I learn so much from teaching horsemanship to people; maybe as much as people learn from my teaching of horsemanship. Some of what I learn is a deeper understanding of how horses operate and digest information. But perhaps even more importantly, I am learning so much about how people operate and learn. Before I became a teacher of horsemanship I had no idea about the complexity and diversity of the ways people learn. I thought everybody learned the same way I did. I always knew horses had different learning paradigms, but humans were smarter and I thought they could figure it out and adapt to learning in a way that made information accessible and meaningful. It turns out I was wrong. I know, hard to believe, isn’t it?

The revelation that hit me hardest in recent weeks of clinic teaching is that people tend to think linearly. They see a problem with a horse and proceed to tackle it head-on. They keep tackling the problem until an eventual winner emerges from the dust and sweat.

During a clinic I watched a student ride her horse on a circle at a trot. At two points on the circle, the horse kept drifting off the line to the outside. I sat quietly watching to give her time to figure out how to keep her horse following the line of the circle. She tried using the outside rein to stop the shoulder from leaking. She tried using a stronger inside rein to block the outward drift. She tried disengaging the hindquarters to interrupt the horse’s thought to leave to the outside of the circle. Yet, despite all these approaches the horse kept attempting to drift to the outside each time it came to those two spots in the circle. It never gave up the idea to leak outwards on those two spots of the circle.

I was glad to see her trying different approaches that might better suit her horse. Her search for the right approach told me she was listening to her horse and not sticking rigidly to a method that had worked before or she had picked up somewhere. It was great to see her thinking and experimenting.

However, she was still stuck with the notion that she had to fix the crookedness in the circle. She could not see past the circle as the problem.

Finally, I suggested that she forget about riding the circle. I’m sure at the time she thought I had given up on her and riding a balanced circle. But she was wrong. I had her work on a series of small tasks like asking for one foot forward, one foot back; halt to trot for 4 strides and then into a rein back with no stop; a quarter turn on the hindquarters and back up three steps; leg yield one step left, then one step right followed by a quarter turn on the forehand, etc. This went on for several minutes with the requirement that she asked her horse for different things and never one thing for very long

About 10 minutes later I asked her to trot a circle. There was no drifting and the horse followed the feel on the line without fault.

When you need to empty a bucket full of water, you can scoop the water out from the top or you can put a hole in the bottom. Either way will work.

The student at the clinic kept trying to scoop water out from the top of the bucket to correct her horse’s crooked circle, but the bucket never emptied. The problem persisted.

We look at a horse doing something we want to change and we instantly see the thing they are doing as the problem we need to attack. It’s linear thinking and it’s narrow thinking. The world runs on this type of thinking, so it should not be such a surprise to me that we do it when it comes to our horses. 

But it has become a recent awakening to me that many students of horsemanship are trapped in a vortex of linear thinking, unable to think laterally because they don’t see the whole picture no matter how much I sermonize about everything is about a horse’s thoughts underpinning and connecting every issue to every other issue.

When the horse’s thoughts are right, everything else tends to fall into place. It doesn’t matter how you get the thoughts right. If you want a horse to follow the feel of the rein with its thought, it doesn’t matter if you do it by asking for a hindquarter disengagement or by backing over a pole or scratching its tail. The process doesn’t matter. Only impregnating the horse’s mind with the idea to follow the feel of the rein matters. How you get it done doesn’t matter. This is why a little bit of lateral thinking from time to time can go a long way to improving the relationship with a horse.

I feel stupid for coming to this revelation so late, but I am thankful to my students for their patience and perseverance in opening my eyes. I hope it will make me a better teacher. 

I wonder what new things they have to teach me in the coming year?