How to be a Good Student

From Both the Teacher's

AND the Student's POVs

All right, we'll all agree:  acquiring new abilities and retaining new abilities are just ... plain ... difficult.  But, I'm here to shed some light on this and to bring good news.  Which is, they always have been difficult.  If we were naturally perfect students, we would all have been (or be) toting home report cards laden with As and A+s, and Alex Trebeck would always be wowed by our answers on "Jeopardy."  But most of us didn’t, and Alex isn’t, so we are left here to work with our imperfect, mortal abilities.

Turning this toward the art and sport of riding, as adults, it is true that there are more roadblocks than ever toward learning.  We, unlike children and teenagers, have multiple and consequential demands on our concentration and our memory and our sense of responsibility.  Career responsibilities, relationships, and the nagging requirements of day-to-day life use sharp elbows on any incoming information, especially the type asking for reflection and thoughtfulness, which are important parts of deepening one’s skills.

But, it doesn't doom us, we adults, to not enrich ourselves with new experiences and insights.  As a teacher of riding for nearly 25 years, it's been my observation that it's not really more impossible for an adult to learn something new, as compared to a child.  We may struggle with fears and be overly aware of the learning struggle, but we are able to nimbly counter those with a developed ability to focus, to articulate confusions, to understand complexity and its implications, and to apply ourselves productively to the learning curve.

So, with all those young people returning to school these past weeks, it's a good time to check in on our own riding education and see if we're making hay with our lessons or just frittering away the time and bank accounts.  As an instructor for the past 25 years, here are some of the tips I put forward to both my adult, and child and teen, students to help them come to the next lesson more skilled than at the end of that day's lesson:

1)  For students of any age, if you are unable to lesson on a very regular basis (weekly or bi-weekly), decide an interval at which to take your lessons so that you get the most out of them.  One-off lessons are not of much value:  riding position, the aids, and the horse's reactions, its own fitness and learning curve, all need to be addressed and those elements are rarely sufficiently addressed in a single, occasional lesson.  As well, the student may very well leave with inaccurate impressions of new techniques, and then  a)  waste untold amounts of time 'doing it wrong,' and b)  have the rough realization of having learned something useless, and all that time and lesson money are gone.  You didn't take a lesson to learn it wrong. Both the rider and the horse suffer when this happens.

Instead, dredge the most of your lessons by setting aside time and money to gang several lessons together -- weekly or twice a month -- and get a thorough grounding in your new material.  Discuss it with your instructor, and let her know that you are scheduling in this way in order to make the most of her supervision.  She will likely structure the lessons with manageable bits of knowledge so you can practice, and she will appreciate the resources and thoughtyou are devoting to your riding.  One thing a good instructor likes is a student who is respectful of the importance and value of a riding lesson and tries to make her training a priority.

2)  Whether you 'lesson' regularly or whenever you can slip one in, after your lesson, as soon as possible, jot down notes of your lesson.  These notes make for very 'live' reminders of your instructor's comments and of exercises, and can be amazingly useful in your practise time in between lessons.

3)  Focus on what you've done well in your day's ride/lesson and the skills you flexed to make 'it' go well.  Avoid dwelling on what didn't go well, unless your approach is about how to improve that weak area using positive words and imagery.  This is not denial.  It is known that the brain hears only “lower my hands” when you tell yourself “don’t lower my hands,” and does not compute the negating wording of the word “don’t.”  Therefore, any instruction to yourself should be in a positive construction.  In this instance, therefore, instruct yourself with the directive “raise my hands.”  If unhappy thoughts about your riding are a consistent stumbling block, consider seeing a sports psychologist directly or read up on how to create a learning environment for the brain. Many excellent books exist on this topic; two to consider are the best seller Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and The Talent Code, by Daniel Coyle.

4)  Most of us have heard of the three general styles of learning, called the VAK (or VARK) system of learning preferences.  It stands for Visual, Auditory, Kinesthetic.  The R is a newer addition, representing Read/Write.  All not all educators subscribe fully to this system, but over time, each of us have probably noticed that we receive information and work best with it in a particular way.   Determining your way of receiving information (and often it can be a mix of the above) will go a long way in maximizing your lessons.  This way, your instructor will know to demonstrate the technique, to talk about the technique, or help move your body around to grasp the technique – or a little of all of that! – to move you efficiently along the learning curve.

5)  To really learn, you may have to tolerate the agitation that learning a new skill your instructor presents to you can cause.  Putting on the shelf your pre-existing training approaches, riding habits, or outlooks can bring on a sense of frustration and annoyance as the new skills potentially conflicts with your established skills.  If you trust your instructor and have seen her  produce results you admire, be willing to "suspend your disbelief" and embrace the unknown.   You can always return to your old ways if you feel the new skill is too against the grain for you or your horse.  With a competent instructor, however, this outcome is unlikely.

6)  After your series of lessons, relieve your time and resources, put the next series of lessons out there as a future commitment, and then commit to practice.  Practicing is free!  The notes you made yourself write down after a ride are really going to be a boost now, as is all that positive mental review of your riding “errors.”  Pick something out of each of them to practice in your upcoming rides, and keep yourself on the hook about this.  This is the time during which your money will become very well spent, and where, with an adult’s appreciation, you will grasp with deepening comprehension all that your instructor was putting across to you in those lessons.

One additional note, especially for adult riders:  research has shown that distraction is a very significant impediment to memory.  Short-term memory is not endless, and distractions can tax it beyond its abilities.  According to Dr. Adam Gazzaley, adjunct assistant professor of neuroscience at UC Berkeley and assistant professor of neurology and physiology at UC San Francisco, "difficulty filtering out distractions impacts a wide range of daily life activities...and can greatly affect quality of life."  Besides focus, "It is also necessary to filter distractions. Otherwise, our capacity-limited short-term memory system will be overloaded."

How to apply this to your riding?  If you can find a way to allow your riding time to be unimpacted -- cell phone on mute; children occupied; errands accomplished -- so that you can think of just your horse and your riding and then allow yourself a mental review time later in the day, your riding accomplishments will grow exponentially.  (If it worries you to not have your worries right at hand, remember that you can re-focus on your concerns as soon as you've finished your lesson and post-lesson review time.)  I have seen the material impact tiny reviews throughout the week of a new riding skills make on students' progess, including my own.  If, however, 'distraction' is unrelenting and unavoidable, then taking those notes will be a good substitute.

Give these tips a try, and see if your riding-lesson investment doesn't start showing an even more positive trend line. These tips may not remove every obstacle to your riding fun, but they are a healthy start to riding better -- and making for a happier horse!