How hard are you trying?
How much time do you put in?
Ok, so this one comes from both my recent horse training experiences and from years of both my own training and training other people-both on and off horse.
How much time do you give to trying something before you give up.
Try it once, decide it’s too hard and don’t bother again?
Give it a couple of goes and if you don’t get it properly then give up?
Or do you keep trying, hopefully making tiny incremental gains along the way, so that one day a little in the future you have got it?
It’s something I’ve had to do with pony training recently with both Gwydion and Panda, but if you’ve seen my other social media you’ll see that Panda has gone from scared, aggressive and Panda to a little scritch obsessed sweetie finally learning the arena isn’t a scary place. Gwydion has gone from being a total anxious wreck just being tied up to having a rider on his back again, and I can assure you that even a few months ago I wasn’t sure we’d be getting there! But I just kept chipping away……along with some tears and tantrums!
The same goes for riding. I’ve had new things taught to me that I’ve really not been able to get the hang of the first few goes but I’ll just keep chipping away and eventually it clicks. It might take days, weeks or even months but I’ll keep trying.
Then with my training, there are loads of exercises that I couldn’t do at first. Olympic lifting definitely a case in point! You didn’t lift heavy on your first session, you start low and add a little more as you get stronger.
When I’m training clients whether that’s on or off horse often they can get frustrated and want to give up when they try something for the first time and it’s hard. But you didn’t learn to ride in your first lesson did you? If you want to keep getting better you’ve got to keep pushing yourself to do things that seem hard at first.
Just think if you started exercising now and did a couple of session a week, you might feel useless at first. It might not immediately fix all the problems you thought it was -you don’t stabilise your seat in 1 Pliates class!
However if you just keep turning up and leaning into that uncomfortable place where it feels like you can’t quite do it and aiming to get just a little bit better each time; you may well just look back in a few months time and not be able to believe how far you’ve come.
