For me 2015 was a bit of an interesting year, and quite difficult in terms of horse riding. I spoke about it a bit in Storytime Saturday: Frustration, but I'll reflect on it a little more here. When you start getting into the higher levels of horse riding, it's easy to become overly critical of your own riding and frustrated at all your mistakes and flaws. This is something that plagued a lot of my riding this year, especially as I felt that I wasn't making a lot of progress while everyone around me was advancing. At the beginning of the year, I had a new instructor who, in hindsight, was really quite awful. He was very critical of my riding and my position, but at the same time told me nothing on how I could fix it. I think that he was a reason my self-esteem took a bit of a plummet, and it didn't help that I wasn't able to get out to the stables as much because of school work.
However thankfully things took a change for the better as the year continued. At around May this year that instructor left, and was replaced by my current instructor who is honestly the best coach I've ever had (and I've been through a couple). She doesn't just tell me to do things - she tells me the precise reason why I should do things, explaining the functions of my aids in a whole new way to me. It is with her that I've become a more technical rider, and with the closing of this year I feel like I'm finally making progress again. Recently I've been having some amazing rides and I'm thankful that I'm able to end 2015 on a good note.
This year I went through a lot of obstacles, but I feel like it was a character development year. I've sorted through my problems and am on the road to improvement, and I have a feeling things are only going to get better from here.
So, I'll end this post by saying: 2016, come at me!
