Horse people have only one job. And horses have only one job. It’s the most important job and it's the job that supersedes all other jobs. Nothing is more important when it comes to training. The job is to be focused and connected. That’s it. That’s the job. Even when doing other jobs, staying focused and connected to our horse and our horse to us overrides all other jobs in importance.
The one condition to the “one job” principle is that focus and connection are only important if you want a good relationship and a partnership. If you only care about a horse being an employee and doing a learned job, then focus and connection are less important provided the job gets done.
A question you may be asking is how can you tell if a horse is focused and connected? The answer is pretty simple. Most people believe you can tell by the way a horse is performing or moving or how light it is to respond to pressure. But that’s not always true or reliable. You can’t be sure of a horse’s connection with you by what it is doing. A more trustworthy indicator of focus and connection is how a horse feels and responds when you interrupt what they are doing. When a horse is performing one job and you ask it to think about doing a different job, how braced is the transition? How expressive is their body language? How troubled are the emotions?
When moving from one idea to another causes a horse zero trouble, it is a good sign that a horse is attentive and in a conversation with you. But when interrupting a horse in the middle of a task creates any level of ill feeling and resistance, the probability is high that the horse had either mentally left or was blocking out any conversation with you.
Perhaps the best example of this is trailer loading. Some people have horses that load into a trailer trouble-free. They just walk in when they see the back of the trailer open. However, in my experience, the majority of those horses will melt down if you asked them to walk into the trailer halfway and stop, back one step and stop, forward two steps and stop. Their minds were in the back of the trailer and if that were interrupted, many horses will re-model the inside of the trailer - for free!
Another example was my old showjumping horse. Most jumpers see a fence approaching and get more committed to jumping with each stride. But Luke did a pretty good job of staying focused and connected. I could stop him in front of a jump with minimum resistance. I could stop him two strides after a jump, walk him to turn, and jump over the fence from a walk that he just cleared. He was not very fast around the jump course and could not compete on speed with most of the TB horses. But he was so much “with me” that we could cut corners and approach fences at impossible angles that most other horses couldn’t.
In dressage, the half-halt is taught to riders as a substitute for having a constant connection with a horse. It’s because a significant proportion of dressage training is NOT about the “one job” being focus and connection, but the movement. Focus and connection are down the list of most important jobs, despite the rhetoric and good intentions. When focus and connection are strong and the conversation between horse and rider is flowing, the half-halt is redundant and perhaps even a nuisance.
I want to add that focus and connection are not just about better performance. They should be the priority in everything we do such as picking up feet and saddling, trail riding, dressing a wound, fitting a blanket, catching and leading, hosing - even brushing! Being vigilant about always asking for focus and connection is what makes the relationship work. It can't work if we only require it when we need it.
I never expect a horse to focus 100% on me at the cost of blocking out the rest of the world. That would be silly and dangerous. But with all the things I have to teach my horse, nothing is more important than focus and connection. Nothing supersedes it. When I lose it, I stop what I’m doing and do whatever it takes to get it back before going on with the task at hand. The number one job I have is to encourage my horse that in everything we do, we do together. Everything else follows.
At this clinic I was working my hardest to do my number one job of building a focus and connection between myself and this sweet horse.