The Sensitive, Spooky, Nervous Horse

There are many other labels I could use—reactive, worried, distracted, scared of the world... and some less kind, like idiot, stupid, drama queen, chicken... and worse. But you get the idea.

They say the greatest pain we can suffer as humans is “uncertainty”… and the horses described above are all the pain of uncertainty in horse form!

They are not fun to ride or handle.

Some are predictable in what they tend to shy or spook at. Some go along fine until they don’t, and then they do that horrible spin-and-spook move at some "evil-looking" leaf or random thing. Some appear to have phobias about certain places (scary corners) or things that can be frustrating and shrink your riding area. In fact, I know someone who removed every bush, tree, and fence post from around their arena just to be able to practise riding dressage tests in a full-sized arena because her horse had so many phobic spots!

Anyway, it was one of these horses that shaped who I am today. His name was Skuda, and I often tell his story. He taught me my first lesson about horses labelled as “sensitive.”

Although he frustrated and depressed me, and his incredible athleticism in spinning unseated me countless times (I never got hurt, as he spun so low to the ground I wasn’t far from it! LOL)… he humbled my ego and showed me that all I had to do was change, instead of hoping and praying he would!

He set me on a path that has led to what I do today, and I’m proud of how I now help people with my understanding and approach to forming partnerships with horses.

Skuda was also the inspiration behind my deep dive into the root causes of why some horses turn out like him. Even though his problems stemmed from my well-meaning but innocent mistakes, I had ridden other horses who didn’t react as he did. What made him—and these other horses—different?

What I found is that there are a few key reasons. But they can be understood, and with awareness, you can navigate them and prevent a horse from becoming a Skuda, as well as transform those that are already this way.

I have written about aspects of my understanding in many blogs and articles. If you’ve attended my clinics, presentations, or my weekly Zoom Q&A sessions in the CWCH Society group, you’ll know I talk in depth about why horses can become like this and what you can do about it. But I’ve never put it all in one place.

Until now.

So this is my gift to everyone who has been frustrated, disheartened, or had their confidence eroded by a sensitive, spooky, nervous, reactive, distracted, worried, or phobic horse!

It’s a manifesto that will help you see horses differently and replace frustration with understanding, and hopelessness with a clear, pragmatic, and logical path forward.

Horses are far more complex than they appear. In this post, we explore how horses embody 'wicked problems'—complex, interconnected issues that have no perfect solutions. From their health and welfare to management and training, horse care often requires ongoing adjustments, trade-offs, and a deep understanding of each unique situation. Discover why there are no clear answers in equine care—just better or worse options

"New HORSE Syndrome”🆕🐴

Yesterday, I wrote about a new term I have coined called “New Home Syndrome.” The post has gone viral, and I am really glad about that because what horses experience when they move homes is incredibly significant and poorly understood. It sets off a pattern of behaviour due to the psychological and physiological impact of completely changing their environment and routines.

I wish to introduce you to my next term, which I hope is also accepted as widely because it is just as significant and goes hand in hand with “New Home Syndrome.” The term is “New HORSE Syndrome,” and it is to bring recognition, respect, and appreciation to what can happen to many PEOPLE when they get a new horse. I personally got stuck in the vortex of “New HORSE Syndrome” for nearly eight years after I bought a flashy young warmblood. I believe if I had known about “New HORSE Syndrome,” things could have been very different and I would have been better at identify better help and solutions.

I am calling it a syndrome because the psychological turmoil, loss of confidence, and sense of hopelessness that can manifest in an individual connected to the event of getting a new horse are common and predictable. The things that resolve “New HORSE Syndrome” are also predictable.

Let me explain.

When you get familiar with something, you perceive it as predictable and reliable. Your nervous system down-regulates, and you can relax. Familiar things are all part of our comfort zones. Familiar places, people, activities, and tasks are easy to be around, engage with, and navigate. The familiarity of these things makes you feel a sense of certainty and hence security.

Think about a horse you got on with really well. It might not have been perfectly behaved, but you were familiar with them, so you found them predictable.

If you are like me, before I got my warmblood, I was the typical amateur rider. Horses were my hobby, and although I had ridden for most of my life, it was only on a very small number of horses. I was always surrounded by people that helped me out, and the small number of horses I experienced were kind and, as I discovered, forgiving of me.

When my flashy young warmblood was delivered by the trucking company after a four-day trip across Australia, I had no concept of what he was being confronted with. I gave him a single day off before I eagerly jumped on board.

