Coaching, mentoring & neurodiversity

Meet Emily Hedger, a BDCC Level 3 coach who is part of the BD mentoring scheme, delivering amazing support to other aspiring officials. 

Coach and rider Emily is neurodivergent and speaks openly about her personal experiences, and how she applies these to her efforts in helping others. Read a fascinating interview with an inspiring individual, who’s giving back her time, to support pupils, friends and strangers alike.

Explain your role as a mentor with British Dressage?

So the role is to support mentees through sharing knowledge and helping them to build skills, develop confidence and work towards future goals, whatever they might be, in a practical way.

We have meetings either in person or on Zoom and we have a good chat and spend the hour working out how we can build a way forward, in whatever circumstances.

You’re a BDCC Level 3 coach, can you explain about why you wanted to become a BD qualified coach?

As a teenager I was quite shy so it came as a bit of a shock when I decided to coach - to myself and my family! I was 18 when I did my Level 2 qualification. It’s a bit young, but I had the full dressage bug through doing FEI Juniors.

Through the coaching I found more confidence. And I think the more you do it, the more confident you get with yourself and the value you have.

After I had my daughter I pushed on to do my Level 3, it is one of the best things I’ve ever done.

Tell me about your experience with neurodiversity?

I didn’t know I was neurodiverse until about two years ago. I’d had my daughter and then gone through COVID and I just found myself feeling very different. I’d spotted some videos on TikTok and really related to them, and it was through that I started looking into it.

I went to my GP and started the diagnostic process, initially for ADHD but ASD was added later. It can take a long time to get a formal diagnosis, normally over 3 years.

It’s very much been a learning curve, realising the things I’ve been doing subconsciously and learning better strategies to help moving forwards.

When I look back at my coaching and riding, I realised that there were so many things I’d implemented long before I knew I was neurodiverse. For example, listening to music in the warm-up with my headphones in is actually a coping mechanism for sensory overload.

Do you take experiences into your own coaching?

Lots! Until reflecting on it, I didn’t realise how many coping mechanisms that I'd made for myself. Now I can pass this information down to clients to help them succeed, without being too heavy handed or labelling.

Quite a few of my clients are neurodiverse so it’s really easy to relate to one another!

There’s plenty of positives and areas where being neurodiverse is really useful - attention to detail, thinking outside of the box and finding creative solutions are all great skills in equestrian sports!

Why are you passionate about mentoring other neurodiverse people?

It’s estimated that in the UK, one in seven people are neurodiverse – that's 13 million people. Imagine how many of those are BD members!

A lot of the time I feel there’s quite a strong stigma around neurodiversity - I care about creating a place where people feel like they belong and they will be seen and heard just as they are. If I can help someone feel valued, make a process easier or help them reach goals, then that’s amazing!

Talk through how you’re adapting your skills and processes to help other people in achieving learning goals?

SO say if someone comes with the target of achieving a qualification, it’s breaking that down and seeing the areas that people might find hard. Some people might find the portfolio aspects quite overwhelming, as it is a large piece of work. When it gets overwhelming often negative self talk creeps in and then it spirals and seems unachievable– so I help to hit the pause button, break things down and find practical solutions to completing tasks in a way that works for each individual. It’s all about preventing that spiral, and that’s something I can really understand from my own experiences.

Often body doubling can help - It motivates you to know that there’s somebody with you, helping to get work done. It’s not about pressure, it’s about knowing there’s someone there if you need them.

Outside of written work, the other key area is supporting with confidence. Self-confidence can be low with people with neurodiversities, due to the amount of negative feedback often heard at a young age. This can creep in different areas; coaching in front of others, not second guessing your lesson plan and receiving feedback well. Receiving constructive feedback well is a skill everyone can learn but due to low self-confidence and not always reading body language or cues as intended can make this area a little tricky. Receiving feedback is fundamental to improving and achieving qualifications. I try to work on encouraging confidence and helping to breakdown feedback.

Lots of mentoring work is about sharing experiences and listening to problems, it’s thinking about different strategies and understanding that everyone has their own way of managing it. If people are open and comfortable to say “I’m neurodiverse and this is my workaround” we can then help each other find our individual workarounds.

Can you explain the phrase workaround for me in more detail?

Workarounds are just a way of doing things that are different to ‘normal’!

You’ve probably heard it used more in relation to physical disabilities, say for example a rider has had a hip replacement or issue and they struggle to get into canter, so we teach the horse to canter off a seat weight aid instead – thats a workaround!

For neurodivergent people, it’s taking a way of doing something and moving it more towards how each persons brain works. For example, I tried to organise my diary on my phone as other coaches had recommended this to me. For me it absolutely didn’t work - I became anxious that it didn’t save or I’d put the wrong yard/date/person. A paper diary where I could see each week laid out was much easier for me to manage. Everything goes in the diary - even the school run!

How important do you think it is that we continue to raise awareness and offer support to neurodiverse members, in all walks of BD from riding to officiating and coaching?

Neurodiversity means that the brain functions, learns and processes information differently...and alternative perspectives bring innovation. With that, it changes the way we perform and where we take sport forward.

Because we think differently, I believe that we can find marginal gains and solutions in areas of sport that others perhaps haven’t yet. Simone Biles is a great example of this, as an amazing sports women who’s open about her experiences of ADHD and how she's used this to drive gymnastics forward.

Secondly is emphasing how important horses are for everyone’s mental health, especially that of neurodiverse people where exercise and therapy have a huge impact. Horses are amazing; we need to continue to foster the sports environment where we can benefit from the wealth of benefits that horses bring.

I really believe that we have advantages as neurodiverse people, being creative, being detail-oriented, enjoying repetition, thinking outside the box – these are all things that lend themselves so well to dressage, and through education we can learn about how to apply our individualities to success and progress.

Photo credit: Paul Ruffle