Working on Tim's psychological skills.

Our email conversations leading to the session allowed me to tailor the session to Tim and he mentioned he wanted to do drops and jumps more confidently as well as corner better etc..
With this in mind I planned a possible double venue day with both Woburn and the Herts skills area.
As usual I put Tim through the skills check where I see what each rider can do naturally and what skills are perhaps missing from their tool box.
Looking and footwork were identified and we began immediately to work on those areas as we moved through the techniques of un weighting the front end, pumping and the disconnected bunny hop. All of those techniques were picked up very quickly indeed and it became clear that Tim needed to build his mental skills a lot more so I began working on these too.
We moved onto the drop technique and then onto a small tabletop for the jump technique. After a few body position and timing suggestions we had Tim comfortable with air under his wheels. I left that simmering so to speak and deliberately walked him to my coaching trail past a 7ft gap double and just pointed at it as we walked past, the seed was sown!
On the coaching trail we worked hard on cornering and linking sections together. methodically we worked our way down the trail and all sections including the drops were ate up at speed with flow and control.
I then moved him to the trail that ended with the gap double and we first worked on the first half of the trail linking the 3 corners and the drop section effortlessly. Now Tim wanted to run into the gap and feel the speed for it so I allowed it already knowing the mental process had been done over the hour or so beforehand when i just "showed" it to him. Off the drop section, swooped the corner and pumped down and over the gap. Tim was amazed at the ease of it and his confidence was booming. after a few runs of the trail we moved to an isolated larger drop section to work on airtime and soon Tim was comfortably dropping 6ft+ at varying speeds. with that I ended our woburn session and moved us to the Herts skills area.
We began with a couple of runs down the completed 1st skills trail before moving across to the unseen Herts Shore. Tim was convinced it was all beyond him but slowly we pieced together low short length ladders before working on wooden berm cornering. Tim was flying round it now so it was time to add in a drop before the corner and to Tim's amazement he found the very same skills he now had could be applied exactly to shore style riding and the drop flew by.
Tim kept looking at a 10-12ft gap log booter I have built there so I offered to coach him on it and after working on his speed management he was clearing it effortlessly and smoothly. On this note we ended our day together. A truly great session in so many ways. High 5 Tim!