The best-kept secrets of riding success
The same character traits that help riders succeed at the highest levels of equestrian sport can help you better relate to your horse and achieve your own riding goals.
The same character traits that help riders succeed at the highest levels of equestrian sport can help you better relate to your horse and achieve your own riding goals.
Our emotions, taken together with the way we respond to these emotions, create what is often called “character.” More than any other factor, character determines the success or failure of your relationship with horses. “Whoa,” you may think, “a dissertation on character is a long way from tips on how good riders get good.” But believe me, it is the best-kept secret of riding success. Why? We riders experience the same wide range of emotions as all other human athletes---but with a difference: We aren’t alone. The horse we ride also has emotion. Plus, our emotions affect him, and his emotions affect us. When a baseball player is nervous as he steps up to the plate, his baseball bat doesn’t sense his anxiety and start shaking, too! But a horse can sense anxiety.
Just like us, each horse has his own unique character. Some are brave; some are timid; some are aggressive. Whatever their character, we can influence horses most effectively if we model our own character on that found in good riders.
CHARACTER IS A WORK IN PROGRESS
Just as we can practice the sitting trot, so we can practice a character trait like courage. Although we may not change as quickly or as easily at 30 as we did at 3, the potential for change is just as real as it ever was. But not if we don’t think so!
The essence of improvement is change. Change from one state of being to another state of being can be painful and fraught with emotional and sometimes even physical peril. At the least, it drags you out of your comfort zone; that’s why most people hit a plateau and stay on it for life.
As long as there’s life, there’s hope for change. You absolutely have to accept this premise to become a better rider. Your emotional responses and character traits are just as subject to improvement as your mental and physical traits.
Having said that, I must acknowledge that some of the traits that make you uniquely “you” are more susceptible to improvement than others. That’s okay. Change what you can, and be smart about what you can’t. There’s only so much you can do, realistically, in trying to become somebody different. This is as true of horses as it is of people. We learned it in kindergarten, on that little pegboard game. “Don’t try to put the square peg in the round hole.”
1. PATIENCE: AVOIDING THOSE MELTDOWNS
If I could choose a single trait to confer as a gift to struggling horse trainers all over the world, it would be patience. Here’s why.
Webster’s Dictionary defines patience as “the will or ability to wait without complaint…the bearing of suffering, provocation, delay, tediousness, etc. with calmness and self-control.” We could easily feel that a horse’s resistance as provocation, a malign intent. It can cause us discomfort---aching arms from his pulling on us, physical jolts and slams as he veers, shies, and twists. All the words from dictionary definition that a patient person needs to bear: “suffering, provocation, delay, tediousness, etc.” are all implicit in training, schooling, riding and competing a horse.
Can you develop the ability not to lose emotional control under pressure? This may be the most important choice you will ever be asked to make, as someone who deals with horses.
2. INITIATIVE: DO YOU MAKE THINGS HAPPEN OR LET THEM HAPPEN?
Years ago, Simon Turner, a friend who is a veterinarian at Colorado
State University, sent me a little desktop plaque. It read: “There are three kinds of people in the world. Those who make things happen, those who let things happen, and those who wonder, ‘What happened?’”
You are at a distinct advantage if it is in your nature to take the initiative and make things happen instead of waiting around to see if anything good will fall out of the sky. My own “horse history” bears this out.
I may have made lots of mistakes in my nearly 60 years of involvement with horses, but I don’t think lack of initiative was ever one of them. I was pretty young when I started to seize the initiative in my fledgling riding career. I didn’t come from a family that had anything to do with horses. I would say that my parents’ attitude toward my riding was quietly supportive, in that they paid for my first three or four horses, but they were busy with their own life and basically let me pursue my interests.
If I did well, they’d say, “That’s nice,” and if I didn’t, they’d say, “That’s too bad.” Otherwise, their attitude toward my horse career was very much handsoff, basically “benign neglect.” I was left to my own devices starting from when I began riding Paint, my creatively named pinto pony, at about age 10.
I lived on the campus of StoneleighProspect Hill School, in Greenfield,
Massachusetts, where my parents were heads of the school. In 1955, I discovered in the school library a copy of the Green Mountain Horse Association Magazine containing an article about the 1954 100-Mile Trail Ride, held the previous fall at GMHA in South Woodstock, Vermont.
I decided I wanted to ride in the GMHA 100-mile ride the following summer of 1956. I was 13 years old and had been showing in gymkhanas for just two years. I knew nothing about longdistance riding, conditioning, the rules of the sport---really not much other than that I wanted to do it.