As soon as I got on him, I felt weird. He was taller than the other horse I had been riding and moved differently. His movement was so big and ground-covering. This is significant for our nervous system and proprioception, as the movement of horses we ride regularly gets locked into our proprioceptive circuits. If we don’t ride many horses, as I didn’t back then, feeling a new horse is confronting to our sense of balance in the saddle. Not only this, but I vividly remember him abruptly stopping and turning his head right around as if to eyeball me. It was most likely because I was hanging onto his mouth and giving him go-stop aids at the same time. He would have been completely confused and confronted by how I was communicating with him and how unbalanced I was on his back. It felt like he growled at me; what I probably felt was his tension lift. He then proceeded to spook and shy around the arena because I had just added an alarming and uncomfortable experience to what he was already dealing with. I had never had a horse spook so many times over nothing. It was not fun. After a week of this spooking and shying, my nerves were shot, and I started dreading getting on him. And so began my seven-year battle with “New HORSE Syndrome” as I became obsessed with trying to fix my “sensitive,” unpredictable, and unreliable horse. It took me that long to identify that I was causing him trouble. But when you are stuck in “New HORSE Syndrome” you cannot see this.

What is “New HORSE Syndrome”?

I define “New HORSE Syndrome” as what happens to a person when the way a new horse behaves, responds, and feels is different from what is known or expected. This difference and shattering of expectations creates a sense of distrust and lack of reliability and safety. The rider then becomes overly preoccupied with risk management, emotionally monitoring the horse, and finding solutions to fix them. When efforts to resolve the behaviour or gain a sense of harmony in encounters continue to fail, feelings of guilt, shame, and a sense of hopelessness can be overwhelming.

This can lead to the person experiencing anxiety and a destruction of confidence as a rider; prone to lashing out aggressively towards the horse; riding recklessly in an effort to push through fear; or creating excuses or distractions to avoid riding altogether.

Sometimes the horse might be sold and another new horse acquired, where the same issues will surface. However, other times to resolve the discomfort caused by the conflict between their desire to ride and their fear, they might change their expectations and activities with the horse, opting not to ride it for various reasons. This reframing is a coping mechanism that helps them deal with the perceived failure and alleviates the psychological discomfort of not feeling safe riding their horse.

“New HORSE Syndrome” can be overcome.

It can be solved by helping people understand how to help a horse adjust to a new environment, routines, and rider. By showing people how to introduce themselves to the horse's mind and body through imprinting what I call their signature. Everyone is a different height, weight, and will do things slightly differently. Therefore, the horse has to learn about you and be given time to develop and practice responding to how you handle them and ride. This includes how you sit, hold the reins, use your leg, and communicate direction and transitions. You need to allow your and the horse’s mind and body to adapt and grow proprioceptive circuits to allow the physical connection between horse and rider to feel familiar, for the communication to be familiar, and for the routines to become familiar. All so everyone feels a sense of security and healthy stress regulation can occur. It is important to respect that a sense of trust is built by time and experience, and it needs to be strategically approached.

“New HORSE Syndrome” may be a transient hiccup when the horse and rider can adjust to each other and trust is built. But for others, it can be a long suffering that is mentally, emotionally, and financially devastating. Not to mention all the horse accidents that happen when non-trusting riders make bad choices with non-trusting horses.

If this has struck a cord with you, please ask for some guidance, there are those of us out there that understand this very common yet poorly understood experience of what is really going on❤

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Please hit the SHARE to spread the idea if it resonates with you. ❤

‼However, please do not copy and paste and plagiarise my work as it happens all the time and it is really not cool. ‼

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"New Home Syndrome"🤓

I am coining this term to bring recognition, respect, and understanding to what happens to horses when they move homes. This situation involves removing them from an environment and set of routines they have become familiar with, and placing them somewhere completely different with new people and different ways of doing things.

Why call it a syndrome?

Well, really it is! A syndrome is a term used to describe a set of symptoms that consistently occur together and can be tied to certain factors such as infections, genetic predispositions, conditions, or environmental influences. It is also used when the exact cause of the symptoms is not fully understood or when it is not connected with a well-defined disease. In this case, "New Home Syndrome" is connected to a horse being placed in a new home where its entire world changes, leading to psychological and physiological impacts. While it might be transient, the ramifications can be significant for both the horse and anyone handling or riding it.

Let me explain...

Think about how good it feels to get home after a busy day. How comfortable your favourite clothes are, how well you sleep in your own bed compared to a strange bed, and how you can really relax at home. This is because home is safe and familiar. At home, the part of you that keeps an eye out for potential danger turns down to a low setting. It does this because home is your safe place (and if it is not, this blog will also explain why a lack of a safe place is detrimental).

