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California rider Leslie Morse has spent nearly 20 years buying, training and selling horses to earn a living. Now she's in a position to keep one of her brightest stars, a 9-year-old Dutch Warmblood stallion, Kingston, and she is on track to becoming one of the country's top competitors. Here she discusses how she stays confident and focused when competing and the challenges she's faced as a rider with dyslexia.
Finding Her Zone
Morse emerges from the quiet confines of her car after an hour-long nap. Ignoring the goings-on around her, she puts on her show clothes in the tack room and heads for the warm-up arena where she mounts her 17.2-hand, 9-year-old Dutch Warmblood stallion Kingston and gets to work preparing for the upcoming class.
Morse wasn't sleeping on the job, though. She's found that sleeping for one-to-two-hours before riding her tests helps to "empty out my brain," she says. That way, she can enter the arena and ride down centerline looking confident and focused. "I close out the outside world and it becomes quieter in my mind; I don't have so much noise in my head," she says. "Everyone I work with knows that I need to have quiet time before I ride. That's why I ride first thing in the morning when I'm at home. If I talk to people first, my mind fills up with other things." While unconventional, it works for her: Morse was undefeated for almost two seasons on Kingston--more than 50 consecutive classes--at Fourth Level and Prix St. Georges/Intermediaire I.
Morse has found the key to performing her best in the show ring; she's figured out how to get herself in "the zone." "It's more of a feeling, not a competitive place," she explains. She recalls one of the first times she became aware of this ability: "I was at the Olympic Festival in St. Louis, and I'd never felt so much heat in my life, and I was riding the laziest horse in the world. I was so in my zone that I didn't notice the heat. In the extended walk, all of a sudden, this wave of heat came over me, and my friends recalled me turning tomato red. I felt like I was going to pass out. Then, in three or four steps, when I got my concentration back, the heat was gone for the rest of the test."
Morse describes the feeling. "Being in your zone is silence. It's quietness. Things slow down. It's such peace that you think of only one thing, but at the same time, you're not just thinking of it, you're feeling it. You have to feel it, make a split hair of a decision and then the decision has to go from your brain to your body to do it. Then you have to evaluate it and make another adjustment."
Dealing with Dyslexia
Staying focused and confident has been a challenge for Morse, who began riding to build her confidence after having difficulty in school due to dyslexia--a learning disability that makes it difficult for a person to read and/or write. Rather than giving up, she's learned how to overcome her disability by using the terms "inside" and "outside" rather than left and right. It's something she discusses with anyone she takes a lesson or clinic with. "Sometimes I have to stop in the middle of the lesson and remind the instructor to use 'inside' and 'outside.' Otherwise things come too quickly for me to sort them out and react to them."
At the Bayer/U.S. Equestrian Team Festival of Champions in June, she described her technique for remembering to pick up the left lead during her Freestyle test: "I was walking by M and wiggled my left thumb to remind myself 'left lead, left lead, left lead.' This is just one of the issues I've had to overcome."
Finding Her Zone
Morse emerges from the quiet confines of her car after an hour-long nap. Ignoring the goings-on around her, she puts on her show clothes in the tack room and heads for the warm-up arena where she mounts her 17.2-hand, 9-year-old Dutch Warmblood stallion Kingston and gets to work preparing for the upcoming class.
Morse wasn't sleeping on the job, though. She's found that sleeping for one-to-two-hours before riding her tests helps to "empty out my brain," she says. That way, she can enter the arena and ride down centerline looking confident and focused. "I close out the outside world and it becomes quieter in my mind; I don't have so much noise in my head," she says. "Everyone I work with knows that I need to have quiet time before I ride. That's why I ride first thing in the morning when I'm at home. If I talk to people first, my mind fills up with other things." While unconventional, it works for her: Morse was undefeated for almost two seasons on Kingston--more than 50 consecutive classes--at Fourth Level and Prix St. Georges/Intermediaire I.
Morse has found the key to performing her best in the show ring; she's figured out how to get herself in "the zone." "It's more of a feeling, not a competitive place," she explains. She recalls one of the first times she became aware of this ability: "I was at the Olympic Festival in St. Louis, and I'd never felt so much heat in my life, and I was riding the laziest horse in the world. I was so in my zone that I didn't notice the heat. In the extended walk, all of a sudden, this wave of heat came over me, and my friends recalled me turning tomato red. I felt like I was going to pass out. Then, in three or four steps, when I got my concentration back, the heat was gone for the rest of the test."
Morse describes the feeling. "Being in your zone is silence. It's quietness. Things slow down. It's such peace that you think of only one thing, but at the same time, you're not just thinking of it, you're feeling it. You have to feel it, make a split hair of a decision and then the decision has to go from your brain to your body to do it. Then you have to evaluate it and make another adjustment."
Dealing with Dyslexia
Staying focused and confident has been a challenge for Morse, who began riding to build her confidence after having difficulty in school due to dyslexia--a learning disability that makes it difficult for a person to read and/or write. Rather than giving up, she's learned how to overcome her disability by using the terms "inside" and "outside" rather than left and right. It's something she discusses with anyone she takes a lesson or clinic with. "Sometimes I have to stop in the middle of the lesson and remind the instructor to use 'inside' and 'outside.' Otherwise things come too quickly for me to sort them out and react to them."
At the Bayer/U.S. Equestrian Team Festival of Champions in June, she described her technique for remembering to pick up the left lead during her Freestyle test: "I was walking by M and wiggled my left thumb to remind myself 'left lead, left lead, left lead.' This is just one of the issues I've had to overcome."