So I wrote to GMHA, and in due course received a letter saying that I would be sent an entry form the following spring when they were printed. By this time I’d outgrown Paint, and sold him to a local family. I’d found another horse---a bright bay Quarter Horse gelding at Louis Goodyear’s---and named him Bonfire, after a horse in a Walter Farley book.
My journal entries from 1956 show how my initiative included preparations toward my summer goal that began in the depths of a Massachusetts winter:
January 2: I went riding in the morning. In the afternoon we measured the route to Bernardston. It is eleven miles round trip. (The measurement was to enable me to track my 100mile preparation.)
February 11: I went riding for a while in the afternoon. (I was home for the weekend from Phillips Academy in Andover, where I was “away” at high school without my horse.)
March 16: I went riding in the morning and Bonfire went pretty good. (Spring vacation!)
March 18: I went riding this afternoon and for the first time used a saddle. He (Bonfire) is feeling pretty good these days so I have quite a lot of fun.
In the 1950s, I could ride through the Stoneleigh woods and head north on Swamp Road all the way to the Vermont border, about 10 miles away. Today the campus is boxed in by Interstate 91 and Route 2. That spring and summer of 1956, I took longer and longer rides.
June 8: I got up early so I could go riding before it got too hot. I went up to Bernardston the short route, and Bonfire seemed quite fresh when I got back.
June 11: Jack and I rode down to Louie’s [Louis Goodyear] this morning, and had lunch in Sunderland. We didn’t ride back until it got cooler. I think it was a 14-mile ride.
August 14: Rode practically to Vermont with Jack. At least 30 miles.
Later in August, my parents borrowed a wooden, home-built, one-horse, open-topped horse trailer and hauled Bonfire and me to South Woodstock.
August 28: Arrived in Woodstock. August 29: Horses judged in. August 30: First day of ride.
August 31: Rained all day.
Despite the rain, less than two weeks after my 15th birthday I completed my first 100-mile competitive trail ride with Bonfire. How did it happen? Because I had the initiative to make it happen. Much of my subsequent career with horses came about in pretty much the same way.
3. POSITIVE ATTITUDE: DO YOU DRAW PEOPLE TO YOU OR DRIVE THEM AWAY?
A positive attitude beats a negative attitude every single time. People with negative attitudes spread gloom and misery like a contagion. These depressing people lurk in every office, every business, every sports team, every barn---everywhere, around the world, staining their surroundings with their unhappiness. It’s usually not enough for them that they be miserable; their one ray of happiness comes from making everyone else unhappy.
Being miserable is a choice. Being upbeat, positive, and sunny is also a choice. Years of “being down” may even make being miserable seem so normal
At the very least, change drags you out of your comfort zone. That’s why most people hit a plateau and stay on it for life.
as to be beyond choice! It’s a very hard state to change, but you can change it if you so choose.
The reason to try to change: When you are gloom and doom personified, people shun you, which makes you feel even more gloomy. You create your own misery in a widening spiral. You wallow in it, and you invite everyone around you to join you down in the cold mud. Do you wonder that you lack a cheering section of supporters? Negative people usually don’t get as far as upbeat, positive people.
How can you choose to change? Maybe you don’t even realize that you are slouching around with a storm cloud over your head. But if everything seems wrong, and nothing seems right, do a “storm cloud check.”
Ask the people who deal with you on a regular basis. They may be tiptoeing around you, trying so hard not to awaken your inner bear that they won’t answer you honestly, at first. Look at yourself closely. Would you really enjoy being around you? If you wouldn’t, isn’t this a change that you’d like to make?
Negative thinking, a great depressor of self-confidence, is just as much a bad habit as looking down, or posting on the wrong diagonal.
4. ASSERTIVENESS: GET YOUR OWN WAY—NICELY!
Assertive people tend to get their own way rather than be pushed around by others; as riders, assertive people tend to get their own way rather than being pushed around or ignored by their horse.
Legendary U.S. Equestrian Team coach Jack Le Goff was known to shout, “Don’t be a passenger!” (or something that sounded like that) at riders he felt were being ineffectual and unassertive. To Jack, a passenger is a rider who lets it happen and takes what the horse doles out. A rider was someone who made it happen, imposing her will upon the horse to obtain the desired result.
Another “Jack-ism” along these lines: “I am galloping my horse down to the big oxer. I pick up the telephone to dial the horse. But there is no answer!”
