The Tiny Steps Matter Most

A shot from one of our zoom lessons

Since Kirsten Nelsen lives in Florida, she doesn’t travel to cold Maryland during the winter, and I don’t blame her. She’s come up with a unique solution to support her students - virtual training. At first this sounds crazy, but having experienced it I can say that it has been incredibly helpful for so many reasons!

For starters, knowing I have her support, even through the winter, has been a driving factor in actually getting out there and getting the work time in despite the weather. After that, there’s SO much more that you can see in video that you can’t see in the moment while riding. Being able to stop and rewind has it’s benefits! 😂

The biggest thing that I gained this winter from reviewing the videos is the awareness of power of taking those small actions even when it feels like nothing is changing.

Ride to ride, I hardly noticed anything different. Since I was only getting in one, maybe two 20 minute rides a week on a really good week (i.e. the weather cooperated for us AND my schedule was clear at the same time!), it’s not like we were putting in hours and hours of work.

And yet, every single time, she could see a change. She could see small adjustments that he was making that were making a difference in his strength, coordination, and body control. Reviewing the videos together helped me recognize what was changing ride to ride because I could see it, after I felt it. Being able to put a visual with the felt sense of the ride made a big difference in understanding what was different, and knowing what to do to continue to make progress.

I find that with most things in life, we don’t see the changes day to day. We often know why we should* do something, but being able to muster the energy to keep our commitment to the should day after day gets tiring when you can’t tell if there’s been any change at all.

In the beginning hanging on to the deeper WHY of the task is important, and eventually the results will speak for themselves, and you’ll feel the shifts deep down and it won’t take so much coercion of your psyche to do the THING.

That’s where having a few tricks up your sleeve can help:

✅ Can you habit stack? Could you add the task to something else that’s much more pleasant, so I don’t get to do X until I do Y?

✅ In the above example, the videos helped tremendously - can you record yourself doing the task at various intervals so you can look for the differences week to week or month to month?

✅ Can you use a streak to help keep going? Track your progress in gold stars on your calendar if you have to, or where ever will give you that little hit of dopamine for checking off the box.

Whatever little tricks that you need to use to get you through the hard part in the beginning is the best way to get it done - whatever that looks like for you. Get creative and you’ll be able to look back in six months and be so impressed with all of your progress!

Here’s the second piece of the puzzle: the steps can be very tiny. Our rides over the winter have been about 20 minutes at most. Partly because that’s all he can handle, and partly because it’s often been cold and blustery and that’s about how long it takes to lose feeling in my fingers and toes!

But our progress over the winter has been powerful, and that’s the really great news about change - often it takes a collection of tiny steps in order to make big change. I find that in the beginning it’s so much easier to tell yourself you’re only going to do 5 minutes of the THING. You can do anything for 5 minutes, right?

Five minutes every day is 35 minutes per week. If you bump that to 10 minutes per day, that’s 70 minutes per week. That’s more than an hour. Doing the thing one day a week for an hour will actually be less time spent than doing the thing for 10 minutes per day.

That adds up fast. And the more consistently you can do the thing, the more likely your body and subconscious are just going to decide that it’s something you do and you do it every day, and you’ll miss it when it’s not there.

This is how we train for whatever goal we have - whether that’s agility with our dog, basic commands for health and safety living together, or more complex goals like the coordination required for the horse to move into “collection.” All the tiny steps matter the most, and when you can start treating them that way, that’s when the magic starts to happen.

For a deeper dive into this topic, check out the Riding in the Weeds podcast, in episode 83, where Tash and I wade into the weeds on this!

*I don’t care for the word should. But sometimes it’s the only reason we have for doing something (especially in the beginning), and it isn’t inherently bad, but we’ve got to find a deeper reason than just because somebody said we should.