In my last post, I wrote about what it was like to be mentored. Today I want to turn the table and talk about what it is like to be a mentor.
Firstly, I have and have had many long-time students that I have done my best to help. But mentoring a student is a little more intensive and requires a larger commitment than liking and caring about people who are regulars at clinics. For me, mentoring a person is more than a teacher/student relationship. It involves them becoming part of my life.
I have committed to mentoring 2 people in my career.
The first was my wife, Michèle. She came to Australia from the US. We became involved and she wanted to join the horse training business. Despite her relative inexperience at the start, she was training and starting horses in less than 6 months of us working together. She remains the most talented horse person I have taught. It is a huge point of pride for me that before she ceased training full-time, many people would ask if they could work with Michèle instead of me. People who know Michèle won’t find that surprising because she is capable of being the best at anything she turns her hand to. She is an amazing person and the love of my life.
The second person I have mentored is Ellen Kealey. She doesn’t know I am writing this, so maybe I am no longer mentoring her when she finds out.
[You can find more information about Ellen by searching Ellen Kealey Horsemanship and going to her web site and Facebook page. There are also a couple of videos featuring Ellen on my YouTube channel]
I met Ellen in September 2016 when she was 21. She had a small training business in Iowa that had only been in existence for a couple of years. One day Ellen came to watch a clinic I was teaching. I saw her arrive late as I was teaching (she’s always late). She looked very young, maybe 15, and small and I wondered if her mum had dropped her off. I didn’t pay her much attention until she began asking questions - excellent, insightful questions. Later in the clinic, she rode a horse for another participant. I was struck by how hard she tried to follow my instructions. She was glued to every word and was determined to make it work.
But most of all, I was surprised by her energy and feel with the horse - what I called her “touch”. It was low energy, but full of intent and precision - not something I see a lot even in other professionals. I knew this young woman had something. She had been following the work of another better-known horseman but was looking for something she felt was missing. She was hungry for information. She wanted to pick my brains clean. I felt she knew there was more to learn, but didn’t quite know the direction to look. She was in need of guidance.
During the clinic downtime, Ellen and I talked. She was bright, funny, sassy, and irreverent. I like working with young people. I really like stirring the pot with them and making jokes at their expense and seeing how they handle it. Ellen was not shy at giving me “shit” back. I liked her immediately. She even said she was thinking about buying chaps and made me let her try mine on, in case the magic she was seeking was in the chaps.
After the clinic, we exchanged a handful of emails talking about horses she had in her training business. This slowly evolved into a mentoring relationship. Ellen sometimes hosts clinics for me and other times she participates or fence sits in clinics when I am in the US. I would take time off to work with Ellen for a week or two in between my clinic commitments. That situation continues today. When I’m in the US we take time working together and when I’m home in Australia we continue the process via the internet.
So that’s how I came to mentor Ellen and how it works today. But what is it like to be a mentor?
I love it. I have a passion for it. I had a passion for mentoring Michèle and I have a passion for mentoring Ellen. I love helping horse people be better horse people and to have a student whose talent and drive are above the average is wonderfully exciting.
Perhaps Ellen’s most important asset is her empathy and compassion for the horses. This makes it a lot easier for me as a teacher because I don’t often have to work at her doing less and waiting longer. She is already getting there. It’s what gives her the “touch” that impressed me so much in our first encounter.
Perhaps Ellen’s greatest liability is her impatience. It’s not impatience with the horse, but impatiences with herself. She wants to know all there is to know yesterday and is too restless to wait for it to evolve naturally through experience.
Ellen is smart and Ellen is determined. She wants to know “why” about everything and she has a “try” in her that makes even the impossible seem maybe possible. It’s a combination that makes teaching fun and infuriating. Whenever I try to show her something, she won’t let me take the lead rope or ride the horse without an argument because she insists she wants to do it. I want to kill her. But then she gets it done and the change in the horse is beautiful and I want to hug her. Perhaps that is more of a reflection on my impatience as a teacher than it is on her impatience as a student. God forbid we are alike!
I sometimes forget how young Ellen is because she is way ahead of others I meet of similar age. But her age and relative newness to being a professional are tough for me to negotiate as a mentor. When she makes mistakes, I sometimes have difficulty locating the line between being supportive and being critical. I don’t want to bruise her self confidence, yet I want her to know she screwed up. I feel I sometimes get it wrong and I wonder if the only reason she sticks with me as a mentor is that nobody else would put up with her. :)
The easiest part for me is when things are going well for Ellen and I hear the excitement in her voice. The hardest part is when things go wrong and she has to call me immediately to talk her off the ledge (although that is becoming less of an issue these days). That’s when Michèle and I both want to put a contract out on her. But I have no hesitation in admitting the pluses easily outweigh the minuses.
Ellen makes me a better teacher and a better horseman because she looks up to me and expects so much. What good mentor wants to disappoint their student? So I try harder for her.
I look at how Ellen is progressing as a horse trainer and see a very bright future. I note how far she has come since we have been working together. I believe she has the potential to be one of the best. I know that at age 25, I was not as far along as Ellen. It fills me with pride.
I look forward to the day when Ellen tells me something she discovered about horses that makes me stop, think and reassess an insight that I thought I already knew. It will be one of the proudest days of my life for Ellen to be the teacher and me to be the student. I believe that day is coming.
Ellen now lives in Minnesota and her training business has steadily grown and she is busy all the time. I have tried to mentor her in the business too, which is very new experience for me. It seems to be working, because she no longer appears to have slow times - even at the height of a Minnesota winter. Ellen deserves to be busy and her business secure. She rates second to nobody in the way the horses go home after their time with her.
As you would expect, Ellen and I have become good friends in the course of being her mentor. I find it similar to the way that Harry and I became good friends in the course of being his pupil. I think in order to be a good mentor you have to like the student and care sincerely about them as friends and about your role in their work. In that way, mentoring is a little different than the normal teaching responsibilities of being a clinician. The commitment is greater. The highs are higher and the lows are lower.
I’m 63 years old. I’m an old fart in this business. All my mentors are even older (even Harry Whitney, though he lies to people about that). I don’t want the knowledge to die with me and those of my generation. I want to excite the younger people, the Ellens of the world, to carry the knowledge into the future. I want people like Ellen to use what we teach them as building blocks to a better way with horses that we have not even considered.
I love mentoring Ellen. It makes me feel good about myself that in a small way I am part of the horse person she is becoming. My legacy and the legacy of people whose shoulders I stand on will continue into the next generation through students like Ellen.
I hope one day Ellen gets to enjoy the same thrill and feels this same pride when she becomes a mentor to a young, smart, cheeky and hungry horse trainer. When a young, curious horse person leans over the arena fence to watch what Ellen is doing and asks her a question I hope she will invite them into her world.
Being a good mentor is the highest of achievements any of us can hope for. It's like the Nobel Prize of Horsemanship. What is our life's work worth if we can't pass our knowledge on to successive generations? Being a good mentor is the most important thing we can ever do for making the lives of horses better.
This photo was taken on September 14, 2016, at the clinic I first met Ellen in Iowa. The intensity of that stare and her absorption in the work has never gone away and I hope it never will.