Great advice here already.
I have one too. Bred and raised him myself. It took a long time to get him to lunge. We did a lot (3 months?) of long lining prior to riding. Riding him was something that felt very odd. His focus rotates around the arena, going here, going there, and rarely going where I wanted it to go, and almost never on me, when mounted or on the ground. And he was tense, and he doesn’t appreciate much contact with his mouth either. Draft cross, 3/4 TB and tends to the drafty side. Great jumper, when things went right. It took two years to break him to ride where I actually felt safe on him. Getting an iron halter to lunge him in was a good thing, it is soft if he was bent towards me, but if he started to ignore me, or try to bolt, it brought his attention back onto me right away, no doubt. I didn’t have one when I started with him, but getting one made a big difference. The ultimate in lunging cavassons for horses who have no focus.
Things have got better, very good actually, now. But it took a long time. And he’s still weird. The few other people who have ridden him have not got on with him well, but he and I have a system that works, although it is very different from most other horses. He has a high drive to do the right thing, and doesn’t like to actually be given cues, because he knows it all already, silly human.
I reduced my goals. I just wanted him to go softly, stretching his head and neck down, relaxed, and paying at least some attention to me some of the time. I did not give him a lot of cues, just leg, just “forward”. It became his goal… relaxation. No spooking (he was one of those who spooked at the same thing every time around the arena, a pile of poles stored in the corner). Think in terms of where his attention is, and isn’t. When he was going to spook at the poles, I put a cone on the other side (a Christmas tree actually), then I put a crosspole jump there instead. So, if he didn’t pay attention to the jump instead of the pile of poles, he was going to fall over the jump. Repeat. This forces his attention to where you want it, without YOU actually being involved. In this way, it became possible to put his focus where I wanted it, when I wanted it there, and he has improved a LOT. But he’s still a weird horse, an oddball.
I also had to ride this horse on Atravet for about a month, right at the beginning. Because he just got more upset at any attempt to communicate with him, and seemed to be just expecting to be upset and tense, in advance of actually being contacted in any way. The atravet made things less stressful for him, and I was not always having to correct things (spooks, bolts), so we could both relax, and expect to be relaxed. This helped a LOT. Because I did not want to be constantly correcting things, I WANTED to just throw the reins at him and let him trot and canter softly and quietly, but that is hard to do when the horse is tense, spooking, bolting, and not paying attention. So the atravet broke the vicious circle, and showed him how to relax, and that I wanted him to relax, and that he wanted to relax. For a while, this goal taught him to root, which was not the ultimate goal, but I understood what it meant to him, and he progressed through that in time, and no longer does that often.
He’s not a normal horse, and you can’t change him into a normal horse. He is the horse he is… odd. You have to find a way to contact him, in a way that he can accept, which is not the normal way to ride and train a horse. Contact him, and give him a reward. So start by finding a reward that he appreciates, and use that. Good luck! I hope some small part of my experience with this horse may help you. I’ve broke and rode a lot of horses in a number of decades without encountering one like this one. But I quite like and appreciate him now! The joke is… people who watch him at the horse shows now think he is “easy” to ride LOL! And he is, for me. Because we accommodate to each other, and I let him be the horse he is.
