(“His adrenalin high animates him, (but) it doesn’t get him in front of the leg .”)

I’m guessing many of you are taking shortcuts in your training. The toughest part is that many times you don’t even know you’re doing it. The more experienced you are, the less this is apt to plague you. Remember my blogs about self-awareness. But if you are climbing through the levels for the first time and haven’t had a real schoolmaster to guide you, the fog can get pretty thick, and it’s hard to know when you’re going wrong.

I truly believe that most riders want to “get it right.” Complications arise when they come up against concepts which are alien to them having never experienced them in person. Here is a simple example:

What is forward and what is in front of the leg? They’re anything but obvious unless you have identified their feel through past experience. Clearly they don’t equate simply to moving forward over the ground. It’s not just what your horse does but why he does it and what he thinks about it.

Case in point: I have a student whose horse can be too dull to the leg. When on her own, she relies too much on the whip to motivate him. While that does make him “go,” it makes him run forward against the hand and not carry himself forward in balance. And although his adrenalin high animates him, it doesn’t get him in front of the leg or reactive thereafter to more subtle aids. It just makes him dash around and be stiff.

The first issue is to convince the rider that she’s not accomplishing what she thinks she is. Even harder is to break her reflexive habit of automatically going to the whip or a sharp kick where sometimes a more patient approach—a series of meaningful upward/downward transitions, for instance—will get the result without the undesirable side effects.

Admittedly, it will take longer and many more repetitions, but my job is to persuade the rider that this will reap greater benefits in the long run. She must take as an article of faith that the ways she has discovered on her own and adopted as her “go to” solutions (and which seem to her to get the job done) must be unlearned and replaced with something better. That involves suppressing her ego driven resistance to confronting an error (which until this point she didn’t even realize she was making).

“Make haste slowly” is a timeworn cliché that’s easy to say but a difficult road to stay on. Redirecting a rider back onto that path whenever she strays is part of my job but not the hardest part. The trick is to do it without discouraging her from thinking and trying things even if from time to time they must be discarded.