stonecreekranchllc.com Blog

Have you ever noticed that sometimes the same thing is brought to your attention over and over again?  Does it make you think someone is trying to tell you something?

 That has happened this week for me, and that theme is to notice your impact.  I have had that come up before, mostly related to ACCD’s Breakthrough training (awesome training if you ever get a chance to go), but this week it has come up a lot. 

I have a horse in for training that has been here for a couple months.  He has not been an easy horse to train, and has been at the barn longer than his owner and I were hoping.  Because of this I have been doing a lot of thinking and soul searching about why this horse is not responding like the others.  I came up with a lot of things, and one of them is this. . .

We can make a big impact on horses by making small changes in the way that we handle them, because a lot of what they do is reacting to what we do.  To boil it down to the most simple terms most of my training takes place by doing things that make them react productively until they always respond the way I want.   The thing with this horse is, I don’t know how he acts when I am not around.  I have never watched him interact with anything but me, and I don’t know how I impact him.  He obviously doesn’t respond like most horses, but that doesn’t mean he has a problem.  That means I as a trainer have a problem: to behave differently so that I impact him differently.

So one way that I often think about training issues is to pretend that I am that horse.  I list all of their behaviors good and bad, and think of times that I have behaved like that.  (Sometimes that is really interesting.)  I started thinking that if you can change a horses behavior by approaching them in a different way, you may be able to change a person’s behavior by doing the same thing.

 I started this “social experiment” on people at the barn, and it has been very interesting.  The way that I approach my employees and students has a huge impact that I never realized.  Every day we see people and impact them one way or another.  It isn’t that we can choose to impact someone or not, by being there we have an impact.  So what is our impact going to be?  That is what we get to decide.

In all of the lessons that I teach, and all of the horses I work with I notice that something that stops most riders from going to the next level is a lack of confidence.  For some that means that they won’t canter because they aren’t sure that they can stay on, or they believe the horse will buck.  For others it may be avoiding riding on trails, because of uncertainty of the outcome.  I would assert that anyone who has spent much time on horseback can relate to the feeling of anxiety rising in your chest, when all you can think about is how to stay on, or how to stop the horse.