Confidence is here to stay...hopefully

It's amazing how confidence has everything to do with your mind...your mind most of the time is your enemy when it comes to confidence. It was funny because something so simple boosted my confidence entirely today. I showed up at the barn where I keep my jumper around 9 and of course my trainer was running late, as usual...while waiting, I figured i would try out one of his new horses that just arrived a few days ago to see if I could possibly make any money off the horse. Having seen the horse bucking and spooking like crazy with a rider two days ago, i knew he had major psychological issues. I took him out of his stall, and he immediately tensed up waiting for something bad to happen, i just walked along like I didn't notice anything and pretty soon he relaxed. I led him to the round pen where i started lunging him. Let's pause for a second so I can elaborate on something a little more; whenever I refer to the word lunge, i don't mean just running the horse around. when I lunge a horse I am working on getting the horse to fully pay attention to me, getting the horse relaxed, and at the end, for the horse to lick his lips and follow me around of his own free will. You might be familiar with this lunging technique, it's typically known as the natural horsemanship technique. This is the ONLY thing I use from natural horsemanship because I don't believe in the anything else the natural horsemanship people teach. Anyways, back to my story...after about ten minutes, I was able to get the horse to stop, face me, and follow me around all the while licking his lips. yay! success!!! At the point, I decided I would tack him up and try to ride him. Walking him around the arena with so many scary things all around, the horse would spook and then tense, waiting for me, the rider, to punish him. At that moment, i truly felt so very sorry for the life this horse has had to live. From then on, whenever I felt him tense up, i would pet him over and over and praise him with a "good boy" and a "you're okay" ; the more I said those things, the more he would relax. After about 20 minutes of just walking I started trotting and then cantering. He spooked a couple times at the canter and the poor horse thought I was going to punish him so he would try to buck as a defense mechanism; again, I would praise and praise him, and again, he calmed down and did not try to buck anymore. Riding this horse and accomplishing that much in an hour and a half boosted my confidence so much that I was able to jump those darn oxers correctly and  with extreme confidence . I hope everyone can take something away from this story...I know I definitely learned a lot today, about how much my mind/confidence affects my jumping and whenever I feel like I can't jump a certain jump, I'll just remind myself of this day and hopefully, my dormant confidence will rise and continue to rise to the point where it's always there, ready to use for any and every situation! : )