(“She had read all the right books”)

I said to a student, “Don’t take this the wrong way, but if I had to describe you as a rider to someone, I would say that you are incredibly naïve,” A polite-ish away to intentionally rock her world a bit. This was a woman who had all the best intentions and had read all the right books, and thought she was doing all the right things. “I was being really strong!” she’d say as her horse trickled to walk about 20 m after she had begun to ask her.

The answer was that although she was applying force, she was sending no message. Her legs gripped. Her hands held. Her horse was oblivious .I explained that on the great continuum of aids, her idea of more or less was all in a very narrow range which, until the horse listened, meant approximately nothing.

She told me how sometimes if the horse was really bad (like running off with her) she could be very strong. “All well and good,” I said, but the point was not about violence, it was about being unapologetically meaningful enough that you got a rewardable result and then diminished the size of the aids.

This involves some decision-making on the rider’s part. If you have been swayed by too many articles about absolute lightness, harmony, and non-confrontation, you can wonder if you were doing the right thing. There’s nothing wrong with second-guessing yourself and evaluating whether the aids you used were appropriate or not. But if you got no result, they were not appropriate. Don’t be afraid to be effective!