Internationally experienced coach and author Tanja Mitton has developed a unique blend of mindset improvement and horse and rider training to become an in-demand leader in the holistic approach to coaching.

Tanja Mitton is a character of great integrity and passion. To chat with her it is as if you are the only person on the planet and her immediate interaction and amazing ability to read the situation is quite inclusive.

Modest, to say the least, she is a rider of great respect and talent having competed internationally in show jumping. An equestrian coach of great knowledge and perception, she takes the total body and mind into consideration when showing riders how they can better themselves in the sport and in competition.

This holistic approach leads to great interest for Tanja to give clinics in Australia and also in Germany, where she was born.

Now established on her property at West Woombye in Queensland’s Gold Coast hinterland, Tanja is in great demand for her clinics, both in Australia and Germany, and for her coaching and range of educational resources. A mother of two daughters, she has also written two books about her approach to training.

Tanja was born near Stuttgart in Germany, and had one sister. The family was not in any way interested in horses. Her father, Horst, was an engineer and ran a very successful business that he created and where Tanja’s mother, Gerda, worked as the bookkeeper.

Tanja’s interest in horses started when she was around six years old. She just loved them, but it was not until she was 11 that she started to ride at a local riding school and have weekly tuition. The family had moved to Augsburg not far from Munich at this stage, and when Tanja was 14 she owned her first horse. He was a 17-year-old Hungarian carriage horse that used to be in a competitive team of four. He was retired from competition and put in the riding school as a school master. He was an amazing gentleman, says Tanja, and ideal for her at the time as he was such an honest horse and gave her confidence and kept her safe when her skills were uneducated and she was green.

When Tanja left school, she retired him and bought a four-year-old Holsteiner, which, on reflection, she realises was not the best mount for her level of experience. He was a show jumper and not the easiest, but the rider at the stables helped Tanja a lot and rode him for her as well, and the combination started to fall into place. Tanja started jumping him in the 90cm classes and graduated to 1.2m classes; he was not super competitive but certainly was a great horse who really set some training tasks for Tanja.

LEARNING THE ROPES

During the next two and a half years, Tanja says she worked in a saddlery shop as a shop assistant while also training at the stables near her home. Then there was a move to the Black Forest – a large forested mountain range in south-west Germany – where she was employed as a groom by the Dutch showjumper, Bert Heijman. She took her beloved Holsteiner and continued to train with help from Bert. It was not long before she was riding the younger horses and then some of the more experienced ones, jumping them successfully up to 1.3m classes. Tanja was with Bert for two years before taking up a four-month position with Herbert Meyer, the national German showjumping coach, riding the young horses and bringing competition horses back in to work after the winter.

From here it was a position with Alwin Schockemöhle in Mühlen, where she was grooming for Thomas Frühmann and Jörg Münzner and travelling all over Europe, mainly with Jörg, to all the big shows. By travelling to all those big shows, Tanja gained so much insight into the training, riding and work behind the scenes, and realised it was not an easy sport at the top level. It was also expensive to be competitive and she came to a realisation that she did not have the dedicated belief in herself to make it. She says she started to wonder “what the hell” was happening with her life and, with a wry chuckle, admits it was a sort of early mid-life crisis moment; one that she did not realise would enable her in the future to help many people through similar life challenges.

She took a career leap and started vet nursing at the Telgte Equine Hospital, where she rose to be in charge of the intensive care unit during her four years there. The hospital was huge and had 40 stables, and she says the experience of working in such a facility and seeing every kind of operation and procedure was invaluable. Tanja had four horses of her own at this stage and her days were long, to say the least. She started at the hospital at 8am and worked through until 6pm, then would go home, eat, change and ride her horses – sometimes not finishing until midnight!

After completing her vet nursing diploma, she was offered a position at an equine physio rehabilitation centre in the UK. It was supposed to be for three months but the inevitable happened, as it does, and she met the love of her life in Richard Mitton, an Aussie who was based at the Milton Keynes Eventing Centre and riding and competing there. He was also riding owners’ horses and had the ride on the very well-credentialed eventer Cosmopolitan, who was on the short list with Richard to compete at the Atlanta Olympics. Unfortunately, Richard had an accident and his six-month recovery made it impossible to compete; Cosmopolitan was given to William Fox-Pitt to ride for Britain, placing fourth.

NEW LIFE IN AUSTRALIA

After staying at the eventing centre for 18 months, Tanja and Richard decided to move to Australia and settled in Hamilton, Victoria, in 1997, where they bought 100 acres and continued to ride and produce show jumpers. Richard, who was a chiropractor, bought a practice in Hamilton and found he had less and less time for riding. Tanja continued with the horses and also started teaching, as she loved it and had experience coaching in Europe and in the UK. Their daughter, Laura, was born in 1999 and then in 2004 they adopted Jessica at the age of two.

Staying home and looking after the property and her children, Tanja decided to do her NCAS Level One coaching accreditation and, of course, sailed through with her usual unflappable, confident and unassuming approach. She took on a teaching role at the Hamilton College boarding school, managing the school’s equestrian program. This was in the first 10 years of life in Australia.

Tanja’s real passion started to raise its head. She enrolled in and completed a Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) course – a new alternative therapy intended to educate people in self-awareness and effective communication, and to model and change their patterns of mental and emotional behaviour. She went on to do her master’s and began to intertwine these mindset skills into her coaching. Tanja tends to specialise in rider position and biomechanics. She loves the position of the seat and all that goes along with this as it is so ingrained in her from the early riding in Germany.

