Many years ago a woman brought her Arab gelding for some training. It had not been broken in very long and was quite frazzled. Its explosions were only a hair trigger away at any time.

I liked the horse and didn’t have much trouble with it. It settled very quickly for me. However, I noticed that as soon as the owner started to interact with her gelding, he turned into a helium balloon caught in a windstorm.

The thing that seemed to upset him was her energy. She was one of those “can do” types of people who set her mind to a task and threw all the energy she had at the job. There was very little feel or awareness of her horse. She had lots of skills and knew how to do anything I asked her to do with her horse, but she put no thought into how to do a job – she just got it done. This lack of connection with what she was doing bothered her horse.

I tried very hard to teach her to slow down and consider her horse more. I emphasized over and over the need for her to take more care of how she approached asking something. Everything I tried failed to get her to slow down, relax, and be more aware of how she worked with her horse. Nothing was working to get her to stop working on autopilot.

Then I got an idea. Then next time she came I gave her a rope halter and lead rope and told her to go out to the paddock and catch her horse. She charged out to her horse in her usual manner, as if she was going to chase down a bad guy. To his credit, her horse stood still while she marched up to him. But you could almost see the dread on his expression and I’m sure he winced when she raised her hand to pat him.

As she rushed to get the halter on she stopped. She had a look of confusion on her face. She tried to tie the halter on her horse, but it didn’t seem to work. She slowly began to realize that the halter was not the normal type she was used to. The halter I gave her had to be tied from the right side of the horse, not the left. When she attempted to catch her horse in her usual non-thinking way on the left side, she couldn’t. It forced her to stop and re-think how to catch her horse. After a few moments, she realized she had to fit the halter from the other side. But even then she couldn’t continue to tie the knot in her normal mindless fashion because she couldn’t rely on habit and muscle memory to secure the halter correctly, The owner had to slow down and think about how to use her hands to do a proper job. It forced her to be careful and deliberate in the way she did the task.

We talked about what had happened and I felt a small triumph when the woman told me she had a light-bulb moment. That one tiny exercise did more for her understanding than all the talk and demonstrating I had been doing in our sessions together. I’d like to say that it was the end of the trouble, but that’s not true. However, it was the beginning of the solution.

When a horse or a person can work on autopilot, it is because the job is predictable. We ask them a question; they know the answer and then just do it without putting in an effort or try. This concept is relevant to both working with horses as much as it is for working with riders.

The way around that is to take the predictability out of the exercise. Don’t make the correct answer so predictable. By taking the routine and predictability out of the work, the horse and human will open their eyes and wake up. It may not be very pretty for a little while, but it’s a start.

To motivate an effort from either a horse or a rider, things can’t be easy. If it’s easy, no effort will be made.