Ultimate Horse Training Formula

Dear Friends,

I was excited to visit with the Fast Track students last week. It was kind of impromptu because I made a mistake in thinking that we were having a Photonic Health demonstration that day, when in fact it was the following Monday! So I told them they had the booby prize instead – me! – and I opened up to questions. I love being able to say, “You can ask me anything you want…well, ALMOST anything." I’ve learned my lesson on that one, so I have a caveat now!

There were some super questions around Horsenality and especially on ‘phases or stages’ that a horse goes through as you develop them. I actually wrote an article on this in the May 2009 Savvy Times called ‘The Ultimate Training Formula.’ Essentially it’s about this: there are four stages a horse needs to move through as you develop a partnership with them: 1. calm, 2. confident/trusting, 3. motivated and 4. willing.

Sometimes it’s even more powerful to think about it in the opposite way: 1. afraid/nervous/dominant, 2. unconfident/mistrusting, 3. unmotivated/lazy and 4. unwilling/disobedient.

A horse can experience one or all of these feelings at any given time. For example, with right-brain horses you’re going to be dealing a lot with 1 and 2, but all of a sudden, one day, you’re going to think he’s gone Left-Brain Introvert because he seems lazy! Or your quiet, dependable Left-Brain Introvert suddenly spooks and goes Right-Brain Extrovert. Have they really changed Horsenality, or are they just behaving differently because there’s something we’ve missed or failed to attend to early enough?

A horseman like Pat is measuring these elements all the time and making subtle adjustments as he goes. In the beginning they may be big issues, but as you progress they become subtle changes in your harmony with a horse. They still need to be addressed as soon as possible, though, so you can keep things moving forward and in emotional balance. Most of us, however, don’t adjust when the horse adjusts – we carry on trying to accomplish a task despite the horse getting tense (losing trust) or nervous (losing calmness) or getting lazy or unwilling, and sooner or later the problem becomes impossible to ignore!

The secret is to do less sooner rather than more later. The sooner you can detect things getting out of balance in one of those four areas, and the sooner you can do something about it, the less your horse has trouble. For example, if my horse starts to get tense, I use partial disengagement, or I stop (because Remmer’s an Introvert) and wait for him to relax before I continue with the exercise. In this way, things stay smooth and improve instead of me pushing him through it and things getting worse.

I strongly recommend going back and reading that article again either in your magazine or in the Savvy Club vault. In it I give you a list of strategies for each stage that need to be tattoo-ed on the back side of your eyelids :)

Yours Naturally,
Linda