A fellow trainer and I were recently discussing one of the biggest dilemmas that face trainers. Every trainer at some stage has to come to terms with the success or otherwise of the work they do. By that, I mean how good a job they do with each horse and how much of the training sticks.
The effectiveness of a trainer in helping a horse comes down to two factors, (i) their skill as a horse person and (ii) how conscientiously they approach their job. But how well their training sticks after the horse goes home is largely out of the trainer’s hands. It depends on the competence of the owner to follow up the work and the amount of time they can commit to their horse.
My friend and I were bemoaning the fact that when it came to training horses for people we both had, in our view, really poor long-term success with our clients. I estimated that when I saw the horses months later, perhaps only 10-15 percent of them displayed significant improvement, irrespective of how well they were going at the end of my working with them. That means 85-90 percent of horses were worse! They may not have fallen back entirely to the “bad old habits”, but they had gone backwards to some extent since leaving my place. I use to often say that the best some of the horses would ever be is how they were the day they left my place.
This may be disheartening, but not entirely surprising. After all, it’s ridiculous to expect a client to have the same skill level as Michèle or me. If they did, they wouldn’t have sent their horse to us in the first place. So for a client to be able to continue the improvement in their horse without faltering along the way is an unreal expectation.
To improve my rate of long-term success, I would insist that clients had to come for lessons while their horse was with me. I refused to accept horses from people who just wanted to drop them off and wait for my phone call to say they were ready to go home. Some people accepted this begrudgingly and only appeared at the mandatory once-a-week lesson, and others would grab the opportunity enthusiastically and come along every day. But still, the rate of success only marginally improved.
My next brilliant idea was to hold a lesson weekend each month. Michele and I set aside one weekend every month entirely devoted to teaching clients and past clients. It was intended that people could bring their horses for some further coaching and tuning up. We hoped that this would help avoid people falling back into old habits and we could catch problems early before they developed into serious issues. I feel it did help those people and horses that took advantage of the lessons each month. However, we found that a lot of our clients viewed going to a competition or a club rally, or a trail ride with friends as a more important use of their weekend.
Both Michele and I found the process of training horses very disheartening because of the issue of what happens when the horses go home.
Five years ago we moved to rural New South Wales. At first, I figured I would start a training business. However, I soon learned there was not a lot of opportunity in this area. So I gave up the training of horses and substituted it with teaching clinics for a living.
Four years later I have made a surprising discovery. It is a good discovery, but still a surprising one.
The horses of people who keep coming back to clinics over and over again are overwhelmingly showing fantastic progress. The thing that I was striving to achieve all those years as a trainer, and failing, is now happening as a result of the clinics.
I believe one explanation is that I am nowadays a better teacher than I was a few years ago. In those days, my focus was on being the best horseman I could be, whereas now I am working hard at being the best teacher I can be. So perhaps the answer lies at least in part that I am just being a more effective communicator than I use to be.
However, another contributing factor could be that people come to a clinic with a different mindset than those that are looking to send their horse for training. Most folks attend a clinic because they want to learn. On the other hand, most people send a horse to a trainer because they need a job done. Both have important roles in the horse industry – but they are different roles that serve different purposes.
Whatever the reasons, I am very satisfied to see the progress of students that keep coming back clinic after clinic. I feel that by helping people affect a better change in their horses through the clinics, my contribution to bettering the lives of horses is both more valuable and longer-lasting than when I was training horses for folks. People are learning the skills to solve their own training problems that will make a difference to their horses and horses in the future.
Furthermore, I believe there will be a trickle-down effect of the learning, where my students will have a positive influence on the horse people around them. I find that idea very satisfying.
It’s like the old saying goes, “Give a man a trained horse and it is trained for a day. Teach a man to train a horse and it is trained for a lifetime.”
L-R: Myself, Harry Whitney and Michèle Jedlicka during an annual pilgrimage to Arizona at a time we were still training before becoming full-time clinicians.