Every single person that I consider to have a talent with horses has learned it by doing it. Not just doing it, but doing it thousands of times with a thousand different horses. It’s called experience.

Once one has the experience to repeatedly help and train horse after horse after horse, no matter what the problem, breed, or discipline, they are then in a position to begin to figure out what it is they do that is effective in helping horses. They have the grounding to work out why the things they do work for them. Nobody, I know established theories and principles for working with horses and then went to the arena to figure out a way they could use those theories and principles effectively. Experience came before understanding.

I have met a handful of people who have read everything there is to read about horsemanship. They can quote entire passages from books of learned scholars on the subject. They have attended many clinics and had lessons from the most esteemed teachers. And when working with their horses, they try to practice what they think they learned from their teachers and their books. But it seems to me that they are trying to make the horse fit the principles they have learned, instead of establishing principles that fit the horse they are riding.

At a clinic, as a woman rode her horse she was focused on getting a grasp on the concepts of a horse’s primary and secondary thoughts and keeping them between her reins in order to assist her horse to be straight. With every step, she was telling me where her horse’s primary thought was drifting and where the secondary thought was in relation to the primary thought. She was desperate to conquer this concept. The horse was walking a line like it was its first day as a tightrope walker – wobbling left and right, too worried to put a foot wrong.

I suggested that instead of worrying about each footfall the horse made and correcting every fault, she should just point the horse and ride somewhere. She did a great job of doing this and the difference was obvious. The horse became straighter and more relaxed because instead of worrying about the horse’s thoughts deviating from the straight line, the rider just sent the thoughts somewhere and allowed the feet to catch up.

I know I write a lot and often times I write a lot of detail. My book, The Essence Of Good Horsemanship, is almost two hundred pages of detail. But a person can’t read my book and then know how to train a horse. They need to spend time working with horses and then read my book to find out why some things work and other things don’t. The book will explain what elements of training need to be considered for success to ensue. But it won’t replace spending thousands of hours with a horse. This is just as true for any information that comes from other people. Nothing can replace our own experience.

It is important that we take advantage of the experience and mistakes that others have made in learning to be good horse people. They can save us from repeating the terrible mistakes of past generations. I don’t know anybody whose talent with a horse does not stand on a bedrock of knowledge and experience that others have shared. But we can’t accumulate that intellectual knowledge and expect to compare ourselves with those giants that came before us without living the experience.

My message to folks is to use the information in books and videos in conjunction with your experience and not use it in place of experience. Learn what feel is, a try is or a thought is, by doing it. Make the mistake of ignoring a horse’s mental state and noticing the effect on the outcome. Learn the difference that directing and driving pressure makes to a horse by trying both. Learn what focus, clarity, and softness can do for your horses by playing with your horses by the trial and error of both disregarding them and using them, and compare the results. Let the horse be your teacher.

Some people study horsemanship like they study a technical manual. They read books and go to clinics to learn complex ideas and concepts and then try to make those ideas and concepts work for them when they are riding their horse. But all the good horse people who wrote the books and are teaching the complex ideas have learned what works by working horses. Then they wrote books and taught lessons to explain why they work. You can’t learn to be a good horse person by reading or listening or watching.

When you get bogged down in the small technical details you can lose sight of the bigger picture and fall into the trap of nit-picking on every small incorrectness too early and fail at achieving the bigger picture. First give your horse the big picture then worry about the details.