On The Bit & False Attributions

Attribution is a topic in psychology, and especially sports psychology, and it really refers to the question, to what do you attribute your success or your failure? And this is a huge, interesting, complex topic topic that's immensely relevant to all of us as riders, whether we struggle or whether we're naturally talented. So let's take the topic of getting the horse on the bit, which many of you know I prefer to call the seeking reflexes, but we'll stick with on the bit for now. Riders who are talented or out there might just consider, well, it's this leg here in your inside hand and play a little bit, and they attribute their success to that. And then you go and try and do the same thing of what they've told you, and you are not successful. So if they are truly successful and they're making horses in beautiful carriage, perhaps what's happening that's making it work is something they're not aware of, something deeper into the onion, if you like, of the layers of interaction between the rider and the horse. If it's not working for you, perhaps you're there going, well, my horse is resistant. He's just so difficult. He's out to get me. He's this, he's that. And you're not seeing the bigger picture of your interaction with him. Perhaps you think he's successful when his nose is vertical. So your awareness is only on where his nose is, where your arms are, the reins are, the feeling in your hand. And your attributions are all about hands and reins and noses, whether you're talking about success or failure. I'm going to suggest to you that none of these ideas have got close to what really happens in the interaction between the rider and the horse. And because whatever you think you're quote, teaching him about coming on the bit, what's really going on is an interaction between your body and his. That's to do with where your center of gravity is, how much you're pushing his back down, whether he can become able to draw his back up and influence his back to come up so his head and neck then naturally reach into the rain. How your stillness, your quietness, your wiggliness, your jiggliness, your handiness, or your quiet ability to just be in place and transmit force through your body. All of those could be positive or negative influences and attributions which ride as a whole just don't make. So for me, a whole deal in my work is to try to strip away the attributions that people make that are not helpful, whether they're do it like this or my problem's that and really lay out what happens in the rider Horse Interaction after all, the horse reads our body so precisely. When you do a handshake with someone, you get such a phenomenal amount of information about them. Every time you sit in the saddle, you deliver to the horse your butt shake and he reads you like a book and your body becomes a template that his body gets arranged around. And when you know how to arrange your body in the right way, what I'm suggesting is those kind of attributions about how the middle of you affects the middle of him create a much more viable understanding and a way of breaking a mysterious skill into learnable pieces.

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