Therefore, the first symptom of horses experiencing "New Home Syndrome" is being unsettled, prone to anxiety, or difficult behaviour. If you have owned them before you moved them, you struggle to recognise your horse, feeling as if your horse has been replaced by a frustrating version. If the horse is new to you, you might wonder if you were conned, if the horse was drugged when you rode it, or if you were lied to about the horse's true nature.

A horse with "New Home Syndrome" will be a stressed version of itself, on high alert, with a drastically reduced ability to cope. Horses don't handle change like humans do. If you appreciate the comfort of your own home and how you can relax there, you should be able to understand what the horse is experiencing.

Respecting that horses interpret and process their environments differently from us helps in understanding why your horse is being frustrating and recognising that there is a good chance you were not lied to or that the horse was not drugged.

Horses have survived through evolution by being highly aware of their environments. Change is a significant challenge for them because they notice the slightest differences, not just visually but also through sound, smell, feel, and other senses. Humans generalise and categorise, making it easy for us to navigate familiar environments like shopping centres. Horses do not generalise in the same way; everything new is different to them, and they need proof of safety before they can habituate and feel secure. When their entire world changes, it is deeply stressful.

They struggle to sleep until they feel safe, leading to sleep deprivation and increased difficulty.

But there is more...

Not only do you find comfort in your home environment and your nervous system downregulates, but you also find comfort in routines. Routines are habits, and habits are easy. When a routine changes or something has to be navigated differently, things get difficult. For example, my local supermarket is undergoing renovations. After four years of shopping there, it is extremely frustrating to have to work out where everything is now. Every day it gets moved due to the store being refitted section by section. This annoyance is shared by other shoppers and even the staff.

So, consider the horse. Not only are they confronted with the challenge of figuring out whether they are safe in all aspects of their new home while being sleep deprived, but every single routine and encounter is different. Then, their owner or new owner starts getting critical and concerned because the horse suddenly seems untrained or difficult. The horse they thought they owned or bought is not meeting their expectations, leading to conflict, resistance, explosiveness, hypersensitivity, and frustration.

The horse acts as if it knows little because it is stressed and because the routines and habits it has learned have disappeared. If you are a new human for the horse, you feel, move, and communicate differently from what it is used to. The way you hold the reins, your body movements in the saddle, the position of your leg – every single routine of communication between horse and person is now different. I explain to people that when you get a new horse, you have to imprint yourself and your way of communicating onto the horse. You have to introduce yourself and take the time to spell out your cues so that they get to know you.

Therefore, when you move a horse to a new home or get a new horse, your horse will go through a phase called "New Home Syndrome," and it will be significant for them. Appreciating this helps them get through it because they are incredible and can succeed. The more you understand and help the horse learn it is safe in its new environment and navigate the new routines and habits you introduce, the faster "New Home Syndrome" will pass.

"New Home Syndrome" will be prevalent in a horse’s life until they have learned to trust the safety of the environment (and all that entails) and the humans they meet and interact with. With strategic and understanding approaches, this may take weeks, and their nervous systems will start downgrading their high alert status. However, for some horses, it can take a couple of years to fully feel at ease in their new home.

So, next time you move your horse or acquire a new horse and it starts behaving erratically or being difficult, it is not being "stupid", you might not have been lied to or the horse "drugged" - your horse is just experiencing an episode of understandable "New Home Syndrome." And you can help this.❤

I would be grateful if you could please share, this reality for horses needs to be better appreciated ❤

‼️When I say SHARE that does not mean plagiarise my work…it is seriously not cool to copy and paste these words and make out you have written it yourself

Every now and then one of my posts manages to go viral and I get a lot of information about who I am. I have an interesting story of how I transitioned from a quintessential amateur rider and university academic in pharmacy to a full-time horse trainer, coach, clinician, author, and podcast presenter of a popular equestrian podcast.

I had no desire to do what I do today; it just happened by accident. I was a dedicated amateur dressage rider, but in my university role, my research area of interest was in medical education and human learning. I was fascinated by how health professionals learned and developed their expertise, particularly how they learned to develop their critical thinking skills. How they combined their knowledge and skills to make decisions crucial to patients' lives. The two worlds of my life - my expertise in learning and my equestrian life - lived in two separate silos, most likely because my equestrian world had been there since I was a child. So, I had a lot of knowledge about all things learning, yet never transferred it into my equestrian life. It is weird when I look back at how it remained so separate. That was until I made my horse's mouth bleed, and it upset my equestrian beliefs so much that I listened to a voice I had never thought of listening to before - a guy in a cowboy hat.

