the hook! Never been so nervous or scared or confronted or pressurised in my life.”
Me again: Did you have to apply your own techniques?
“Oh my God did I have to, I had to sports psychologise myself to the nth degree. So I was very grateful that I had the skills.”
And finally, quickly: I wonder if she agrees that yoga could be beneficial for horse riders.
“One hundred percent, absolutely,” she says. “Yoga especially is fantastic for awareness, and [for] mental as well as physical discipline… I think that it is brilliant and wonderful as a training mechanism or method for equestrians…”
“And it’s selfish,” she adds. “I think that so many of us who have horses, we do so many more things for our horses than we do for ourselves. And I think that the beauty of something like having a meditative or yoga practice is, it’s wonderful because it’s all about you. You know, like go and be selfish, please, for at least a chunk of time, at least every day.”
Dr Jenny Susser — At A Glance
An athlete, scientist, horse lover and people expert, Dr Jenny believes anyone with big goals can train for greatness. A New York State licensed psychologist, she has a doctoral degree in Clinical Health Psychology specialising in Sport Psychology, and is a member of the US Olympic Registry for Sport Psychologists, the highest distinction for Sport Psychology in the country. A former All-American swimmer, Dr Jenny knows what it is to perform under pressure at the highest levels. During her athletic career she swam on two national teams and competed at the 1988 Olympic Trials. Since retiring from competition, Dr Jenny has worked with athletes of all sports, ages and levels, including amateur, professional and Olympic teams. She has also delivered performance training to groups and individuals at Fortune 500 companies. She is a passionate advocate for women in leadership, and in 2016 was a panelist at Fortune’s Most Powerful Women Summit.
