I had a fantastic dressage lesson with Sarah today. We worked on really getting William bent around my leg and using his whole body. It was a lot of inside leg to outside hand to establish bend and push his barrel over so his whole body would bend and also outside leg to outside hand to keep him on the bit. I had to work on keeping my inside hand very still (it tends to like to take & give) and use my inside leg to push into the bend, rather than just bending his nose with that inside hand. We worked on changing direction in a figure 8 and also by going across the diagonals (harder because of the longer “straight”) and I really had to think about keeping the bend for the way we were going, then being straight for a step or two (or across most of the diagonal) and then shifting my hands and body to establish the new direction. It was difficult, but it felt 100x better when we got it because instead of having a few strides of “which way are we going, head up, rhythm lost” at the change, it felt balanced and smooth and William stayed engaged. We did a little canter work going his bad direction and I have a tendency to try to push him around the circle with my outside leg, but when I was firm in my outside rein contact and pushed him with my inside leg it made all the difference in the world, instead of bulging to the outside, he bent around my inside leg and had some really beautiful moments.
Sarah was encouraging, saying that I ride William really well and he’s the perfect type of horse for me (and physically he’s so different to Stevie, so that should be interesting!) and William was a perfect gentleman like always. It felt really good to get things right and see the difference correcting my position and aids made.
I’m really hoping when I get established with Stevie I can work out taking him to another farm where Sarah teaches to have some lessons on him, but I’ll have to wait and see how that works out.
And, just a little anecdote about how wonderful William is: he typically stands resting one hind leg and I always had to ask him to shift his weight and stand squarely when I went to put the saddle on (by pushing him over or tickling his tummy) and now when I approach him holding the saddle he automatically shifts so that he is standing squarely – what a smart pony! 
Aha! See?? Things are looking up already.