I’ve had a truly significant growth experience in the past few years in relation to my understanding of horses and horsemanship. I’ll explain this a little later in the post. But first I want to describe my view of how my knowledge and skill have evolved. I wonder if it is similar for other people.
When I was a kid, I was largely taught by more experienced horse people. My mentors owned a riding school and I worked casually for them in exchange for lessons. They taught me everything from how to tie a knot to how to perform a half halt and position a horse in front of a jump. All the basic skills that a person needs to know at the beginning began by religiously following the instruction of my two mentors. I didn’t think too much about what I was told or why things were done that way. It was what it was because my mentors said so.
As I gained more confidence and more passion to be better, I began to read the classics of riding, dressage, horsemanship, and training. I was a ravenous reader. Mostly it was material that was above my head to truly understand. Nevertheless, it gave me a hunger to understand it and be better. I was still largely under the influence of the same two mentors, but there were glimmers of understanding creeping into my brain that were not exactly in line with my mentor's lessons. Questions were starting to worm their way into my mind.
I was now in my later teens and I got a working pupil position with an esteemed show jumping coach. He was Austrian and did things very differently from what I had been taught. Mmmm. New things to learn and think about. I was beginning to shift more and more away from what my mentors taught me. Yet, almost all my riding and horsemanship still came from what others told me to do and not from what I was figuring out myself.
Then I went to university. This changed my life in many ways. But most importantly, at university I learned I had a good brain and a talent for critical thinking. I begin to stop relying on other people and books to have all the answers. One of my professors told me, “Mr. Jacobs, assume everything you are told is wrong until you are satisfied it is not.” That one sentence was cathartic. My thinking was never the same again.
I began to question what I had been taught about how horses operate, riding, horsemanship, and training. I saw a video of one of the great modern masters of dressage, Nuno Oliveira. He was riding a horse through some fabulous movement. But what I noticed most is that the horse he was riding required a groom to hold the horse still so that Nuno could mount it. WTF! Even my horse could stand quietly while I mounted. A schmuck like me understood how, and the importance of, teaching a horse to feel relaxed when mounting. Yet here was one of the great masters who appeared unable to do what I and Luke could do.
I was no longer just a sponge absorbing the knowledge of other people. I was starting to think for myself. Instead of my new knowledge and understanding coming 99% of the time from others, bit by bit it was coming from my own experience and experimentation.
Then I got to travel overseas, first in my work as an academic and later as a horse trainer. I met some fabulous horse people. Without a doubt, the most influential has been Harry Whitney in the US. Harry took an interest in my work and I spent many years visiting with him for several weeks at a time. He explained the basis of influencing a horse’s thought that has become the foundation of everything I now do and teach. By the time I began working with Harry, I was reliant on other trainers and horsepeople for about 80% of my knowledge. Twenty percent of my learning came from my own experience, testing, and thinking.
But now I was on a trajectory to be less influenced by others and more by what I was learning from my growing awareness of what horses had to say. Each year I was less dependent on the books and what other trainers had to say. Even the lessons I was learning from Harry were being rethought and modified and refined in my mind and in my work. I was coming up with concepts and practices I had not seen or heard from anyone else. I was learning at an accelerated rate from each horse that I worked with. I was still learning a tremendous amount, but I guess 50% of the things I was learning came from other humans (particularly Harry) and 50% came from my work with horses.
Then I stopped training full-time and started teaching clinics for a living. Wow. Another burst of speed learning. My students were becoming my new mentors. The need to teach them at their level of understanding and experience forced me to stop and re-evaluate my approach. It forced me to slow down, re-think and look at the principles I was teaching at a much deeper level and from angles I had not considered before. So new knowledge was coming from more diverse sources. I’d say 30% from students, 50% from horses, 10% from my own experiments and thinking, 5% from other professionals, and 5% miscellaneous.
I have been teaching now for several years and the new knowledge from students has largely fallen away to maybe less than 10%. But there has been a dramatic growth in new knowledge from horses. This brings me to the promise I made in the first paragraph of this post.
I have become aware that my powers of observation have made exponential growth in recent years. By this I mean, I am seeing things happen before they happen in a way I was never aware of before. It’s not that I notice something just before it is about to happen. I am seeing something about to happen several seconds or several metres ahead of time. I had seen Harry do this several times and it left me in awe how he was able to see a horse’s thought change with no perceptible indication from the horse. I have heard people say that Tom Dorrance often knew a horse was about to do something before the horse knew it. For a long time, I have been able to see a horse’s posture or focus or tension change just before it made a decision. But there were always signs, even if they were subtle and escaped most people. It was still clear. However, more recently I get a strong sense of a change and yet can’t see any visible signs. I just know it.
As an example, yesterday I was assisting with loading a horse into a trailer. The horse was reluctant and avoided putting a foot on the ramp. The owner took the horse away about 10 metres and stopped. After a few seconds I told the owner to lead the horse to the trailer again and this time it will walk straight on. He did and the horse did. I still don’t know what I saw that told me that. That awareness and sense of judgment are becoming common. It's happening a lot. It’s not psychic. It’s not spiritual. It’s not luck. It’s something I still have to figure out. And I will.
So today 90% of my new knowledge comes from horses and thinking/experimentation. The rest is divided between other professionals, books, videos, and students. Who knows where it will come from tomorrow?
Would you want to learn from this man?