Micromanaging

Recently I have been riding three very different horses but a theme has come to light during my lessons which is my bad habit of micromanaging. I think dressage riders have an especially tough task in avoiding micromanaging their horses during rides. Dressage attracts a lot of very driven, type A personalities and micromanaging is a popular theme amongst us in many of our careers, our riding, et cetera.

I personally have discovered that I have a tendency to over-ride the horses and constantly “speak” to them with my aids instead of giving a cue and leaving them alone. I tend to nitpick at the horses to just be a little straighter here, or give me a little more energy here. Instead of poking at them, I need to be able to say: be straight and energetic until I tell you otherwise. It is going to take some training of both the horses and myself and I’m hoping that learning to ride this way will create horses that have more respect when I do “speak” to them.

Another thing that I am struggling with is the idea of letting the horse make a mistake and fixing it instead of fixing the problem before it happens. This doesn’t work for all situations, especially with dangerous horses, but for your average amateur horse I am learning how important it is to allow them to make a mistake. They have to have a chance to do it for themselves if you ever want to produce a confident horse who is in self carriage.  In order for a horse to find their balance you have to allow them to mess up. I am finding that I am at the stage of my progression as a rider where I am good enough to catch the little things before they happen and fix them but I need to be a good enough trainer to let the horse make the mistake and then fix it after. I recently heard Ali Brock tell my coach, Allison Spivey, during a lesson to not be such a good rider. She went on to clarify that the horses need to have the opportunity to make mistakes and learn from them.

While I dislike comparing horses to people (except in the case of saying my horse Echo is similar to Howard Walewitz from The Big Bang Theory!), I do feel like these are things that we know as adults and yet we struggle to apply them to horses. We all know that if you micromanage your employees that they will be unhappy and it doesn’t produce a high level work environment. The same thing goes for letting your children make a mistake even if you can see it coming, because they won’t learn otherwise. I know I am personally extremely hardheaded and tend to learn best from making my own mistakes – so why do I try to save my horse from doing the same? I am actually just inhibiting his growth as a dressage horse by trying to make everything perfect all the time. I am learning that it is OK – actually even good – for moments to be unattractive during training.

The bottom line – avoid the tendency to micromanage. Let your horses learn from their mistakes and leave them alone to make said mistakes.

The horse can’t learn to carry himself if you are always doing it for him!