I think Hillary and I have some of the best conversations in the truck driving to/from lessons and shows. A lot of the random stuff that lives in my head gets to come out, and she often brings up other things and additional related points that I maybe hadn’t thought of. If you’re a nerd like me (us?), it’s fun.

One of the subjects we hit recently started as a discussion on dedication and morphed into talent vs commitment, which morphed again into what it means to be teachable. I had recently listened to a podcast with Stephen Bradley that touched on the subject, so I had already been through a lot of it in my head over the preceding days. (What, you don’t find yourself standing in the shower staring off into space while thinking about a random tangent related to riding theory or horsemanship?)

We started out talking about the subject of dedication, and how a lot of folks tend to be as dedicated as the people around them, for better or for worse. We as humans are like that in a lot of ways, as far as taking on the characteristics of the people we surround ourselves with. It’s why I’ve gotten so careful with my “inner circle” as I’ve gotten older. Hillary gave me what is probably one of the biggest compliments I’ve ever had, saying that she definitely agrees with that, because she thinks I am one of the most dedicated people she’s ever met, and being around me makes her want to buckle down too. I am keeping that compliment tucked away in my psyche for the next bad day when I need a pick me up, so thank you Hillary for that. She’s not wrong – out of all the things I lack, and there are many, dedication is not one of them. I was raised having to working hard for whatever I want, and I still do, so I don’t really know any other way. I’m an “all in” kind of person, if I’m interested in what I’m doing (of course the down side to that being: if I’m not interested in what I’m doing, I’m 0% “in”… sorry to literally everything else that’s not horses).

I’ve thought about this a lot in the past couple years, and I told her that I’m pretty sure I am the way I am because I’ve never been a particularly talented rider or been able to afford fancy or well-trained horses. I’ve always had to show up every day and do the work, and try to make the most of whatever I was lucky enough to be sitting on. I think a lot of us know what that’s like. If we aren’t 110% committed, we won’t make much progress. If I was a little more naturally talented, or if I had a horse that came to me as a “finished product”, would I have the same drive? If my parents had paid for my lessons and shows and bought me a super nice horse when I was kid, would I have the same drive? I don’t know. Probably not, honestly. Stephen Bradley talked about this too, saying that he never thought he was really that talented, but he wanted to learn and he wanted to be better, so he was insanely dedicated and did the best he could with the horses he had. With, um… significantly better results than myself, of course.

From there it morphed into what it means to be teachable, and I have to give Hillary a return compliment here because she is a good example of what teachable means to me. I’ve never heard her argue, she asks questions when necessary, she tries, and she’s respectful. She wants to learn. She’s got grit. She shows up with a “help make me better” attitude and is willing to listen to what anyone has to say. IMO, you can’t stop teachable people from getting better. If you show up every day wanting to learn, you will learn. If you’re open to doing things differently, you will learn. If you dig in when things get hard and embrace the process, you will learn. If you aren’t ruled by ego or pride, you will learn. As we were talking about it I realized that to me, being teachable is head and shoulders the most important quality when it comes to growth and success.

Well okay, maybe equally as important as dedication. But then again, maybe they go hand in hand. We both agreed that talent would be somewhere near the back of the pack.

I always think back to my days of teaching lessons at the barn’s summer camp… without fail I always had a handful of kids who were just as bad at the end of camp as they were at the beginning, and then another handful of kids who were little future champions. It had nothing to do with how talented they were on day 1, and everything to do with the attitude they brought to the plate every day. Guess which ones were fun to teach? Guess which ones I felt more invested in?

I don’t care if I’m the best rider at the show, or if I’m sitting on the best horse. Those are frivolous things, qualities that can come and go at any time and are beyond my control. Instead I want people to look at me and see that I’m dedicated, that I show up every day and work hard, and that I really want to learn. Having this conversation was a great reminder of that, and helped me get a firmer view of exactly what is most important to me. Those are the things I can control, and those are the things I want to strive for every day, which is exactly why I’m “putting pen to paper” now.

It goes along well with a lot of what I got from the book Chop Wood Carry Water, which includes an exercise where you develop a “scorecard” for yourself, to define what you consider to be a truly successful life vs letting society tell you what success means. You’re supposed to write down what characteristics you truly admire, and the ones you want to be known for, and then narrow it down to your top four. I’d been thinking about this in the back of my mind for a while but wasn’t able to really firm it up until after this conversation. Then it came easy. But I’ll get into the details of my scorecard and how I plan to use it more in the next Mental Game post.

What do you think on the subject of talent vs dedication vs being trainable? How important are these things to you? And, maybe more interesting, what would the top four things on your scorecard be?

It seems like most of the nation has been plunged into a gross, horrid, disgusting arctic cold front within the past few days. Apologies. I think it’s partially my fault.

