How to be a stand out riding student

   OR …  How to get the best out of your horse trainers and teachers

   OR…  Do you even KNOW how good you are yet?

 

There are some absolutely awesome trainers and teachers and riders out there, some of whom I have studied and some whom I have admired from further afar. You can find them on the world stage and you can find them teaching on little country arenas and you can find them in outback paddocks.  And some of them are so outstanding that the world is simply a better place for their existence.

These horsemen and women are so good at what they do, so gifted, that it is logical that we want what they’ve got with a horse.

So how come sooo… many people get bogged down in the struggle to be like them?

Well if you want what they’ve got, then I’ll start by telling you what NOT to do.

You don’t get to be as good as these people that you admire, by doing what they do, the way that they do it.

You follow these people because they’ve got what you want, but you don’t get what they’ve got by following them.

 

You get what they’ve got by being uniquely you.

 

Don’t worry, this is not some airy fairy piece I’m writing here. It’s very practical and if it doesn’t make sense by the time you get to the end, then I’ll figure out something free to give you, to make sure that it makes sense.

Actually, I’m going to give you something special for free anyway. 🙂

All the best horse people in the world, every single last one of those who are worth admiring, do the right thing with their horse, at the right time.

Their timing is phenomenal – they look like they are responding almost before the horse reacts. In fact, they ARE starting to respond before the horse actually does anything.  That’s one of the things that happens when you work with confidence from your own unique feel – you feel what’s going to happen, right at the beginning, before you can even see what is changing in the horse with your eyes.

Their feel for the horse is exquisitely sensitive, never pushing a horse beyond what they can give – knowing exactly where that point is. By their very presence a horse feels reassured and more comfortable.

They have an inner guidance system that they can rely on. It’s beautiful to watch.

But here’s the thing – if you try and do exactly what THEY are doing, the odds are that you will struggle unnecessarily and fail to reach what you are looking for.

And that struggle makes people more and more miserable, feeling more and more like a failure or even worse, getting hard on the horse because they think it must be the horses fault. Back in the days when I was copying others to try and be that good, I sooo… thought it was my horse’s fault because it LOOKED like I was doing what they were doing.

 

But it didn’t FEEL like that to my horse.

 

And here’s why.

The biggest thing for horse people to understand is that each of us – every single last one of you reading this – is unique with natural gifts and talents in your feel and connection with your horse.

It’s your OWN inner guidance system.

And you probably don’t even recognize how naturally talented you are with it …

… because typically our society hasn’t paid much attention to these kind of things. We haven’t been taught to notice our skills and strengths, we kind of focus on lack rather than on celebrating our strengths.

As riders, we have so often been drawn to the famous people and beautiful riders whose type of skills we lack – we are very often drawn to our opposites – in order to complete the experience that we don’t have. And doing that is all well and good, even excellent – when we recognize our own strengths, our own natural talent in FEEL for a horse and know how to use it.

When we recognize our strength…

…and use our natural talent…

…we become even stronger…

And yet by focusing on what we AREN’T good at, by trying to follow someone else’s version of being really good with horses, we sadly produce more of what we AREN’T good at too.

And that’s when we struggle.

When we are NOT aware of our own strengths and natural talents, we risk abandoning them and floundering around trying to copy someone else’s idea of being good with horses.

 

And we are left feeling not good enough.

 

That one single thing – ignoring or being unaware of our own natural talents and trying to copy someone else’s way of being good with horses, that is the single biggest cause of us feeling not good enough.

AND

It is the root cause of struggle and doing the whole horse journey sooo… much harder than we need to.

It is supposed to be enjoyable.  You cannot have a happy ending to an unhappy journey.  It’s not going to get better unless you start enjoying it.

 

Tomorrow I’m going to talk about how you can start enjoying everything with your horse.  We’ll talk about the different sorts of natural talent and how that works in practical day to day use of them, in the context of the teachers on staff here.

They have kindly volunteered to share how they personally experience the different kinds of feel and connection with their horse and with others and to talk in more detail about that in the comments section too, so that you can get a clear idea of how this feel and connection stuff works on a practical level and how that fits with your own unique feel.

Then the day after that, I am going to give you that freebie that I promised you and lead you to notice and experience the uniqueness that is the way that YOU experience feel and connection to a horse, so that you can start getting the best out of your horse AND all those wonderful horse people and teachers out there.

I am not going to email everyone again tomorrow – that feels too much like spam – so sign up to get my blog straight into your inbox if this is an interesting topic for you. There’s an easy unsubscribe if you are not enjoying later articles. There’s a blog sign up box on the right hand side of the page and up towards the top.

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And please – comments are the life blood of a blogger – and I REALLY want to know how this lands with you.

What about your inner guidance system? Can you think of spooks and falls off your horse and other circumstances where a clear and reliable inner guidance system would have saved your butt? What about just knowing HOW to help your horse and yourself to feel good – most of the time?

So leave a comment below. I’ll be looking for them and ready to chat!