The Many Advantages of Assessing Your Horse During Training
I have produced thousands of happy, well-adjusted, and confident horses over the years, and here's my secret.
I assess every horse I work with and throughout every interaction.
Assessing means to evaluate or estimate the nature, quality, or ability of someone or something. This is how you learn how to read and understand your horse.
It teaches us to slow down, attune, connect, communicate, and figure out how to work harmoniously with horses.
Assessing helps horses feel safe enough to connect, trust me and most of all feel good about what I’m doing and asking them to do.
Whether I am meeting a horse for the first time, or coming into the presence of a horse I am interacting with, I am always assessing how they feel, and how they show up.
If you want your horse to trust you and become your best friend, you must show them how much you care. When you take the time to feel of and for your horse, you show them you care. Assessing helps us do just that.
Assessing helps me get to know the horse, what they know, and how they feel about what I'm doing or asking them to do.
This is how I avoid creating stressful interactions, by slowing down enough to pay attention to how they show up.
Learning how to assess your horse teaches you so many things, most importantly, what the best approach is for your horse when beginning their education, training, re-training, or rehabilitation.
Horses only revere leaders who know how to partner
and partners who know how to lead.
While most professional trainers focus on the behavior, behavior can be misleading, especially if you don't know how to read your horse.
Assessments teach you how to read your horse so you can understand the behavior.
An example is your horse bites you. Most professionals would tell you to hit, or punish, the horse. Hitting or punishing a horse for biting will only teach it to fear you.
This is the wrong approach. For one, you will break the trust, connection, and two-way communication. Not to mention this doesn't always make the horse stop biting.
Horses bite for various reasons.
They are expressing how they feel about you, your energy, how you show up.
They are expressing how they feel about how you are treating them.
They want to get your attention.
They are teething or exploring.
If you revere horses as sentient beings, you know they have feelings, opinions, judgments, memories, and unique personalities. This means they will not want to be with you, or work with you, if you are mean to them.
This also means they will not connect with you or want to connect, if they don't feel a connection with you.
Assessing teaches you how to be in the now, the moment with your horse by asking you to be present, attuned, and aware.
It also teaches you how to be flexible and not fixed on a set outcome or goal.
Like humans, horses need to feel emotionally safe and comfortable enough to open themselves (trust) so they can connect, ask questions, and learn.
This is what I refer to as feedback. We need feedback from our horses. They need to feel safe enough to give it to us too.
In the end, if we don’t get feedback, how do we know what to do?
One of the biggest mistakes I see people make with their horse is not paying attention to how their horse shows up - how their horse feels about what we are doing to them or asking them to do with us, for us.
This is how we lose our horses, and our kids for that matter. We don't know how to observe, listen, or have a back-and-forth, two-way conversation.
We also ruin our horse's confidence by asking them to do something they are not properly prepared to do.
I see it all the time in clinics, online training, and lessons. Students are being taught to force their horses versus teach them. This is not how horses (or humans) learn.
Learning is a process that involves understanding theoretical concepts, acquiring relevant knowledge, and developing the necessary skills to apply that knowledge effectively.
This means taking the time to learn the pieces, the building blocks, the why and the how of the lesson, not just the mechanics.
Learning something new is where confidence begins and gets destroyed.
An example would be your instructor telling you to do x, y, and z with your horse without proper preparation.
This usually results in you and your horse floundering, becoming confused, and escalating.
You feel helpless and stressed and your horse feels your stress, which puts you both on overdrive and in your sympathetic nervous system.
We can't function like this, and neither can our horse. This is not the right (or beste) way to begin learning something new.
In addition, we are being taught to push hard, ask too much, and judge ourselves and our horses. Again, this is not the right way to learn or set us and our horses up as confident learners.
We can put an end to this madness by assessing how we and our horses feel about what we are learning and experiencing together.
Assessments are the pillar of compassionate horsemanship and are the only way to create positive learning experiences for us and our horses.
My assessment process works for every horse and every situation. It accomplishes this because it teaches you how to listen. Listen with your eyes, your heart, and your hands.
When a horse knows you’re listening, they know you care. This creates trust and through connection and two-way conversation, you and your horse will learn to work together, in true harmony.
If you're not sure or don't know how to read and understand your horse, my assessments will teach you.
Most importantly, you will learn how to meet your horse where they need to be met and not make them do something they are not ready to do.
Meeting our horses where they need to be met is how we make training easy.
The Tao of Horsemanship’s holistic method teaches you how to assess and is designed to help you and your horse in the following ways:
Shows you who your horse really is, their nature, and their learned behaviors.
Helps you understand your horse and shows you how to evaluate them holistically - from the inside out.
Teaches you how to evaluate them honestly, without bias, judgment, or preconceived ideas.
Gives you a baseline of information, a barometer, to gauge where you are and your progress.
If you would like to learn more about training your horse holistically, please click here for my Holistic Horsemanship Mastery Miniseries. If you would like to learn it all, click here for my Dream Riding Partnership Program.
May you always be one with horses,
Caroline
Ps...I offer virtual coaching and can help you as a learner, with or without your horse. Please click here for details: https://www.taoofhorsemanship.com/natural-horsemanship-coaching. You can also email me directly to schedule a Zoom meeting where we can meet and discuss what path to take: Caroline@taoofhorsemanship.com.
Want to try the Holistic Horsemanship Mini-Series? Regularly $179.99, you can try this series for just $29.99 for a limited time! It's a great way to get an introduction to holistic horsemanship and how my programs work! Please click here for details:
Are you ready to start your beautiful journey NOW?
If you are ready to dive in and follow my holistic horsemanship roadmap (complete step-by-step curriculum), where you learn how to develop you and your horse holistically, from the inside out, ground to riding, rehab to recovery, beginner to pro, please click here: https://www.taoofhorsemanship.com/horse-riding-holistic-program.
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