My list of grievances over the preceding week are now obvious, in hindsight. It probably started way back in Ocala, when I was browsing through all the sunshirts and thinking how it was really time that I revamp my collection. Most of my sunshirts are going on their 5th year, and since this is Texas, I wear them a good 10 months of the year. So I bought a new one while I was there, a Tredstep Sun Chic, which I actually quite like. Then a few days later Karen posted on facebook about the new EC Erna shirts, and I had a coupon code, so I ordered a couple of those too.

Yeah, I bought 3 new sunshirts because I thought it was spring already. I got cocky.

I also ordered my first big gallon of fly spray for the year, and the boys’ spring dewormer. Last week the flies were SO BAD, I even commented “Ugh these flies, it never got cold enough this year to really kill them!”. THAT WASN’T A CHALLENGE, MOTHER NATURE.

And then I finally tucked my one pair of fleece lined breeches away on a shelf in the closet, thinking we were done with that mess, where they sat for 2 whole days before I was digging them back out again. Kind of similar to a few days prior, when I was cleaning out my truck and came across the neck cover I had ordered for Henry when all the HUG blankets were on sale. I vividly remember thinking “I didn’t even use this thing once this season”, and I put it in a corner of the garage, still in it’s packaging. Ha. Ha ha ha ha.

My final grievance (that I can remember anyway) was daring to admire all the wildflowers that have started to pop up in our jump field. They’re a very pretty orangey pink color, and they always pop up a couple weeks before the bluebonnets start to bloom. The grass is green. Things are looking alive again. It’s pretty. I like wildflower season. It’s one of the few times that Texas isn’t hideous. I got excited.

So now, here we are, and it’s 24 effing degrees. The “feels like” is 18. Which, admittedly, is better than yesterday when the “feels like” was 16. Nothing like a 15mph freezing wind to remind you that NO, in fact, IT IS NOT QUITE SPRING YET. I can practically hear Mother Nature cackling, asking me how I’m liking those meshy sunshirts now. She is kind of a witch.

Of course, it’s supposed to be mid-70’s again by the weekend, so we just have to hang in there until she finishes her tantrum. Note to self, don’t order fly spray before March next year. Geez.

The one good thing about all this, I suppose, was watching Presto’s reaction yesterday when I put his sheet on. He’s so damn hairy that he’s only worn that thing once this season, so it’s mostly just sat around and gotten dirty. Yesterday though, he thought it was the most fun thing ever.

And maybe I shouldn’t laugh while watching the naughty baby horse likely destroy his clothes, but I can’t help it. I bought that thing on sale anyway, and it won’t fit him next year, so if he murders it, he murders it. The sheer joy he got from pulling on that flap was totally worth it. He never fails to entertain.

Hope everyone is staying warm out there. Hard to believe that in a few months we’ll all be complaining about the heat.

Continuing on this trend of having a lot more lessons than we normally do, we hauled out again on Saturday… but this time for a dressage lesson. When was the last time I had a dressage lesson? I don’t even know. Last summer probably? But 1) I wanted Trainer to see Henry in his new bit, to see what she thought, and 2) I’ve been texting her recently about a couple of issues I’ve been having on the flat, and she wanted to get her eyes on it.

As soon as I got on, Henry was pissed off and tense as hell. We were in an arena full of jumps, in his dressage tack, and he was pre-done with this bullshit. He hasn’t felt that awful right out of the box in a long time. When he’s like that he just tightens his back into a board, takes teeny tiny horrid steps, and puts his tail in helicopter mode. All you can really do is push push push him forward, riding him over tempo for a while, and wait until he starts to get more in front of your leg and let go of his back a little. Honestly he used to be like this more often than not, especially in warmup at shows, so I was having flashbacks to Past Henry. Nothing like flashbacks to give you perspective on how far you’ve actually come.

After about ten minutes he finally started to give up a little, and we were able to begin addressing the issues I’d been having. Turns out they were both connected. Who saw that coming? Literally all of us.

My first issue is that I’d been having a bit of a problem getting him to connect as well in the outside rein when we’re traveling to the left. At home I noticed I was overbending him to the inside, and when I started to think of almost more of a counterbend, it was better, but still not quite there. Trainer immediately said “his haunches are falling out to the right”, and I’m like “wow I’m dumb, DUH!” and we starting working on controlling that hind end, almost riding the haunches slightly left. When I got it, he came into the right rein just fine. When I stopped concentrating on where his haunches were, they snuck right again, immediately evidenced by a lack of connection in the right rein. And so we went, back and forth for a while. This’ll take some work and diligence on my part.

