26/06/2026
I totally agree!
I often tell students that I can see a lot of progress, while from their perspective, they’re still working on the same things as six months ago. The same questions keep coming up and sometimes it can even feel as if nothing is changing at all.
We tend to look for progress in the most obvious places; the movement, the exercise, the end result. But what I like to look at is everything around it.
I want to see if the horse’s expression changes when a difficult question is asked, whether the answer comes with a little less tension than it did a few months ago, how quickly the horse returns to a calm and thinking state after becoming worried, frustrated, or excited… The exercise itself may look almost the same, but the experience of doing it can be completely different.
The same applies to the human. Very often, students think they are still making the same mistakes they always have. But I see someone whose timing has become better, observations have become more accurate, and who is making dozens of tiny adjustments without realising it.
A lot of learning happens below the level of conscious thought. The brain gradually becomes better at recognising patterns, predicting outcomes, and responding appropriately. What once required intense concentration starts happening automatically. From the outside, it can look as though nothing much is changing. But from the inside, both horse and human are becoming more organised.
Perhaps that is why I sometimes seem more excited about a lesson than the student is. They are looking at whether the horse can perform a particular movement, while I am looking at whether the horse understands the question, the answer feels easier, recovery is quicker, both nervous systems spend more time in a state where learning can actually happen.
Those things are harder to measure than a movement or an exercise, but in the long run they are far more important. Ironically, when those foundations become strong enough, the things people usually think of as progress often appear by themselves.