I thought I had a “hard-mouthed” horse and just shopped for different bits. That was the advice I got from my equestrian world at the time. Then when I made his mouth bleed and my world was rocked, I heard the phrase “horses learn from the release of pressure” and saw a demonstration of lateral flexion by a horsemanship clinician. I went and saddled up my horse, flexed him to the right, he turned LEFT, and for the first time in my life, I saw my hard-mouthed horse just didn’t understand the bit. In 45 minutes, with just this one idea, I transformed my “hard-mouthed horse” to a “soft-mouthed horse” by TEACHING him because he just didn’t know how to respond to the bit. I was blown away by how, in my almost 30 years of riding horses and regularly coaching, no one had ever told me that.

That moment caused the floodgates to open between my worlds. This, along with an exceptional horseman as a mentor, exposure to many horses, and many hours practising my skills, experimenting, and studying everything I could lay my hands on. Even at this stage, I had no intention of helping anyone. While some people tinker with cars, I went around finding horses with different behaviour issues and stretched my skills by learning how to unpick the behaviour and transform them. It is purely what I did for my own enjoyment.

Then one day, I helped a friend - then another and another - then their friend…and within a short space of time, every evening and weekend, I was training horses and coaching people. While I was doing this, I was blogging and posting about what I had learnt and was working out. I was both intrigued and frustrated by what I had worked out and why I had never been told or shown it. It was what made me so effective at helping people because I had worked out what I had been ignorant about and was just showing them what I had discovered.

I have been coaching, delivering clinics, and training professionally for nearly 10 years. Five years ago, I left my 25-year academic career and started Calm Willing Confident Horses. I have never stopped learning, experimenting, and working things out. I discovered that my edge in the equestrian world is that the horse is actually not that difficult to train and influence. The only thing that can complicate a horse is its soundness, and experience has made me very good at identifying quickly when I need to refer a horse to an equine health professional. The tricky part of training horses and influencing them is the human hanging onto their lead rope or sitting on their back. What gives me an edge in the industry is that my research interest and PhD is centred around how humans learn and develop expertise, and I apply my deep knowledge of this to how people learn to work with horses.

Therefore, I am a very effective horse trainer, but I am also an expert in how people master their equestrian knowledge and skills.

If you are reading this blog, you may be interested in how I might be able to help you. While I do give clinics and workshops, I am restricted to the places I can get to, and my clinics tend to be pre-filled with long-term clients. The reality is my face-to-face coaching is limited. Therefore, to support both riders and professionals worldwide, I have created various resources and a community. For owners and riders, I have educational resources such as books and online courses where I share my insights and ways of understanding and working with horses while being aware of what we bring to the partnership with a horse. I identify three realms of horsemanship - we need a knowledge base, skill set, and self-awareness of our inherent humanness that is key for success.

For professionals, I share my insights into the human education side of equestrian pursuits to lift their teaching skills and ability to build resources to be more effective teachers to their clients. I also have a membership society where I unite owners, riders, and professionals. I am proud of this community; it is a special online space. It is backed up with resources and a positive, supportive, and interesting place where people share their knowledge and stories.

Membership Society and Community

If you want to engage with me and get my help, I am very active in my membership community. It is called the Calm Willing Confident Horse Society (CWCH Society Members group on Facebook). We have regular challenge weeks where we focus on learning about an interesting topic or skill, a suite of resources, weekly group Zoom chats which are really fun, plus I am always there to answer questions and give feedback and advice.

Here is the link to find out more and how to sign up and become part of our community. It is only $19.95 AUD per month:

https://www.calmwillingconfidenthorses.com.au/members

Online Courses

If you want to work with me privately one-on-one, then you can enrol in my online courses. These can be purchased as a bundle called my Complete Reboot program, or you can buy the courses one by one. All allow you to make a one-off payment for a discount or pay by instalment. Below is the roadmap and the way they have been designed to be worked through.

This is the title of an interesting book that points out something that may not be obvious, especially if you consider yourself "intelligent"; being intelligent comes with the downside that it does not necessarily mean you make good decisions😬

This is incredibly true, and I have lots of stories about how horses can really turn intelligent people upside down.

Before I go any further, I want to point out that everyone has the capacity to learn. The major difference between those that are labelled by society as "intelligent" have typically had some moons align that supported them thinking this.

I am one of those people and have been validated my whole life for being intelligent, with all the certificates on my wall to prove it.

........And then horses did a brilliant job at proving how dumb that made me!

There is something that changes you in profound ways.And if you are a woman, we don't talk about it...It is the thing that fogs your mind, makes you burn, makes your heart race, steals your shape and takes you on a roller coaster ride of change.It happens between the ages of 40-55 years old and you know what I am talking about. The thing that changes us so much yet we never join the dots of its impact on our horse riding.