Anytime we feel a brace or resistance in our horse we are learning the limit of our relationship. A big part of training is to eliminate any and all ‘no-go’ areas of working together. A lack of softness to an idea is a horse telling you the limits of your relationship have been reached. It doesn’t matter if it is when you try to catch your horse in a stall or to take your horse snorkeling on the Great Barrier Reef. All resistances and all responses that begin with ‘no’ define the nature and limits of your relationship with your horse.

So when a world champion wins every event it enters because of a horse’s performance but there are spur marks on its flank. You know something about the limits of their relationship.

The event horse in a generation wins event after event, but it struggles to stand quietly when its rider tries to mount. You know something about the limits of the relationship between rider and horse.

When you own the safest and quietest kids pony that everyone wishes they had for their kids, but it has to be sedated when the farrier visits. You know something about the limits of the relationship with the pony.

All relationships have limits. All relationships are contractual and are defined by the terms of what is okay and what is not okay. It’s true of our relationship with our horses, other people, dogs, cats, the mice in our barn, and bunnies in our paddocks. The better the relationship the fewer limitations there are between us and our horse. That means as our relationship grows we can ask more and expect not only compliance but softness and okay-ness. Their idea and our idea are in sync. 

The problem is not that there are limitations to our relationship. There will always be limitations. The problem is that either we don’t recognize those limitations or we don’t do something to eliminate them.

In many cases, the lack of awareness and/or the lack of action to do something about those limitations have the same root cause. It stems from our focus on what a horse is doing instead of how it feels about what it is doing.

An overly simple example is when we put a feel in the reins and our horse stops. Great! But because we focus on the stop, we either don’t think about how much rein pressure was required or we dismiss how hard we had to pull on the reins as being less important. After all, we wanted a stop and we got a stop (time to celebrate with champagne). We either don’t recognize the resistance to the reins or we put it down the list of priorities to work on because our primary focus was on stopping the feet. 

You can equally extrapolate this example to the dressage rider who wins a medal but leaves spur marks on their horse or the pony that needs to be sedated for the farrier to trim.

Nothing means nothing when it comes to how a horse responds. Every response tells you something about a horse’s focus or the degree of clarity of understanding or both. Good horsemanship is the practice of constantly improving and expanding our horse’s focus, clarity, and softness and eliminating any ‘no-go’ areas of our relationship wherever we find them.

Now if you’ll excuse me I am taking my horse snorkeling on the Great Barrier Reef.