When you are “galloping to the big oxer,” you normally sit up a bit and, through the use of half-halts, ask your horse to get his hocks underneath himself and elevate his forehand so that he can more readily jump up and over--rather than “at” the jump. When your horse doesn’t respond to the half-halts and continues to run on his forehand--long and low and out of balance---he’s not answering your “telephone call,” and he’s more likely to hit the jump or fall over it.
Unassertive riders are much more likely to get into these kinds of dangerous situations than are riders who “make it happen.” However, “assertive” doesn’t mean “aggressive.” Assertiveness is the degree or “loudness” of a reasonable request. Aggressiveness gets shortterm results through sheer force or intimidation.
The assertive rider builds a foundation of training, so that her horse fundamentally understands the request she is making. They speak the same language, because the rider will have taught the language (the aids) to the horse; she can raise her voice (employ the aids more strongly)
---even shout when necessary. (The unassertive rider, in contrast, will only whisper or murmur.)
5. COURAGE: ARE YOU THE LION PRE- OR POST-OZ?
Here is the definition of courage: “The attitude or response of facing and dealing with anything recognized as dangerous, difficult or painful, instead of withdrawing from it.”
From the earliest literature down to the present day, courage is the trait most lauded in books, songs and legends, while cowards are scorned. If it were only so simple! It’s still hard to fully understand courage, because it has so many embodiments.
In works like The Iliad and The Odyssey, “the courage of violence”
---in armed combat---is glorified above all other forms, as is often the case in modern books and movies, including tales of the American Wild West. However, if we analyze the definition “facing, rather than withdrawing from” situations that are “dangerous, difficult,
or painful,” courage becomes a much broader concept than Greeks and Trojans crossing spears in front of the walls of Troy, or two gunslingers stalking out to face each other on a dusty Wyoming street in 1870.
There is the quiet courage of the cancer patient who is somehow able to smile and keep going through enormous fear and pain. There is the person who dares to take an unpopular stand in the face of public scorn and opposition. There is also the courage of the single parent who holds his or her family together through times of loneliness and despair; the compassionate courage of hospice workers who deal with the dying; the daily courage of the air traffic controller who knows that a single mistake can produce disaster.
Every day, all across the world, ordinary men and women who appear to be anything but superheroes are performing heroic actions. At the same time, some people are intrinsically more brave than others. Watch a group of young people playing for a while in all kinds of situations, and it will be obvious that there are always one or two who are more adventurous, more prone to risk-taking than the others.
Even the easiest and quietest horse sports involve risk, which means every rider will need a degree of courage. Bear in mind, too, that courage is what you need for any task that frightens you. Galloping across the open prairie may be an easy morning lark for a fit, agile, 17-year-old cowgirl, but that same lark takes on totally different proportions for a 60-yearold rider coming back from a major illness or injury.
As an aside, does courage imply being scared of something but doing it anyway? Is someone courageous when what she does doesn’t scare her? For example, is someone who is terrified of heights, but ventures onto a cliff edge to save an injured hiker, exhibiting more courage than a steelworker (who climbs around all day on the girders and beams of skyscrapers, totally unaffected by any fear of falling) who performs the same act? I think most of us would say the answer is “yes”---doing something that doesn’t cause you any fear doesn’t require courage.
6. WORK ETHIC: KICK THE COUCH POTATO HABIT!
It’s the year 1856, and you live on a subsistence farm in central Vermont. You have a pair of Holstein oxen for the really heavy work; a Morgan-cross horse for the lighter work and transportation. You have chickens, a hog, and twelve milk cows. Every day is unrelenting toil, from early dawn until well after dark. You don’t have dental care, but no one else does either. There is no anesthesia for broken bones, no plumbing, no electricity, no telephone, no nearby hospital, no fast transportation, no paved roads, no heated vehicles. But because this is all you have ever known, and because all your neighbors live in essentially the same manner, you consider your life normal and natural.
If any of us, living on those same farms (as I do now, 154 years later), were suddenly subjected to those same conditions, we would most likely think the experience intolerably harsh.
So the question arises, “Can I have at least a glimmer of the work ethic that those farmers had, in the absence of the necessity that drove them to labor from dawn to dark?”
I am convinced that apparently advantageous, privileged “life circumstances” are sometimes a disadvantage, because they deprive children of the privilege of struggle.
