How Good Riders Get Good by Denny Emerson

Author:Denny Emerson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Trafalgar Square Books
Published: 2011-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

VIII. 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.” As a definition of focus, that’s perhaps a bit harsh, but most of my friends who are great riders don’t miss Churchill’s description by more than a whisper. 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 (fig. 15).

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 and indoor ring. But that chair feels so good, and the weather feels so bad, more casual riders might say “the heck with riding today.”

This scenario simply doesn’t happen with focused riders. Perhaps they have developed failsafe mechanisms to prevent these kinds of letdowns, mechanisms you can adopt as well. There are choices you can make to outwit these little traps. Don’t let lethargy get the upper hand! You can trick yourself into more productive choices.

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, never 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 so inextricably interwoven that in my mind they are like that line in the old song “Love and Marriage”: “You can’t have one without the other.”

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.

Setting goals is the easy part. Then 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.

How do you eat an elephant? “One bite at a time.” Without focus, you get sick of chewing those bites.

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