It was at this time that she wrote her first book, Seven Steps to the Mindset of an Equestrian Champion. The essence of the book is the focus on the mindset of the rider associated with daily training, competition preparation and the connections between the mind and communication needed to be a top rider.

On asking Tanja where her interest in the holistic approach began, she says: “I was always interested in the mindset and the personal development, I think because I suffered from very strong limiting beliefs and doubts. I used to go to chiropractic seminars with Richard and they had a lot of personal development sessions. I always related everything I learned to my horses and my riding. When I learned NLP, it could very easily be transferred to the riding and so I started using some of the principles and exercises in my lessons. That’s when I realised that other riders were interested in it too. Now I only use a little bit of NLP in my coaching. I have developed my own philosophies and I have become very spiritual. This helps in getting deeper where people often have very profound realisations and shifts.”

SUNSHINE COAST BECKONS

It was time for a change and a move to the Sunshine Coast in 2009, where she and Richard bought six acres and took five horses with them – the children’s ponies and some of the older troupers. It wasn’t long before they wanted to develop a bigger and better facility, so they purchased a 20-acre property at West Woombye, where Olympian Kelly Layne and her mother, Helen Anstee, had their training facility prior to Kelly leaving for the States.

Now with Jessica at university doing a degree in business and Laura in Brisbane studying teaching, Tanja travelled widely with her clinics while Richard stopped riding and put his efforts into officiating at international eventing competitions. Previously he was a sector control manager at the Sydney Olympics in 2000 and then managed the centre control at the 2008 Beijing Olympics, and now officiates at the Melbourne, Adelaide and Sydney three-day events amongst many others.

In the years leading up to the 2016 Rio Olympics, Tanja worked as the mindset coach with the Equestrian Australian High Performance dressage and para dressage squads in conjunction with Julia Battams. The team were so appreciative of the help. It is an absolutely vital and integral part of the sport to have a well-developed mental approach to this sport that demands so much dedication and self-belief. The self-belief is easily knocked in dressage, and if anyone has amazing theories and ways to get abreast of this, it is Tanja. She has now written her second book, It Takes Two to Tango, which is more dedicated to rider position, balance and the correct uses of the seat and aids.

Unfortunately, Tanja and Richard parted ways in 2018. Tanja has taken over the property which is now a highly regarded agistment and training centre with excellent facilities. These include a barn with seven big boxes, tack rooms and wash bays. There is an all-weather outdoor 60×20 metre arena and an undercover round yard. There are also 27 private, well-fenced paddocks all with their own shelter sheds. It is a charming, established centre and with Tanja at the helm it is wonderfully run, friendly and easygoing – with Tanja to assist with all things riding!

Tanja still travels a lot to give clinics around Australia. She takes one day to work with her students off the horses and discuss personal development and the myriad of issues that bother riders in preparation for competition or simple problems that clutter their day-to-day living. The holistic approach is made so simple by someone like Tanja who is so worldly, yet she has an amazing ability to absolutely put it clearly and succinctly.

“I find that I can relate to a lot of riders from all disciplines and levels because I have had a lot of different experiences myself,” says Tanja. “I understand the world of the professional riders and I can very well relate to the nervous and inexperienced riders. I have been at both ends. Where I can really help people is by getting them to access their own inner voice and by taking them outside of themselves and allowing them to look at their problems from a different viewpoint. We all get into our own head, which clouds our judgement; by opening our heart we can find our way again.”

On asking FEI rider Caroline Hooper, who receives coaching from Tanja, it is interesting to hear her views on how it has helped her in terms of training and competing her horses.

“I do not get nervous before competition at all, yet I sometimes find it difficult to get my mind in the best and most focussed place to give it my all. With the dramas that come with life in general, it is often difficult to be keeping the time I spend training and the responsibilities I have in my life and career in a logical way,” explains Caroline.

“I have worked a lot with Tanja and she knows me well and understands where I am coming from. She is so good at clearing the clutter of daily life stresses, problems and anxieties. I often find that it’s not the training and competing that creates anxiety but the prioritising and organisation of each day that sometimes gets in the way, creating a clouded feeling that can sometimes be overwhelming. It’s impossible to function well at these times and impossible to ride and have empathy for your horses when this is in the way of relaxed progress.

“Tanja is amazing at priorities. Fantastic with ways around life’s problems that confront me, and is my most important sounding board who is logical, strong and gives me great self-confidence and ordered ways to deal with all things. Somehow she has an uncanny way of reverting my problems with life back in answers and scenarios that can be related to equestrian language, that is innate to me. Half-halt, empathy, lack of force, more impulsion, flexibility, firm but yielding, positive forward attitude, behind the leg, rein-back, halt, more in the bridle and get off the hand, are all thought-provoking to work out ways around problems with life, relationships, students, family and all things daily. They work for dressage and are for sure for me aids that help my attitude to daily life scenarios.

“After talking through the day’s innuendos, Tanja avails a way for me to prioritise and not waste time on mental problems that become a story and not the truth. She is my voice of reason and with her guidance through these matters she makes my daily choices easy. I can then truly devote time to my horses without any guilt or worry that that time is precious and totally mine for my horses and I. This is what Tanja means to me,” Caroline concludes.

It is easy to realise the worth in Tanja Mitton. Not only as an amazing instructor when it comes to position, balance and effective riding, but her approach towards the rider as a whole, especially the mental aptitude, is her passion and the realisation of how important a clear mind is in day-to-day living and in the sport. Mental focus and self-belief are essential in such a subjective sport. It’s no wonder that her clinics are oversubscribed and with the availability of online help, the problems that come along can be immediately addressed before the truth turns into a story that is distracting for life, the sport and a feeling of well-being. EQ

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