What Tom Cruise has to teach us about performance

In today’s newsletter: I had a hot date with Abe this week and got to attend an early screening of the latest Tom Cruise movie, Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning. (Spoiler alert: it was soooo good! Go see it!) And after, I kept thinking about how there is so much we can learn from Tom Cruise and his highly methodical approach to stunts and apply to our journey with our horses. I break down what he does to be so successful and how you can be like Tom Cruise and be more successful today.

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If you didn’t know, Tom Cruise is well known for doing his own stunts. It’s pretty crazy to think he actually climbed the Burj Khalifa, (world’s tallest building), hangs off the side of a plane, does hand-to-hand combat on a moving train, or jumps out of an airplane at 25,000 feet. But he does.

In Cruise’s own words, "I want to give everything. To have that experience, to see that it communicates to an audience when it’s real. It’s different. There’s stakes, there’s real stakes".

While appreciated by audiences, the “secret” to his success is careful preparation. I am forever saying, “Confidence through Competency.” So it caught my attention when in an interview, he said, “Don’t be cautious. Be competent.” Definitely expressing the same sentiment with slightly different words.

In preparation for MI: Dead Reckoning, the signature gasp-inducing stunt is Cruise riding a motorcycle jump into a base jump. He basically rides off a mountain cliff, at speed, where he proceeds to freefall into a mountain valley uncomfortably close to the mountain cliffs that surround him in a bowl, before deploying a parachute and making his way to the ground. Holy moly.

But that stunt didn’t just happen. It was months and months of preparation. They drilled and drilled and drilled. They trained extensively. He worked on motocross skills. On base jumping skills. Every component of the stunt was broken down into super small pieces and worked on. Where would the cameras be? How would wind and weather play a factor? They built a scale replica of the jump at a quarry in England and practiced jump after jump after jump after jump… AFTER extensively practicing all the sub-skills in isolation. They used data from all that to form computer models of all the outcomes and trajectories of different jumps.

By the time they were on set to film the “final go” they were beyond dialed in. You can see on Cruise’s face he’s not particularly worried about it. Because he’s essentially done this jump 100s of times already.

The parallels to what we do as horseback riders are so strong! Shooting the movie is like going to a horse show. And all the training Tom Cruise does for a year ahead of time is like us and our horse practicing at home. It’s ridiculous to think Tom Cruise wouldn’t do any preparation and just ride his motorcycle off a cliff; but don’t we often avoid or simply not do some of the relevant preparation for a horse show and just go anyway? (Is it any wonder we don’t always get the results we’d prefer?)

In contrast to the careful, methodical preparation put in by Cruise that results in a magnificent final product, most of us are pretty shoddy.

We don’t deconstruct what we need to do- let alone do it.

We need to Isolate-Master-Integrate. All the skills.

That means practicing our walk to lope transition. AND our spins. AND harnessing our excitement. AND our ability to be in the present moment. AND our stops. AND figuring out how to attach our show number. AND what pad we use. And so much more. Breaking down into minute detail all the horse-specific skills, rider mental skills, and logistical concerns allows us to address all of them separately and most effectively.

That’s how to maximize your performance.

So now that I’ve talked your ear off about how amazing Tom Cruise is and how he really does the preparation work, blah blah blah. And you’re squirming when I brought up how most horse folks are mailing it in by only working on their spins… Luckily I won’t leave you hanging here. What can you do today? How can you not be like the 99% of horse folks who aren’t making progress because they aren’t doing their homework. (Even if they think they are).

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Make a list of everything – and I mean everything – you need to do at your next competition. Write down all the maneuvers you need to do with your horse, sure. But that’s just the start. Other things you may not be thinking about might be something like working on your horse’s trailering skills because he gets touchy about being loaded and that is stressing you out. (I mean, if you miss the horse show because your horse refuses to load, or gets injured attempting to load, you aren’t gonna think this was wasted time).

Make a checklist of all the things you need to pack in your trailer. Make an itinerary of what to do before the show (e.g. Monday- pack clothes, Tuesday- wash horse wraps, Wednesday- pack trailer, Thursday- wash horse, Friday- drive to showgrounds).

Oh, and we aren’t done yet! Write down all the things that make you nervous at shows. Is it the folks you see gossiping at the end of the stall aisle? Is it parking your trailer in the dark? What about not having your warm up routine dialed in?

Then write down any common riding mistakes you make. Do you get nervous at center and want to hurry out of there? Do you jab your horse and over-cue the lead changes? Do you lose it watching other people warm up or do their runs? Does your heart rate generally race and you feel like you couldn’t relax if your life depended on it? Perhaps you have such a fear around making a mistake and are such a perfectionist you ride ridiculously slow and overly careful? Perhaps you freeze and don’t actively ride your horse at all in the ring.

Taking careful inventory of everything in a horse show helps you to find your blind-spots. To find the weaknesses you didn’t even know you had and didn’t realize were really holding you back. Once you acknowledge them – and sometimes it can be as simple as arriving a day early or it may be something that’ll take a while to fully address – but once you acknowledge them you can get to work on addressing each of them one by one.

Breaking it all down into little bites you can actually chew. Because even when the mountain is large, you can still climb it one step at a time. And how’s that old saying go? How do you eat an elephant?

One bite at a time.

Until next time.

Happy Trails,

Nicole

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