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How easy do you find this, and how much have you been encouraged to do this during your training sessions? As you’ll hear, it’s the best answer to confusion and miscommunication! Our traditional language that has been handed down through generations has been subject to deletion, distortion and generalisation, but the potential for misrepresentation and misunderstanding gets even worse than this. It’s those As and Xs again!

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The best ever story about stirrup length, and how in other sports, it’s all about angles. You cannot not influence your horse - he is constantly reading your ability to support your own body weight (or not), your asymmetry, how wibbly-wobbly you are, how ‘shovey’ you are, wether you can match the forces of his movement etc. He knows more about you than you know about yourself! The possible effects of being given the wrong map, and how communication in riding arenas goes awry.

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How is your weight distributed on your horse’s back? If it is concentrated into the area where he would hollow his back, you create or perpetuate that hollow. Your weight needs to be spread down the inside of your thigh, with your thigh bone at 45 degrees. This mirrors sitting on a ‘kneeling stool’ - which is very different to treating your horse like a mobile arm chair! The paradox of how your stirrups might look longer when they are actually shorter…

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The brain is like a manual camera lens, and all of us have to learn how to ‘tune’ our brain into a state of clear focus. As skill develops it’s as if you’re given a more powerful miscoscope lens, becoming able to observe detail that you could not have previously imagined. But all learning requires the willingness to feel weird - and here is an exercise in weirdness that I invite you to take to your riding.

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New students commonly begin by telling me what’s wrong with them, and what they know they SHOULD be doing. Their problem really is ‘premature automation’ - when they first learned their up/downs, they automated a pattern that was far from biomechanically correct. So now they face the challenge of ‘rewiring’ themselves, and they have to become ‘consciously competent’. 

Will elite riders talk to you about the ABC’s of riding, or its XYZ’s? An analogy to icebergs explains the answer!

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Did the lessons you’ve taken, the lecture/demos you’ve attended, and the DVDs and webinars you’ve watched actually make a difference to your skills? They are mostly addressing the language brain, and intellectual information does not help you to ‘groove’ a new habit. This requires you to feel weird: so welcome to some of my favourite off-horse exercises!

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'More!', and muscle tone (alias 'stuffing') which men have 35% more of than women. The 80/20 of how much of your attention should ideally be where, and the biggest task that probably faces you in learning. Being a rider who wants to be picked up vs. being a 'sack of potatoes'.

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 On noseblowing, spacehoppers (hippity-hops), and forces that act either from the back to the front or from the front to the back. The physics of 'an independent seat', and how stability, not relaxation, is the key to skilled riding. 

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What does waterskiing have to do with riding? Much more than it ought to! How Mary stopped that horse from jogging but took many months to work out how she was doing it. Multifinality, equifinality, and the 'how to' of accessing your core, and 'leading the dance' that you share with your horse. 

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 Mary's background story, from begging for riding lessons as a child, to riding schools and riding whilst at university studying Physics. The 'blinding flash of light' moment that led to becoming a full-time professional instructor, and ultimately to giving up riding in despair. It was the act of giving up, coupled with returning to riding and schooling a horse who jogged a lot, that sparked the beginning of the 40-year Ride With Your Mind empirical research project. If you want to know 'how to get to Paris' (with Paris as a metaphor for your ideal) listen to this webinar!