Things You Do Without a Clue Part 1

Things You Do Without a Clue Part 1

Technically, the world should be great for horses – especially in this day and age where expertise, information and learning materials are at our finger-tips. But horses are still out there enduring a life full of discomfort and stress caused by people that “love” them.

Why is this?

You have a tremendous ability to analyse things, evaluate situations, learn, solve problems and adjust your behaviour in very complex ways. But…you also have some other traits that make you struggle to learn how to be better at doing something for the sake of someone other than yourself.

The quickest way to not let these traits sabotage you and your relationship with your horse is to become aware of them. So, I thought I would write a series of blogs detailing the potentially shitty things you do without having a clue.

Ego….yep, you have one…we all do….so, I thought this was a good place to start.

Your ego is your sense of self-esteem and we like protecting our self-esteem. Basically, we don’t like feeling crap about ourselves, so we tend to handle positive and negative outcomes or feedback differently. When something we do is received positively or we have a good outcome we tend to perceive it over favorably and attribute that success to our own abilities and efforts. However, if we get negative feedback or we fail….well…..we go and blame someone or something else! We do this to protect our fragile egos and how we want to be perceived by others.

As a coach or trainer, you get to deal with horses that have been labelled by their owners as having various “problems”. Typically, in the owner’s description the horse IS the problem. It may be because the horse is just “difficult”, an arsehole, a bitch, an “arab”, “thoroughbred”, “chestnut” etc. Then other times it was because of someone or something else - the last trainer, owner, coach etc., that caused the problem. Hardly ever does the owner say….”I do not have the knowledge or skills to help this horse”….and it is a rare unicorn moment when you hear – “I think I have really upset this horse and caused a lot of problems”!

Don’t take offence, I have spent most of my life with horses trying to fix their “problems” by buying different bits, feeding calming herbs, blaming horse breakers and pondering what terrible thing must have happened to this horse in the past to make it like this! It took my horse’s mouth to bleed from the bit to humble my ego ☹

Coaches and trainers will all tell you that horses are easy to help, it is the people, their egos and their attitude that comes with it that are difficult. This is because before someone can learn something, they first must acknowledge that they NEED to CHANGE their ways and therefore, NEED to LEARN something.

So, if you are having trouble with a horse, be courageous and allow the prospect that there is a chance you might have caused the trouble, contributed to the trouble or at least not been able to solve the trouble. Allow yourself to feel like shit because sometimes going into that dark place is the first step in your journey out of your troubles. You must do this consciously because you are not programmed to connect your own abilities or skills to the problem. You will be driven to find blame in others or external events.

For those that are interested the self-serving bias is the technical name for this human trait.

Next blog I will delve into the shitty things that we tend to do when we are learning stuff. So, once you manage to get past your ego you have then have to navigate a whole lot of other shitty things about us that can be crappy for horses!