Photo: You’ve seen Hannah & Maia featured in many beautiful photos on our website here, along with the testimonial from Hannah saying that she couldn’t catch Maia before she started Fast Track. Hannah was already a beautiful rider. What transformed their relationship was HOW she dealt with Maia when she said “No!” AND Hannah’s unwillingness to compromise her dream. This is an ENORMOUSLY important issue. Think how that might relate to you and your horse as you listen to this lesson.
The Lesson
We are defined as horse men and women by what we do and how we react when our horse says “no”. It is THE biggie of leadership, and horsemanship in general, and indeed it is THE biggie about life in general too…
Frederic Pignon (one of the greatest horsemen in the world in my opinion and one of the original co-directors and co-trainers of the beautiful horse show Cavalia, though he broke away and established a more spiritual path) talked about what to do when a horse says NO! as being fundamental to having a happy expressive horse that is in the habit of enjoying saying YES!
Pignon uses his magnificent feel to know when to back off BEFORE the horse says NO so as to encourage the habit of the horse saying YES with pleasure. And if he does by accident push through the horse’s limits, he stops and apologizes and backs off to something they CAN say YES to. (I told you that you would be learning world class feel for a horse – you too will be developing that kind of feel as you work your way through this program. :))
In Fast Track, you are learning to listen to every little nuance of of your feel good feelings AND your Not Quite Right AND ACT ON THAT, so as to eliminate as much fear as possible from your horse’s life – past traumas and present fears. So if your horse doesn’t or won’t do something because they are afraid, you should be getting a feel by now for how to handle that.
But once your horse has no fear, what do you do when your horse says “no”?
I said it before – we are defined as horse women and men by what we do when our horse says no.
This audio talks about a few different possibilities – these possibilities are by no means all of them!
Click here for the alternate recording of this lesson. (To download, right click and save.)
WRITTEN VERSION OF THE AUDIO
In your course here, you are learning to listen to every little nuance of Not Quite Right AND ACT ON THAT, so as to eliminate as much fear as possible (past traumas and present fears) from your horse’s life.
Once your horse has no fear, what do you do when your horse says “no”?
I have said it before – we are defined as horse women and men by what we do when our horse says no.
And there is a whole bunch of choices that we can make – all of them dependent on who we want to be with our horse (let’s put some bells there to draw attention to the fact that THAT is a VERY important thing that I just said there!) and each relationship is going to be different, so no two answers are going to be identical.
When my granddaughter was going through a time that can be “the terrible two’s” and she was practising her power to say no. And there was lots of No’s shouted vigorously across the room, complete with foot stamping – to anyone – over anything.
And I am so proud of the way I handled it.
I used to say in a very soft and reasonable tone of voice “no thankyou Nanna”. And she would say “no thankyou nanna” in a lovely soft and polite tone of voice too. (I wish I had been so wise with my own kids, but hey, you live and learn.)
Then I would evaluate whether she really needed to do that thing, eat that thing, whatever. And unless it was important I allowed her to say “no thankyou nanna”. And if it WAS important, I would say well sunshine, I am afraid that you still have to do that, try that, whatever, because it’s important.
This way of dealing with things created a mainly beautifully mannered two year old, who grew into a beautifully mannered three year old and so on. It also created a young woman who is allowed to express her opinion, who is empowered to say “no” but can see the wisdom in sometimes having to do things that she might otherwise prefer not to do.
Can you see the parallels in this story with our horse?
First of all I would like my horse to learn to say “no” in a reasonable tone of voice – but of course I have to be LISTENING in order to hear that reasonable tone of voice. It is not acceptable to me that my horse bites or kicks or has a hissy fit to say “no”.
It is not acceptable that they HAVE to behave like that to be heard, either.
Then if my horse is still saying “no” I have some choices to make and some processes I can go through.
The other day, I was re-training Sunny with her feet. She has got progressively worse with the last two feet trimmers, expressing her desire that they listen to what she wants done on her feet and telling them off because they weren’t listening.
We had worked through some Not Quite Right’s that had been put in by trimmers not being considerate enough and then I clearly heard her say “no” she wouldn’t pick her foot up.
I stood back and thought about it for a minute. Who did I want to be? What balance of yin and yang was there in this?
And then a very emotional insight flooded in – Sunny had never in her life ever been allowed to just say “no” – there WAS no balance of yin and yang here – up to now it had been completely one sided. I was in a situation where the decision was easy for me.
I sat on a chair and allowed her to graze around for ten minutes or so until I felt her energy change and then I went and asked again. And she was happy to pick her foot up and we went to the next stage.
This is just like how I treated Bree. Is this important enough for me to insist? Well I believe it was critical to our relationship in this case for me NOT to insist.
If we were at a different stage, what else could I have done to insist without actually forcing her do it? How could I have got her co-operation?
I could have said “sure you can say no, but you aren’t going to eat any grass while we are waiting”. And I would have used the My Grass game to enforce that.
Or I could have turned her loose at liberty and played a version of the Mirror Game.
I could have asked her to pick up her foot and when she said no, I could have said cool! Let’s go do something else then! And I would have taken the halter off, moved her off, then mirrored her, deeply connecting while I was doing that, allowing her to move me away with her energy if she wanted me to, saying “my grass” if she tried to eat (because I would maybe still want to enforce that), maybe I would play at speeding up and changing directions occasionally, allowing her to dictate speed and direction at other times.
My attitude in this would have to be very clearly NOT one of punishment for not wanting to pick her foot up – that would NOT achieve the attitude change from her that I would be looking for. I would be VERY clear in my mind that I was allowed to persuade her to change her mind.
And you can thank Bobby for this lesson – he taught me this one VERY clearly!