Ive been thinking a lot about balance and training and how those things are intertwined.
For example, have you noticed how young horses often take a step or two away from the mounting block after a human mounts not because they are unhappy or naughty but because they use the moment of moving to rebalance themselves after a rider gets on?
Ive noticed that with Una. Originally I made no attempts to stop her walking a couple steps after I mounted because I could feel she was just doing it to rebalance herself.
Now that she's a little more experienced a handful of rides later, I've still letting her take a step or two but then I halt her and we stand on the buckle for a moment before we continue.
I do eventually want to be able to mount without her needing to take a step to correct herself. I'm not willing to hold her head or tell her off to accomplish this - I really do see it as a balance and strength thing not a training thing.
But then I also think - How will Una know that I want her to put in the effort to try stand still after mounting? At some point I will have to tell her this is important to me and ask her to please start trying to say standing after I mount. Then she will need to try, and go through an up and down process until she learns how to do it.
So it will start as a balance thing, and then slowly morph into something that's both a balance and a training thing, until one day it becomes a habit.
And I think that time where a question shifts from being one of balance to one of both training AND balance and then eventually mostly training is super duper interesting to me, so I've been musing on it.
Update: I've had a further thought on this and I reckon the secret and the great key is to wait until the horse has almost all the capacity to balance before you start to make it a training thing. Then the training stretches them very slightly but not heaps, and they succeed when you begin to teach them. That way you give them a very small challenge which they can overcome, and that builds their confidence.
Update 2: Una had about two weeks off from riding after I wrote this, and then once I started riding her again she stood like a rock for mounting from then onwards. My guess is she figured it out on her own.