Feel, timing & leadership

Whilst at the Honza clinic Steve and I played with the 51/49 mirroring game only this time with somewhat more feel and subtlety than when we did it at Stoneleigh.

For those of you that don't know what the 51/49 mirroring game is all about. When you are providing a feel for your horse and giving leadership (ridden or on-line) it should be like a dance where you move together with your partner as one. The control should be shared 51% to you as the leader and 49% to the horse. One way of simulating this and experiencing it for yourself is to partner up with another human. Both hold your hands up and place one of your hands, palm to palm, with one of theirs. Now one of you has 51% and start to move their hand around. The other with 49% just follows and mirrors the others movements as accurately as possible. After mirroring for a while slowly start to guide, gently taking that 2% until the roles have swapped.

As Steve and I played with this we were both trying to be as gentle and perceptive as possible (considering we were freezing our fingers off!). When the roles did swap it was almost like telepathy, because although Steve said he'd deliberately steered, I had also deliberately moved that way independently, or so I believed. It was fascinating! The more feel we tried to use, the harder is became to work out the actual point at which the roles swapped. Hmmm!