Today was a pretty ordinary day as far as the set up of my work goes. I rode at two different barns, and most of the horses I rode don't "do" dressage as their primary occupation. They safely carry their loving amateur owners over obstacle courses. My job is "simply" to help them do that job better by getting them to move over their backs and improve straightness.
Yet I came home with an immense sense of job satisfaction. I briefly looked up "job satisfaction studies" and quickly found lots of them, detailing along 43 different variables how employees in general and millennials in particular feel about their jobs. Those measurements included overall equitable treatment of employees, benefits, pay, career development opportunities etc.
My key job satisfaction variable is pretty much a sense of how well I rode on a given day. Today I had both the focus to feel myself into each horse and the physical power to assure the worried and convince the less motivated horses to trust their alignment to my requests, with very pleasing results for everyone involved. To have a more challenging horse come around from his default inverted posture to a relaxed stretch and some nice swingy medium trot in between is a tribute to my teachers, especially Tanya Vik and Andrew Murphy.
I have enough of those days to continue unconditionally loving what I do. Not every day takes me quite to these heights though. There are days when my confidence gets little dings. There is the horse that reared straight up, and the horse that threw in a few too many respectable bucks. There's the day when I'm fighting a cold and can't sustain the muscle tone needed to make an impression on the less easily impressed horse. And those are the days when I question if I've got what it takes. If I'm just another ok rider, or if I can really make a difference. But then I remind myself that all great athletes have off days. And I figuratively dust myself off, and ride like I rode today. With full focus and attention on each horse, not compromising any piece of the puzzle: of a correct, classical approach that puts compassion toward the horse first.
