Whelp,
I played hooky from work and went to the barn, where the Natural Horsemanship Vaquero trainer at the barn was riding his really reactive ultra Hancock -bred QH. The horse is (to me) incredibly well-balanced for a QH and would be a great dressage horse. But he did try to run though a fence last year under saddle. I digress. I watched the ride when I got to the barn.
“THIS horse just learned clean changes and mine still can’t get them???” I yelled to him. He laughed. We talked about it and he offered to do a training ride on my horse today. He had to work at it and my horse threw the same things at him that he does me, but he put in clean changes in both directions (mosty with a couple of strides of cross-canter but he produced clean changes in both directions and we ended things on that).
He talked throughout the whole ride (so informative), telling me what my horse was doing and how he was addressing it. To summarize, he thought the biggest issue was that my horse was “down in the shoulders” even though he was lifting his back and was too forward. He was evading. He said “shoulders up” and as my horse learned the aid and ended up saying said “sir, yes sir” rather than complaining. He also moved my horse’s hind end to the inside when he cross-cantered. I do that too, but I’m apparently too nice. R says “move it now” and can reinforce that with cowboy spurs. R is amazingly “in and out” with the aids and my horse would complain but ended up saying said “sir, yes sir”. When my horse anticipated the change and tried to suddenly rush through it, R shut him down. The point was to get the horse, who anticipates so much, to understand that he can’t take over. Taking over is not an option. He has to listen. And he has to do what he’s told to do. Each time the horse totally screwed up a change attempt, R immediately brought him to walk, corrected what he refused to do, and explained/reinforced the aid at the walk. R is a very fair trainer. He thought there was an element of him ignoring aids, not thinking he had to actually try, and me not getting on him for ignoring the aids. Yep, that’s true given our history and his hypervigilance.
This guy knows us very well for the last, oh, 10 years.
He’s very fair with horses and rides so many different kinds. For example, has a very expensive dressage horse in for ground work and starting right now (I watched his first ride yesterday) and an older barrel racer. He offered to ride him again in a couple of weeks, largely because he didn’t feel like he could explain everything very well because he does so much by feel. He then offered to help me on another day to do his preparation and use his approach. I’m very grateful.
In my case, I know I cut him too much slack and he takes advantage of it. Soooooo, it seems like the vaquero approach worked to get my horse to assemble his feet in the flying change plus really understand that he actually has to listen to the rider’s aids. I have to learn to “enforce” the aids and there are consequences for when he doesn’t listen. What I mean by that is if I give clear aids, he doesn’t get to ignore them because not listening is easier for him (I call him Mr. 90% with trainers). I have to really reinforce what I’m asking for and then try again. “Make the right thing easy and the wrong thing hard”.
I think I trained flying changes in easier horses in the past. This guy is athletic enough to do them but mentally like “ahhh, that’s too much work”.
Who knows. But after watching R get clean changes in both direction in my bridle but a western saddle, I thought “Hmmmmmmmmmmm” 