My other problem, that to be honest has plagued me forever, is my rogue left hand. As Henry has moved along in his flatwork and his balance and frame have lifted, so too have my hands. Well… the right one has anyway. The left one likes to wander around doing it’s own thing, taking sporadic vacations somewhere near the withers. I can only keep my hands up and even if I concentrate on them constantly. Otherwise, next thing you know, that left hand is down the street at the corner gas station, drinking a forty wrapped in a brown paper bag.

But hey, every time Henry’s haunches started sneaking right, guess what my left hand did? Yup, you guessed it. Dammit.

What we have here is a good old fashioned straightness issue.

When we moved on to the canter it was a little more evident to me, especially travelling left (how did what used to be our good direction now become our bad direction?). After about a lap Trainer said “think about bringing your right seat bone a little to the left” and omg. The difference was immediate and obvious. He tricks me a little into shifting my weight a tad to the outside, which exacerbates that crookedness in the hind end. As soon as I thought more about bring my outside seatbone slightly in, everything got so much straighter and I actually had a horse underneath me. Witchcraft, I tell you.

I was kind of glad that Henry decided to show up and be a turd, because it really brought all the “bad” to the surface and made it easier to pinpoint things. Now I have plenty to work on at home. Maybe we shouldn’t go so long between dressage lessons.

Hillary got a few clips that I threw together into one. It’s awesome to be able to go back and hear Trainer’s words again and see what she’s seeing, so thanks Hillary! Usually if I have any video from dressage lessons it’s because I begged Trainer to take it, which kind of interrupts us both. Being able to see and hear it this way is much more helpful as I move forward and try to work on things by myself.

Oh, and the verdict on the Neue Schule bit from literally everyone is that it’s fantastic. I knew it felt like an improvement, but seeing the video, there’s no doubt. It’s a much better fit for the shape of his mouth, and he seems a lot happier to go to it and stay there (when I get him straight and keep track of that delinquent hand, anyway). The chomping is completely gone, and he’s not diving down behind it and then bouncing up off it like he would do in the KK. Seriously need to write up a full review soon, because Trainer wrote down her feedback on it as well, and it’s gold.

Today is supposed to be one of the coldest of the winter so far, so we might put the dressage to rest until tomorrow or the next day. I feel re-invigorated about it though, ready to take what we learned and chip away at it at home. Our scores have been decent enough since we moved up, ranging from 30 to 34 (with an error), but I know this horse has a really solid test in him, if I can do my part to unlock it. That is my mission. Along with everything else, of course, like trying to get him around 1.10m well, and gallop and jump all the Prelim stuff which is literally big enough for a family of hobbits to live in and technical enough to short-circuit my brain. Ya know… no big deal.

Who’s idea was it to take 3 hard sports and combine them into one?

Although I’ve been giving priority to all of my mindset and mental training books lately, I’ve still managed to squeeze in a few others! One I was admittedly slightly hesitant about, because it’s written by Denny Emerson, and I’ve historically had a few definite disagreements with things Denny has written on his facebook page. To be fair, he’s one of the few top names in the sport who puts himself out there constantly, never shy to offer an opinion, so it’s pretty natural that I don’t agree with everything he says. That would be true of anyone if they shared every opinion they had.

Denny is an indisputable legend in our world though, and I do agree with him whole-heartedly on many, probably even most, things. The importance of conditioning, his stance on thoroughbreds, his dislike of gadgets and harsh bits, etc. So when his new book, Know Better to Do Better, came out, I was curious. The line under the title says “Mistakes I Made with Horses (So You Don’t Have To)”. Which… if that’s designed to pique my interest, it succeeded. Of course I would love to hear about the things that older, established horsemen have learned the hard way. I make plenty of mistakes on my own, I would love to learn from someone else’s lifetime of experience.

When I first started reading through the book, I thought that it was a bit more basic than I was hoping for. There’s a lot about how to choose the right horse, generalizations about different breeds, basic horse management, and all that core stuff. Someone newer to horses, or maybe someone who has mostly been raised in a lesson program rather than coming up through the working student/barn management route, would probably get a lot more out of those sections than I did.

I always love to look at a book’s Table of Contents, so here you go!

Then we started getting into the “Horse Training” and “Rider’s Emotional Makeup and Character Traits” sections, and here is where Denny won me over. Well okay, there was one part where he briefly tried to address the common issue that amateurs have – finding time to ride – that I found really lacking. I don’t really have that problem, but a lot of people do, and I feel like he mentioned it but didn’t actually offer any advice on how to work within a time constraint. That was disappointing.

But in the Horse Training section he talked a lot about the importance of having a horse that is fit enough to do it’s job comfortably, how best to communicate with your horse, tips on handling tense or nervous horses, warming up, clinics, developing a better eye for a distance (spoiler alert, its about the canter), etc. I got a few good tidbits out of this section. Maybe not earth-shattering things, but definitely good reminders that I always need to hear.

