What does a horse trainer or coach need to be worthy of your admiration and money?

For me, these are my 5 ‘must have’ characteristics they have to possess (i) love and care about horses, (ii) follow the principles and philosophies I believe in, (iii) be talented with horses, (iv) be honest and have integrity, and (v) have empathy for the struggles of the horse and the human. For me, those are not negotiable. If any of those traits are missing they are not people I want to spend a lot of time and money learning from.

I doubt too many people have a problem with that list. But perhaps you would add an item or two of your own that is important to you.

There are many other features of a trainer or coach that a person might consider when shopping around for help, but they are mostly irrational and based on a personal preference that tells you very little about a person’s qualification to be the best trainer for you.

That being said, I find many people cloud the irrational with the rationale for liking or not liking a horse professional. Very many times the irrational has a stronger sway over our opinion of another horse person than the rational.

Allow me to offer an example of this. Let's say ‘Alex Wannakickahorse’ is a trainer and ticks all the boxes of empathy, talent, integrity, etc. If you know nothing else about Alex except that you watched their horse work and talked to them and discovered they were very talented, honest, and caring and held all the right principles, you might consider Alex as someone to follow and learn from.

But what if you could only afford to go to one trainer and you were told about another professional nearby? What if you were told Alex had never worked with anybody else and was totally self-taught, and the trainer down the road had been mentored by Tom Dorrance, Xenophon, and Buddha? What if Alex was a woman and the trainer down the road was a man? What if Alex was in his/her early 20s and the fellow down the road had decades of experience? What if Alex had never competed and the fellow down the road had a wall of belt buckles and ribbons in his home? What if Alex had only 2 followers on Facebook (his mum and his mum’s Chihuahua) and the fellow down the road had 100,000 followers on FB and 100 YouTube videos? What if all your friends told you that everybody goes to the fellow down the road, but nobody had heard of Alex? What if Alex had lived and worked in the same small town all his/her life, but the fellow down the road was from Europe and had taught and trained all over the world?

Now, how do Alex’s credentials stack up?

These are all reasons why you might be swayed to spend your money on help from the fellow down the road. But they are all the wrong reasons. If Alex is still the trainer whose work you most admire, if Alex is still the person who seems to care about offering the best possible help for the horses and their owners, if Alex is still the trainer whose principles you want to study and learn, why would you not choose to be mentored by Alex?

The role of gender, experience, competition success, number of followers and size of their business, past teachers, etc, may be a consideration when investigating a trainer’s credentials. But for me, those things have so little bearing on my opinion of a person’s ability as a trainer. Some of those details might give me cause to check them out to see if they were the trainer I was looking for, but they are superficial considerations that don’t even come close to influencing who I want to follow and work with.

I know of trainers who rode and studied with Tom Dorrance, who don’t meet my 5 ‘must have’ criteria. I know dozens of trainers with ribbons and belt buckles and decades of experience, who don’t meet my 5 criteria. I know lots of trainers with a huge following and who are in demand all over the world, who fall short of the 5 criteria.

I received an email from somebody who felt the need to correct something I had discussed in a post. They explained that their favourite guru had a very different view on the subject. I tried to explain my argument logically, but it was clear I was not making headway. When I asked what were they having trouble understanding, the response was that their favourite trainer had taught them something very different and the trainer had won several national competitions compared to my puny competition record and therefore I had no credentials to back up my opinion. The emailer simply chose not to consider my points because the other trainer said differently and he had more competition success.

Every trainer has a hook of some kind. They have something that draws a following to them that is other than just their talent with horses or their ability to teach. My hook seems to be that I write a lot on Facebook and when I travel to teach overseas I carry the allure of being a foreigner. Others have the gift of the gab and are excellent talkers. Some wear the right clothing or use a certain type of gear or teach a specific style of horsemanship. Some people offer a certification program and others make their teaching easily available through a massive collection of videos and promotional material. It’s what I view as the business part of being in the business of horsemanship.

None of those ‘hooks’ precludes somebody from being a brilliant horse person and having bucketloads of empathy, integrity, and teaching skill. But likewise, the ‘hooks’ have nothing to do with a person’s qualifications to be the right trainer for you or me or your friends. Those qualifications should come down to care and love for the horse, talent, the right principles and philosophy, integrity, and empathy.

So my advice is not to let the irrational unduly influence the rational reasons for choosing a mentor. The marketing of a business exists because it works and it works because we are human and susceptible to being swayed by it. For the sake of your horse and yourself, always remember to make what are the really important reasons for choosing a trainer or teacher as the primary factors, and don’t be overly swayed by the others.