Friday, 10 September 2010
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• VOLUME 44 • © HORSES For LIFE™ Magazine
A leading question…
What does your horse think of you?
By Carlos Tabernaberri "A good leader inspires others with confidence; a great leader inspires others with confidence in themselves." Anonymous I asked a woman at one of my clinics to lead her horse for me – she wondered why, when she had been riding since before I was born. I told her I just wanted to see what her horse thought of her and her experience. When this woman stopped leading her horse, he not only kept going, but stepped behind her, dropped his nose and head-butted her so hard she ended up with a bruised ego and a mouthful of sand. So why this story? It’s just a way of illustrating how irrelevant are the years of experience a person may have with horses. Horses don’t read résumés. They’re on what I call ‘horse time’ – in the present, the now. What matters is what you achieve each and every time you work with your horse. How your horse sees you on the ground shows you exactly how he will behave under saddle. If he lacks respect for you on the ground, he will not hesitate to be the same when you’re on his back. Many people I work with believe this is due to how much the horse respects them, but respect is just one element and leading is a very simple way to see what your horse thinks of you. Respect comes after you have established trust with your horse and shown yourself to be a worthy leader – a leader your horse wants to follow. Using Confidence, Consistency, Kindness and Leadership with your horse will help you gain his Trust, Obedience and Respect. It’s a simple concept that is the foundation for absolutely everything I do with horses. I explain it to people as an equation: CCKL = TOR Because unless you demonstrate all the behaviours on the left of the equation (CCKL), your horse will not demonstrate the behaviours on the right (TOR). While I could talk at length about the important concepts of confidence, consistency and kindness and how they’re critical to leadership (there’s another three articles!), let’s focus on leadership and the impact that can have on your relationship. But know this – the concepts are interdependent. If you are consistent and kind, but not confident, your horse may trust you but he will not respect you or see you as a worthy leader. If you’re not confident in your own abilities, why should he be confident in your ability to help him? On the other hand, if you’re confident and consistent, but not kind, your horse may obey you and follow you because he must, but he won’t trust you because your leadership would be based on fear and intimidation. That’s why the concept of leading your horse goes way beyond a halter and a leadrope. I am open to the guidance of synchronicity, and do not let expectations hinder my path. Dalai Lama Over the years, many people I work with have observed something of which I was not consciously aware, because I don’t watch myself work! It’s been called ‘mirroring’, ‘resonance’ or ‘synchronicity’, or even ‘entrainment’, which I’m told is the tendency of objects or beings, moving in a similar pattern and tempo, with similar energy, to align with each other. This ‘law of entrainment’ was first recognised by Dutch scientist Christian Huygens more than 350 years ago when he set up some pendulum clocks of different sizes, started one at a time, only to come back a day later and find the pendulums had synchronised their swinging to that of the largest clock. In daily life, it is thought this concept can be explained in terms of our human circadian rhythms being ‘entrained’ to the earth relative to the sun (why we experience jet lag) and appears to be part of the animal world’s highly attuned biofeedback mechanism. In short, we all have an energy field that affects everything with which we come into contact. In the case of animals, this mechanism remains unclouded by negative perceptions or expectations and is clearly highly attuned to the environment and those around them. We humans are susceptible to the clouding of this sense by the distractions of the focus and beliefs that we hold. We become what we choose to focus on. When our focus and beliefs are negative – like a focus on our horse’s previous problems, our own fears, uncertainties, anger or frustration – we send the wrong energy or signals to our horse. Sadly, my experience has been that most of the time the cause of the problems in a horse-human relationship is the human.
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An Equestrian Legacy