Ayla learning trot shoulder-in

"Take whatever two qualities you want to enjoy at the same time, and alternate between them until they naturally combine." ~ Karen Rohlf
During this training session with Ayla, I started introducing a shoulder-in cue at liberty in lungeing so that I could start asking her inside hind leg to support a little more on the circle. Once she understood the cue at liberty, I added the lunge line to help refine it a little more.
The next step was taking this into work in hand where we started with just simple transitions from walk to trot on a straight line. We then progressed to starting in a walk shoulder-in, transitioning into a normal trot, and then back to a walk and repairing the shoulder-in.
On her easier side, the right rein, Ayla ended the session offering some lovely balanced and light steps of trot shoulder-in which arose organically out of layering the cues and transitions throughout the course of the training session.
If ever we find that we are struggling to teach a particular movement or activity, we can ask ourselves how we can break that exercise up into its basic ingredients. When we do this, we will quickly find out which ingredients are lacking understanding, quality, or are missing altogether. Then we can add them individually first and then alternate between them until our horse understands and starts to offer to combine them.
This approach brings so much more lightness and softness into the horse's response to our cues because we are given access to these movement shapes by talking to the horse's mind rather than bypassing their mind and trying to mechanically hold their body in position with our external aids.