- Great! This is the response I use it when everything went good. Everything my horse and I do together just seems to work. We keep asking for more of each other and we get it. We work through what we know and it feels right and easy. We ask for something a little outside of our comfort zone and we get it! It is wonderful. I use this reply relatively infrequently, but I love when I can use it.
- Really good. I use this reply when on the whole things went well. We may have hit some bumpy points but we worked through them. Sometimes we are having difficulty but by trying new exercises we miraculously find that what we couldn’t do at the beginning of the ride we seem achieve by the end. I use this reply fairly often.
- OK. This is reserved for the times we encounter one difficulty after another. Nothing is working. We ultimately look for that one thing we know we can do together well because it is so important to end on a positive note and fatigue is beginning to settle in. We find that one thing, we do it well enough and we stop. It feels like we have made concessions, but we ended in an acceptable place, nobody got hurt. This response is called for infrequently.
- I’m selling my horse*. This response is needed, although rarely, because I and/or my horse are sometimes big losers who shouldn’t be riding together, or at all. Nothing seems to work and the search for the one thing we do well so we can end the pain of trying turns out to be an unhappy walk down the center line and a dismount. I need to go away and think about what went wrong. I am exhausted. This response is only very rarely required.