Hi everyone, I’m hoping you can help me out with something I’ve been mulling over in my head for a while. This is going to be a long post, and I apologize in advance. I’m trying to decide whether I want to switch trainers/barns, or take lessons with two different trainers (at different barns) or stick with my current trainer/barn. (I put trainer/barn because my barn has multiple dressage trainers that all work together and teach the same method so they can be interchangeable and all teach the same students. Right now I have lessons pretty frequently with maybe 3 or 4 of the 5 trainers on staff).
I’m really struggling with whether I want to stay or go. In the past, when I changed barns, it was because I went off to college and didn’t ride for four years, so by the time I was ready to start riding again my priorities had really shifted. Now, I feel like they’ve shifted again. I’m realizing how much there is out there in the horse world and I feel like my trainers can be very “well, this is the only right way to do it and everyone else is wrong” and “why would you want to do anything but this?”. That’s not to say that they aren’t nice people and I do feel like my riding has improved in the time that I’ve been with them and I do really like the other people who take lessons, but I am not going to know if that is the “only right way to do it” or if I “don’t want to do anything but that” unless I go out and actually experience what different places are like. (BTW, things I want to try: gaited horses, working equitation, low level eventing, and just other dressage trainers).
There are some things they do that I don’t necessarily agree with–like they seem to let their horses run around on their forehead and (despite claiming they only care about back position and not about neck) focus a lot on getting horses to drop their heads. They do also have a lot of judgments about horse breeds and which breeds they will buy for themselves or their clients. I also am in a lot of group lessons and I think I could benefit from more individual instruction, especially from a single instructor instead of four, but who wouldn’t? Finally, and maybe most importantly, recently they’ve been giving a lot of their horses low dosages of ace before lessons to “take the edge off”. (Side note: I’m pretty confident their vet knows they are doing this). Their logic is that it does the same thing as lunging before lessons but without the wear and tear, and they also really don’t want someone to fall off and have to go to the hospital given the current pandemic. I see their reasoning, but as someone who has thought long and hard about taking a prescription anti-anxiety med in my own life, I am pretty uncomfortable with long-term drug usage for horses that don’t need it.
The problem is, I do really like the trainers and other riders as people and I am not sure if I have a good enough reason to leave. It would be easier to explain if I said I want to go back to taking jumping lessons, like I did when growing up, but I don’t know if I really want that either (plus, I don’t know if I could afford it–jumping is expensive where I live). There are a couple trainers in my area that I’m interested in–one works with icelandic horses and one does very classical dressage–so I would probably see what their rates were and go with one of them, but I feel like it’s a lot harder to say “I no longer want to do dressage with you because I no longer want to do dressage with YOU” than “I no longer want to do dressage with you because I want to go do hunters/jumpers”. And I still haven’t resolved whether I feel like it’s a good enough reason to go, and handle the fallout.
I am planning on moving in early spring of next year, so I would automatically switch then, but I don’t want to feel like I didn’t take advantage of trying everything I could. Plus, any sport with horses is expensive and if I’m paying so much for it, I really want to make sure I am getting what I want out of it. I could also just say the finances aren’t working out anymore and leave (and then go take lessons elsewhere on the DL) but I don’t really like lying, and I’d have to hide it on social media which just seems like a lot of stress and work.
This is also all complicated by the fact that I work for the barn I’m training at one day a week, so it would be completely out of the blue for them if I did decide to leave.
I am sure I am not the only person who has faced something like this, so I would really appreciate hearing everyone’s thoughts.
