For the sake of your horse and yourself, always remember to make what are the really important reasons for choosing a trainer or teacher as the primary factors, and don’t be overly swayed by the others.
If you can do that you avoid the pitfalls of your horse just learning a job. Instead, they learn to work with you and trust your ideas with every step. If you only teach a horse to do jobs you are only teaching tricks and they will fail you when the circumstances change.
Everybody has to work through episodes of spookiness. I have never met a combination that did not experience it. It’s important to recognise that shying and spookiness is a symptom of something else. My biggest piece of advice is to address the cause and do not punish a horse for the symptom.
The next time you get frustrated because your horse keeps falling in on a circle or insists on moving with its head up or hops into the trot, ask yourself what will it take to make the new way of moving feel more comfortable than the old way?