Privilege? Yes. In fact, many parents of previous eras really understood the importance of instilling a work ethic---whatever their life circumstances. For instance, I love the story about the teenage son of President Calvin Coolidge (himself the product of a New England farming heritage), who had a job in the tobacco fields when his father was in office. A young coworker was reported to have said, “If my father was president, I would not work in a tobacco field,” and Calvin, Jr., answered, “If my father were your father, you would.”
A work ethic, though, presumes more than manual labor. Tolerating the daily grind, even enjoying the daily grind most of the time---that’s having a work ethic.
Many obstacles seem insurmountable when you first see them or even when you carefully evaluate them. It’s sort of like the old cliché
of draining the swamp, so daunting as to defy completion. What a true work ethic also gives an individual is the fortitude to realize that this goal is going to take a very long time to complete, and that’s okay.
7. FOCUS— AND NOT WITH YOUR CAMERA
Winston Churchill defined a fanatic as one “who won’t change his mind and won’t change the subject.” Most of my friends who are great riders come close to matching Churchill’s description. Maybe they’ll change their mind a little about new schooling methods, but the intensity of their focus borders on fanaticism.
Real riders’ focus drives them like a cattle prod. They ride when it’s cold, they ride when it’s raining, they ride after work, they get up at five in the morning to ride, they ride when they don’t feel so well, and they ride when they don’t really feel like riding for any of a hundred reasons.
More casual riders may come home from work on a gray and cold winter evening, and sit down in the recliner for a couple of minutes before they go up to change into their riding clothes and head out to the stable. But that chair feels so good, and the weather feels so bad, more casual riders might say, “The heck with riding today.”
But there are choices you can make to outwit these little traps. Don’t let lethargy get the upper hand! For instance, never sit down for “a couple of minutes” to look at that newly arrived magazine before heading for the barn.
Never ever have “one quick beer.” In fact, don’t even stop at home---drive directly to the barn and change there. Whatever the strategy, your focus on the goal is the driving force.
Success-oriented riders focus on long-term objectives, but set short-term and intermediate goals as rungs in the ladder. Focus and goal orientation are inextricably interwoven. A goal is what you focus on. Anyone who is going to become a good rider will necessarily have hundreds of goals. To acquire that elusive independent seat is a goal; to acquire “good hands”; to buy a very talented horse; to find a top-notch riding instructor; to ride in the Quarter Horse Congress, Madison Square Garden, Dressage at Devon, the Tevis Cup, Rolex Kentucky. These are goals.
Once you set your goals, you chip
away at each of them for days, weeks, months, years---and suddenly, there you are. It is focus that keeps you chipping away, and it is the chipping away that achieves the goal.
8. DETAIL ORIENTATION: THE POSITIVE SIDE OF NITPICKING
Meticulous horsemen are more likely to become good riders, because they pay attention to the details, including those of posture and performance. It’s not the easiest thing to choose to be meticulous and organized, even “picky” about small details, but if a finished performance really is nothing so much as the sum of a hundred parts, each little part needs to be a polished and finished entity in its own right.
Paying attention to detail is something you can learn to do. Why does it matter? Because excellent horsemen are meticulous and knowledgeable about everything, not just about riding: They know feeding, shoeing, medications, deworming and immunizations all contribute to the final product. So do clean, well-fitted tack and equipment, as well as organized grooming kits and tack boxes, feed rooms and horse trailers. Not necessarily lavish or expensive, but clean and tidy, just like the detail-conscious rider herself, whose clothes may not be the priciest, but who is always dressed in a neat, workmanlike way.
Self-improvement is a common and laudable goal. Schools and colleges certainly address the idea that knowledge is “improvable.” Similarly, gyms, sports programs, health clubs, spas, even weight-loss programs, all exist to help people change and develop their physical skills or capacities.
But if someone becomes more patient, assertive, brave---whatever
---they tend to develop those traits or emotions as byproducts of “life” rather than from conscious effort. Perhaps this is why there’s a tendency to assume that at some point a person “is who she is.” Perhaps, because we basically lack systemized, institutionalized programs of character development, we’re collectively less likely to think of these aspects of an individual as “improvable.” But I believe they are.
Of course there are many more elements of character than I’ve addressed here. I’ve probably spotlighted those I’ve had to work the hardest on myself! If I’ve skipped over your particular demons, try to identify, confront, and defeat them yourself, using similar strategies to those I’ve suggested. It’s a choice that’s worth making.
Adapted by permission from How Good Riders Get Good: New Edition: Daily Choices That Lead to Success in Any Equestrian Sport, published in 2019 by Trafalgar Square Books. Available from HorseandRiderbooks.com; 800- 423- 4525