Worst Pep Talk Ever

Kate is out of commission for a little while. She's going to be okay, but circumstances beyond all of our control meant that she couldn't coach her students at an event last weekend. I stepped in for dressage and hauling, while another one of our trainer friends stepped in to coach the jumping phases. I love our community. I've never had such close relationships with other trainers before and it's really been fabulous.

Rode TC quite early to prep for the day at the show!

Anyway, spending time helping out with her kids at the show really solidified to me two things:
1) Children are not for me
2) I possess zero skills in dealing with them nor with their messed up teenage brains

Kate is great with kids, she understands them and can at least fake relating to them. I cannot relate. I just prefer to just stuff as much dressage knowledge into them as I can while ignoring all their angsty hormones.

The kids are used to Kate, obviously, so over the weekend I got brought a few problems that I was not prepared for.

Sunrise on the back of the pony

The first client went in for dressage and my pep talk was this:

"You know you're going to be last, so don't get your hopes up, okay?"

One of the moms heard me and was kind of horrified. But hey, we all have had those horses, right? Well, the kid got her hopes up and came out in last place, very upset, telling me "I got my hopes up" and then she went and laid dramatically in a chair for a while. The way you lay when you don't even deserve to be comfortable. I told her to get up and go do something else, she resisted but I insisted. You can be sad for a few minutes but if you know that it's going to be bad, don't act all dramatic about it when it isn't good.

Kate's tack room set up is AMAZING, I want one of these

Next one comes in and someone cuts her off in warm-up, then yells at her. You know, like you do when you're a professional in your sport and you see a child in your way. Instead of saying anything productive, here's what I chose to say:

"Oh, that's just [person], have you noticed the slight change in the gravitational pull of the earth? Yes, that's us changing orbit to actually revolve around her rather than the sun"

Then I realized that was snarky and added:

"You're winning warm-up bingo, you can check off both the 'got cut off' box and the 'got yelled at' box now, congratulations. This is part of showing, just ignore her and get back out there"


We had a nice long break for a while so I corralled half the kids and took them to the show jumping arena. I told them that I needed to work on the computer and then proceeded to ignore them. Kate messaged me to see how things were going and then I realized that I was being bad at being Kate. Kate always uses things like this as learning opportunities. It went like this:

Me: Make sure you're learning something, Kate would want you to learn
Them: We need to watch a few rounds first
Me: Okay makes sense
...
Them: *on their phones*
Me: Have you been learning?
Them: Uhhhh
Me, to Kate over text: They aren't learning, Kate, I don't know how to make them learn
Kate over text to me: Ask them what the hardest line on course is and why
Me: What is the hardest line on course? What makes it hard?
Them: *explodes with what they learned*

I hauled Kate's rig, it drives like a giant Prius

Later on in the day, one of the kids said she was bummed about dressage and how she'll never be good at it. Here's my pep talk from that:

"You're not a gymnast okay? This is not your prime. You realize that many of our Olympians are in their 50s or so, right? If you think this is as good as it's going to get, you're wrong"

Also this:

"You can feel bad, that's fine, your brain is literally ripping itself to shreds, you have no prefrontal cortex and all your neurons are fucked. Being a teenager is the worst, I'm sorry you're going through that, it'll get better later."
- silence -
"Feel free to use that on your parents next time they're mad at you"

Me, after dealing with teenagers

So you know, don't let me around your kids. It'll do us all a favor.