Inside the Mind of Silvia Rizzo: Winning, Mistakes and the Art of Performing Under Pressure
Silvia Rizzo turns lessons from elite dressage into a powerful approach to pressure, mistakes, leadership, resilience, and performing when things go wrong.
By
Sep 13, 2026
She is winning, being interviewed and building a new professional territory around one deceptively simple question: what do high performers do when things go wrong?
Silvia Rizzo is still winning.
Another Grand Prix Special victory with Ducati. Another result at the highest level of dressage. And, on the same day, another award: Most Elegant Rider of the show.
For the woman long associated with fashion and individuality in international dressage, it was quintessential Rizzo: performance without sacrificing identity.
But lately, something else about Silvia Rizzo has been attracting attention.
People want to know how she thinks.
Across podcasts, interviews and live conversations, the questions are moving beyond horses and sport. They are about mistakes. Pressure. Leadership. Difficult decisions. What happens when preparation meets a reality you cannot control.
Rizzo has spent years living inside those questions.
Grand Prix sport is brutal in its simplicity. You prepare for months. You enter the arena. Something goes wrong.
And the next movement is already coming.
There is no time for blame.
There is only one question:
What do you do next?
The Mistake Contains Information
One principle has become central to Rizzo’s thinking:
Look for the reason, not the blame.
For her, a mistake is not evidence of failure. It is information.
Understanding why something happened gives you something you can use. Blaming someone — including yourself — does not.
It is an idea that travels remarkably well from an arena into a boardroom.
How do you make a decision when information is incomplete?
How do you recover after getting it wrong?
How do you adapt without losing direction or authority?
How do you perform when confidence has been shaken but another decision still has to be made?
These are now central themes in Rizzo’s work in executive and life coaching.
And there is one important reason her perspective carries weight:
She is still testing it.
Rizzo is not describing high performance from a comfortable distance.
She is still competing. Still facing pressure. Still making mistakes. Still correcting them.
Still winning.
The arena remains her laboratory.
Why People Are Listening
Perhaps that is why Rizzo’s growing presence in podcasts and conversations feels significant.
Hosts may begin with the Grand Prix rider, but increasingly they want the thinker behind the rider.
And her answers rarely begin with motivation.
They begin with structure.
Prepare deeply. Accept what you cannot control. Make the best decision possible with what you know. When something goes wrong, understand it quickly. Adapt. Continue.
It is less glamorous than promising perfection.
It is also considerably more useful.
That philosophy now sits at the centre of Rizzo’s expansion into coaching. Not as a departure from sport, but as an extension of everything elite competition has demanded from her.
The environments may be different.
The pressure often isn’t.
A rider entering an arena, a leader facing a difficult decision and a person navigating an unexpected change eventually confront the same uncomfortable reality:
You will not always get it right.
The interesting part is who you become immediately afterwards.
Perhaps that is what makes Silvia Rizzo increasingly difficult to define by a single title.
Grand Prix rider. Entrepreneur. Coach. Speaker. A woman known as much for refusing to dilute her identity as for the results she produces.
The labels change.
The question underneath them does not.
What do you do next?
Silvia Rizzo is not teaching people how to avoid mistakes.
She is showing them what high performers do after one.
To follow Silvia Rizzo’s latest work, discover behind the scenes moments, and stay informed about her upcoming projects, visit her website and connect with her on Instagram and LinkedIn.
