I built the coach
I couldn’t find.

I asked for help. The answer came back in various polite forms, and it always meant the same thing: wrong horse. Friesians aren’t dressage horses. Come back when you’ve got something with the right breeding.

So I taught myself. I pulled the whole thing apart. Preliminary through to Grand Prix and worked out what each level genuinely asks for, and what has to already be in place before you can attempt it. You can’t ride a shoulder-in until you can ride a circle. You can’t ride a half-pass until you can ride a shoulder-in. Skip a building block and the whole structure comes down later, usually in front of a judge.

I rode my first Grand Prix competition in 2010. The moment I knew for certain the method was real was the first time I scored over 60% at that level, that was my “I’ve actually done it day”.

I was the first person in Australasia to take a Friesian to Grand Prix. I’ve also taken a Friesian-cross-Thoroughbred to FEI level. Both of them horses this industry had written off before either of us had started.

That breakdown I made for myself is now the Preliminary-to-Grand-Prix progression I teach. It’s the reason I’ll say, and mean, that any rider and any horse can be trained up the levels, because I had to prove it on the horses nobody rated.

I studied life coaching first. By then it was obvious to me that the rider half of the equation was where the real problems lived and that almost nobody was teaching it.

I got really good at asking coaches and trainers questions a lot of riders are afraid to ask. I’d be inquisitive like a child asking ‘why, why, why…’, but I was zeroing in what all of them were really trying to teach.

And from this I had to distill all the information into something that worked for any rider on any horse.

I built the first version of what became the Dressage Mastery Program and sold it to riders who were stuck exactly where I’d been stuck. It worked. In 2015 it evolved into the program that’s still running today, and everything else at Your Riding Success has grown out from there.

The idea has never changed. Teach both halves… the horse and the rider. Give riders recipes they can run on their own, rather than a coach shouting aids in their ear that they’ll never be able to repeat at home. And take the judgement out of it entirely.

Because the other thing I learned early is that this sport can be cruel. There’s comparison, there’s snobbery about breeding and budgets, and there’s a great deal of telling people they aren’t good enough. I wanted somewhere that did none of that. That’s the whole brief, and it’s still the brief.