How I Get It Done: With A High-Adrenaline Job
It happens to everyone – days don’t always go as planned. Deadlines come up. A kid gets sick. Projects require extra time to get done. That means a lesson gets cancelled.
Juggling a horse habit on top of work, family and everything else, can be exhausting some days.
We get it. Heels Down is celebrating the adult amateurs who understand the struggle. Life gets in the way of riding sometimes, no matter how much we wish it didn’t. Read on for stories from real riders on how they get it done.
Sue S. van der Linden, 55, Washington D.C.
What do you do?
I’m a private wealth manager. I manage clients’ investment plans. It’s a super high-adrenaline job and I love what I do.
Do you have any kids?
I have a daughter who is 18. She just graduated high school and is headed to Smith College in the fall. She’s ridden with me since she was five.
How many hours would you say you work a week?
About 50. I recently hired more people on my team, so that’s cut me some slack. When I was the one-armed paper hanger, it was easily 60 hours plus. Hiring more people also gives me more bandwidth, riding-wise.
Tell us more about your horses.
I have two – my ‘older’ horse Charlie Brown is now 22. He was my lower-level eventer but is moving into dressage simply because he’s getting older. He’s a dark bay Friesian cross. My competitive horse is Barry, he’s a 13-year-old grey Canadian Warmblood. But frankly I should have named him “Pig Pen.”
How often do you a ride a week?
I ride at least four times, sometimes as much as six times a week. This week I’m riding five times because I have a clinic over the weekend.
Do you consider yourself competitive?
That’s one of the things I’m working on. Aside from being a grey, my horse is also a flake. We’re doing a lot of what I call non-show showing, where we’re logging miles at schooling shows to take the pressure off him and me. I can overthink anything, especially when I get in the saddle.
How do you force yourself to be OK with not getting everything done in a day?
That takes thousands of dollars of therapy. Given the business I’m in, I’m inherently type A. I think it is why I gave up golf – there are too many things to think about when I’m playing. I would get too much in my head – the ball position, the wind direction, my stance, where are the trees – and my head would explode. That’s one of the things I really love about the trainer I have. She will strip a lesson down to just one thing. My poor feeble brain can handle focusing on just one thing. We’ll eat it up, four times a week, for two-to-three weeks and bludgeon the concept to death. But it’s funny to me – by not focusing on the 86 other things I’ve convinced myself I need to freak out about, I’ve resolved most of them.
What does time management mean to you?
Given what I do, I have compliance people. They can read all my emails and see my calendar. I warned them that they had to make peace with seeing that someone is coming to clean a sheath – they have to deal with it. My whole life is on this calendar. If I’m at a show, it’s on the calendar. That way my office knows not to schedule anything on Friday. The calendar is king. The task list is king. It can be simply me writing down some notes so I remember to take a bottle of Santa Fe to the barn… if I don’t write it down, I won’t remember it. I have to write myself notes just to clean tack. I have a recurring monthly task that says “time to clean the saddle.” If I don’t put those ticklers in there, I don’t remember.
How do you stay motivated to reach your riding goals?
Because I’m not even close. This sport, and I don’t care which discipline you do, keeps you humble. You think you’re doing something and all of a sudden you’re not. For instance, I thought we were going to move up a level. But last winter, my horse decided he was mortally terrified of the letter “P” in the arena. I’m cautiously optimistic we’ll get over this and keep moving forward.
Featured photo by Edward Fino Photography
This series originally published in the Heels Down Spark newsletter in June 2021. Sign up now for the Spark to read more stories like this first, delivered to your inbox.