Respect My Authority?

Today I rode George and Prince with Mike, and was mostly discouraged but had a tiny flicker of hope.
Ok, so while he was gone, I would have described the issues I had with the horses I rode as very different. And I would have been wrong. The main common theme was a lack of respect for my leg aids.
They were openly taunting me, even with Mike there! As soon as he'd walk towards them, they'd suddenly get very obedient again, but when he'd back away, we were back to me being the teenage babysitter who gets slimed. It was excruciating. He'd say "canter" and I'd fumble around for two or three circles.
That was one of the discouraging parts.
So let's do the tiny flicker of hope - in my bungling efforts to give his horses a workout while he was gone, I actually had stumbled onto some of the right ideas. I didn't carry them through as well as I could have, but that's what I've got and I'm clinging to it. Like I had been working George over the trot poles at 4'6". And one day he was just slogging around like he had on lead boots and knocking the poles, and a fellow boarder suggested they should be wider. Something about that didn't seem right to me, especially with the slogging and the fact that he'd done them fine many other days at exactly the same distance. I did try them a couple days later wider, and he knocked less, but it didn't seem to have to do with the distance. Instead, I had figured it out earlier, it was whether or not he was coming in with impulsion from his hind end - vs. strung out and on the forehand.
Mike said this is George's approach to fences too - flung out and over them, and instead, to sit up and say "no, I want three more strides in before the fence here".
The second thing I was a bit right about, but this feels like inching my way up a mountain by my fingernails instead of the space walk leaps and bounds we made last year, is that the impulsion comes from riding with your core. I think that it's - if your hips are bouncing on the basketball, making the bounce higher (more time in the air), but how to actually explain what's really happening with your body is still beyond my grasp. This is both canter and trot - it's easier to do in canter, but it needs to be showing up in trot too (that's what makes them easy to sit).
I think the things I'm really struggling with getting - like I've hit a wall - is using your core and riding with your seat, getting that impulsion with connection, and then the lower leg still has too much static, especially combined with the weird passive personality I have about my aids (actually, ok, it's insecurity - I'm never sure I'm doing it right).
So, Mike wanted to work with me after I described the issues I had with both of them (I claimed Prince was easy, we just struggled with the 10 meter canter circle - then on George, I had an "ah-ha" and said, "oh, I just wasn't riding it enough from the outside leg and outside hand" - simple, right? But when I got on Prince today, suddenly I couldn't even canter anymore and at one point I started crying.
Ok, second side track - I have cried a few times at the barn lately, and it isn't really about whoever I'm riding, it's my frustration that it's not Willig leaking out of my eyes.)
So, here's the nutshell solutions to my problems:
- Stop screwing around with my legs all the time. Ask for the aid. Ask a second time if the horse was asleep. Then use the whip and demand respect. Hence, the "Respect My Authority". This was ALL horses I rode, without him there to fix it, and an ongoing problem with Willig (which he, somewhat remarkably, seems relatively immune to, at least compared to two weeks with Mike's horses.)
- Ride that impulsion all the time (after a couple minutes of warm up). This is really hard on my abs and lower back, so this is going to go with "work out at home on your abs and lower back every night". Because I CAN get it on my own, I just don't trust myself that I'm doing it right because I can't explain it. I get it by riding the basketball.
- When George tries to dive down or his shaking his head, then sit up tall, lean back, brace my core and back, and use my seat to drive down.
- By the way, I think I can't get the canter because I'm getting frustrated, and then I drive my seat down because I'm mad which = brakes and then I'm like - arrgggh just go forward into canter! while I ask for exactly the opposite with my seat.
- The weird open left hand? That's all me. Work on making squares and making all my turns with the outside hand and outside rein, and work on a 10ish meter canter (instead of 20) and think about leg yielding to the inside to ask for it.
- Lower leg down. Ride without stirrups more. Think at both the trot and canter about what I've called "frog legs" or "trampoline legs" where I push down with my legs (all the way from the hip to my heel), into the saddle. When I watched Mike ride, nothing on his legs or seat ever bounces at all, and I think his "soft" look is actually very refined frog legs. And drop my stirrups a hole - I'm riding with my knees all clenched up, which makes my aids up weird and high compared to his (he's got really long legs and I've got really short legs so I'm already at a disadvantage there about where my aids are on the horses).
- Our trot exercises are: ride the trot with the tall posture on a basketball like you're going over elevated trot poles, turn it into medium, take it back to collected, turn it into medium, take it back to collected. Simple, right? Ha! I'll probably spend the next year working on this.
- Our canter exercises are: ride piaffe (prancing in place), then walk to canter on a 10 meter circle, and it's walk to COLLECTED canter like you're leg yielding into the center, praise him when he does it right, give him a few strides, and then it's 1-2-3 walk again. For Prince, it's the same but then a break, and then try again, and then a break. For George, it's working on increasing the amount of time he can hold it.
- and I got to see the end of another lesson, where Mike had set up three elevated poles at canter distance to help another horse work on his impulsion in the canter. That was pretty cool.