The best part to me, and the part that I think ANY rider will get something out of, is the Rider’s Emotional Makeup and Character Traits section. He starts off by addressing the fact that humans are predators by nature, and horses are prey animals by nature, and what this means when it comes to how we interact and communicate. Understanding this, and all that it entails, has been so incredibly vital to me, and something that IMO often isn’t addressed enough in the English disciplines or riding books in general.

He also talks a little about overcoming fear, although I don’t think that part is particularly helpful compared to everything else I’ve read on the subject, and regaining confidence, which I DID find helpful. My favorite section in this chapter was the “Teach Him vs Make Him” part, addressing our mindset when it comes to working with and training our horses… I found myself going YAASSSSS THIIIIIISSSS the whole time.

One thing Denny does always talk about, throughout the book, is the importance of long marching walks and how to put a good foundation of fitness on a horse – something I 100% believe in and do with my own horses from day 1. He’s from the “old guard”, the days of the long format, as well as being a long distance endurance rider, so his opinions on stuff like that should be highly regarded. It’s something we’re losing a bit in the modern day version of this sport, I think.

As you move through the rest of the book, there are sections addressing rider fitness, moving up the levels, talent vs work ethic… on and on. If you want a book that covers a huge variety of topics, this one is it. There are several small inlaid sections about particular horses he had during his career, and things he would have done differently with them if he knew then what he knows now. Stories like that are always super interesting to me, because I’m sure anyone can identify with those “if only” feelings.

As with Denny’s facebook page, there are parts that I don’t totally agree with, but way more parts where I found myself uttering an amen. He’s never afraid to lay it all there and say what he means, for better or worse, and he doesn’t sugarcoat things. Agree with him or not, you can’t deny the fact that Denny is a horseman, through and through. Putting the horse first and being morally and ethically responsible were undercurrents that ran throughout the entire book. Denny also understands that not every rider is or wants to be an upper level rider, and doesn’t think that automatically means they’re “less than”. I have nothing but the utmost respect for both of those viewpoints, increasingly rare as they are. I think Denny is better at seeing the big picture than many of the riders who are still at the peak of their careers.

There were a few sections where I found myself wishing he’d said more, or addressed the topic in a more in-depth way, but in a book with this much variety, I can see how that would have gotten quickly out of hand. Overall I think that a rider of just about any level or discipline would find something helpful contained within the pages of this book. There’s just so much knowledge coming at you from all directions, it really does touch on just about everything.

I love a good blog hop, especially if it means I get to live in Fantasyland!

Viva Carlos wrote: In a silent fit of anger at my job I began day dreaming about what life might be like without my job, not what I would spend my money on (ponies naturally) but how I’d actually spend my days…

I am assuming for this particular exercise that I am somehow independently wealthy, since I am jobless but still able to spend money on ponies? And since I’m independently wealthy, I obviously now have lots of ponies and my own farm. Obviously.

5:30am – Wake up and head to my lap pool for a swim. I like waking up early, I can’t sleep past 6 anyway, so I’d still get up at my usual time. Also I love swimming, especially early in the morning, but hate people near me, so the only solution is my own private lap pool at home. I’d be in it every day for sure.

6:15am – breakfast and an hour or so of wasting time on the internet/blogging. This is one of the biggest perks of living in this day and age, the ability to mindlessly surf the internet and waste ridiculous amounts of time.

7:30am – wander out to the barn. The morning would be reserved for riding.

11:00am – Get distracted and start piddling. Spend an hour trying to fix a gate or brainstorming a new XC fence or dragging the arena, or… shit, maybe I’m just out in the pasture doing donuts on the Mule for fun.

12:00pm – Wander into town to hit the feed store or tack shop. Grab lunch with friends.

2:00pm – Back to the farm to spend the afternoon working with the babies! Because obviously I have my own little mini breeding operation now, with a couple of foals every year.

4:00pm – back in the house to shower and waste more time on the internet, finding out what happened all day while I was outside living my best life. I think Independently Wealthy Me would have a corgi rescue, so I could easily lose an hour or two playing with them, too.

6:00pm – Have food delivered. Probably Indian. Maybe Mexican. Nah, lets say I had Mexican for lunch, so let’s go with Indian food for dinner. Delivered to me because I am lazy like that.

6:30pm – READING TIME. I love reading. Everyone go away and be quiet so I can get lost in a book.

8:00pm – Night Check! One last look at all the ponies/dispense some cookies and pats. Also, now my day is bookended with horses, as it should always be.

8:30pm – Go to bed. Keep reading until I fall asleep surrounded by a dozen corgis.

Damn, I really need to find a way to be independently wealthy…