Delayed posting of dressage lesson

Last week I had a dressage lesson, and then immediately following it, came down with a doozy of a cold. I was sick enough that I didn't even feel like sitting at the computer to type out my lesson, which is a good lesson in itself, because almost a week later, I can hardly remember all of the details.
My primary complaint was back to the transition from the canter to trot. I don't get Willig "lifted" enough, so it is this jarring down transition, where I post like a pogo stick bouncing up and down instead of sitting the trot. (I know the pogo stick feeling well, since it's how I "sat" the trot most of my life until I started working with Mike last year.)
Mike gave us a very difficult exercise to do - canter on a 10-meter circle. It was almost impossible to do at the start of the lesson - we'd MAYBE pick up a few strides and then collapse - but the point of it was to show me how much I squirm around up there. I am doing pretty much everything. I'm not giving Willig the aid and then letting him do it, but ... micro-managing.
As a spoiler - at the end of the lesson he had us do it again and it was, compared to the start of the lesson, a cake walk. I don't know why, but I'm prepared at this point to live with the magic.
I ask him for something, and then I fiddle, and then I squirm around, and then I toss my shoulders willy-nilly, and the poor guy has no idea what job he's supposed to be doing.
So that was huge take-home lesson 1. Just like Mike suggested that perhaps - just maybe - I am continuing to ask for the trot with each step. And I was like "you're crazy!" and then he asked me to go into a two point, and Willig ... slowed ... down ... to ... a ... walk without my constant banging around.
I have switched my constant anaconda squeeze (old aid) to think that I was no longer banging around, but instead I'm just like a toddler with a drum set - now instead of squueezzzing, I'm tap-tap-tappity-tap-tap-tapping (new aid).
It's an improvement, but still not quite where we need to be.
Lesson 2 - we worked on the "scary" end of the arena again. Mike has a gentle approach - we walk. stop. look. walk. stop. look. Then walk all the way. Then trot. walk. trot. walk. Then trot all the way. Then canter. trot if needed. canter. Canter all the way. Then Mike moves away. And every time we get past is one more tiny feather swiping a meteor every thousand years (one of my favorite Built to Spill songs) and one day it will be the size of a pea.
And yes, it works. But it drives me CRAZY. I am impatient.
Lesson 3. Then we did a bit of our fancy-pants work, which we have not been doing so much of since ding dong got scared of the far end again. (Even though our arena is huge, when we spend half of it preparing for and exiting the scary end, we are really only working on stuff for half (which is still big, but still, it's half).)
The first thing Mike pointed out is to set Willig up for success. If I'm going to ask him to do some leg yield, come off the corner, turn down the quarter line, and move him TO the wall for the first time. Horses gravitate toward the wall, and why ask him to go all the way across as the very first move. Let him warm up a bit.
Finally, in the next post I'll describe our jump lesson, but today Mike was riding gorgeous George, and Willig decided to act up the same as the jump lesson, and when I stomped in to get his lunge line and side reins, Mike asked if I needed draw reins. And then a light bulb went off for me - why in the world do I spend all this time fighting with him when I have a tool we used for like 6 months? So I put them on him today and whether it was the lesson Saturday, or the lunging until he got sweaty, or the draw reings, or a combination - he wasn't nearly as much of a pistol as he was Saturday.