The lessons I got wrong

I have been teaching riders for over thirty years. In that time I have got a great many things right, and I have also got things wrong, and the second list is the more interesting one.

I have thought about whether to write this. The obvious argument against is that nobody advertises their misjudgements. But I would rather you knew what I am like, and what I am like is somebody who will tell you when I have called something badly. A coach who has never got anything wrong in thirty years has either not been teaching very much or has not been looking closely.

So, four of them.

Pushing for a win that nobody asked for

Early on I believed that a lesson should finish on a high, and that a high meant achieving something.

So when a nervous rider was having a session that was going quietly well, I would sometimes reach for one more thing. A short canter. A slightly bigger ask. The logic was that they would go home with a win in their pocket and the confidence would compound.

Sometimes it did. But often enough what actually went home was the fright, not the achievement, and the next week we would be starting further back than where we had finished.

What I got wrong was whose win it was. I wanted the session to have a shape. They wanted to feel safe, and they had already had the thing they came for about twenty minutes earlier.

Now, with a nervous rider, I stop asking for more the moment something has gone genuinely well, even if it is small. We still use the whole hour. We just spend the rest of it consolidating what worked, or on the ground, or talking through what to practise before I next see you. You get the full lesson either way. What you do not get is me chasing one more thing and handing back a horse, and a rider, who are both more wound up than when we started.

Mistaking quiet for agreement

I used to take a rider's silence at face value.

If I explained something and they nodded, I moved on. If they did not raise a problem, I assumed there was not one. That seems reasonable, and for confident riders it usually is.

For everyone else it is badly wrong, and it took me longer than it should have to see it. People do not want to look difficult. They do not want to admit they are frightened of something that sounds small when you say it out loud. They do not want to be the client who complains. So they nod, and they get on, and they have a horrible time, and I do not find out for three weeks.

What changed is that I now ask directly and I ask in a way that makes the inconvenient answer easy. Not "are you happy with that?", which invites a yes, but "what part of that are you not sure about?", which assumes there is one.

The quiet ones are the ones to check on.

Reading the horse as the problem

This is the one I would most want back.

For a stretch of my career I was quicker than I should have been to treat resistance as a training issue. A horse who would not go forward, who was uneven, who was suddenly difficult about something he had been fine with. There is always a schooling explanation available, and if you go looking for one you will find it.

A good number of times, over the years, the horse was telling us something and we were busy correcting the sentence.

I am not a vet, and being clear about that is part of the point of this section. What I have learned is not how to diagnose anything. It is to stop assuming, and to say out loud "this does not look like a training problem to me" much earlier than I once would have. That sentence costs a rider a phone call. Not saying it can cost a great deal more.

Sudden change is the flag. A horse who has always been sticky one way is a schooling conversation. A horse who was fine last month and is not now is a different conversation, and it is not mine to have.

Being right, and being no use

The last one is less dramatic and it is probably the most common.

There have been lessons where my technical analysis was correct, I explained it clearly, and the rider went home with nothing.

Usually because it was too much at once. Sometimes because it was the right correction for a rider two years further on than the one in front of me. And sometimes because I was interested in the problem, which is a genuine occupational hazard, and interest is not the same as usefulness.

Being right about a horse is the easy part after thirty years. Working out which one true thing this person can take away and actually use this week is the harder skill, and it is the one I am still working on.

Why I am telling you this

Partly because it is true, and this site is meant to sound like me.

But mostly because it is the thing I would want to know if I were choosing somebody to teach me. Not whether they have made mistakes, because they have. Whether they noticed, whether they changed, and whether they would tell me.

If we work together and I get something wrong with you and your horse, you will hear it from me. I would rather say it than have you quietly wonder.