Observe, remember, compare.

On Thursday of our final week, we were re-tested on several of the tasks we had been tested on during the first week of the course. We spent the morning on the ground and the afternoon in the saddle.

There was only one task that I was thoroughly unhappy with, and that was the squeeze over the barrels in the morning, during which I was pathetically ineffective.

It’s true that I actually didn’t want Lupin to jump the barrels, as the last time he did that he was lame for a couple of months. So I didn’t want to get him all riled up and send him at the barrels with a lot of energy. But I wasn’t very optimistic that he was just going to step over them. The weakness of my send probably reflected both my reluctance for him to jump the barrels and my doubt that he was going to go over them if he didn’t jump. It didn’t help that when Lupin investigated the barrels, they all started rolling down the hill, so that I had more focus on trying to keep the barrels in place than on Lupin.

But this is the point at which Alex would say, “All I hear is ‘wa wa wa I’m making excuses.’” And she’d be right. There was one moment in particular when I remember asking Lupin to back up and he all but ignored me, and I just let him. Sure, part of my brain responded that way because the task asked for us not to move our feet. But there was no way I could pretend that adhering to that requirement was more important than getting a positive response from my horse. That moment made me disgusted with myself and ate me up for the rest of the day.

By the end of the day, though, I managed to find peace with it. What had happened was that I had just allowed myself to be lulled back into my old way of operating: unclear communication, low expectation, lack of effectiveness with my horse. The degree to which that bothered me for the rest of the day was actually, I realized, the degree to which that way of interacting with Lupin had become foreign to me over the month that I had been at the ranch. I finally realized that my acute aversion to the way I handled that task was a good thing, as it indicated how far I had come.

It was also a wake-up call that I carried with me for the rest of the day. I focused after that, and made pretty good decisions for the rest of the day, I felt. I was especially pleased with our test in the precision pen. It was the last test of the day, and Lupin was feeling strongly that his day should have ended a couple of hours earlier. It was tempting to go into the ring and fake it. The test asked for several serpentines and circles to be ridden at the trot and canter on a collected rein. I thought about how, if I took up both my reins, I could probably micro-manage him through it and, by doing so, prevent him from screwing up.

But I knew that was wrong. It was what I had done during that same test at the beginning of the month, and it hadn’t worked then, and now I knew all the reasons why it hadn’t and why it wouldn’t work this time either. Yes, I wanted to control him, but I needed to do exactly the opposite and allow him the opportunity to make mistakes. Principles don’t change just because you’re taking a test.

So I walked into the ring with my reins in one hand that was firmly planted on his neck. Lisa called out to me, “Marian, you do realize you’re supposed to be trotting on a collected rein?” I said, “Yes, but I haven’t earned a collected rein yet because I still have problems with a BS rein.” I rode the whole pattern at a walk on a casual rein. It wasn’t close to what the test called for, but it was much closer to the underlying goal of the test than it would have been if I’d used two reins when neither of us was ready for it. And I was rewarded by the fact that Lupin could not have followed my focus any better: I barely used my rein, and some of the circles we did were the best we’ve ridden.

It’s possible that when I rode that test at the beginning of the course I had hoped to have gotten further in Finesse by the end of the course than Lupin and I did. But what we wound up getting was even better: firm principles that will lead, in time, not only to the physical components that make up Finesse, but to so much more than that as well.

The next morning we all met in the lodge, and John talked about the reasons behind the testing. He said that the most important thing was for us to learn how we reacted in a testing situation, and he went on to talk about personality types and how our own personality types might have come into play the day before.

We had talked about horseanality a lot, but not personality, though pretty much everyone on the ranch when describing somebody would start with, “Well, she’s a right-brain extrovert . . ." I myself am pretty bad at pegging other people’s personalities, perhaps because I was first introduced to the concept outside of Parelli where it seemed like the height of narcissism to be concerned with what your personality type was. I had a lot of friends who could rattle off their Myers-Briggs types, but I never saw the purpose of it, and so I never got into the habit of thinking that way.

On Friday morning, I began to see the purpose of it. John charted himself, his wife, and his horse and then gave anecdotes of where their personality types had come into play by way of showing how personality types impact relationships. Basically, as Carmen had mentioned during her presentation on Tony Robbins, everyone has a pattern of response. Events don’t cause us to act a certain way; they are simply the trigger for us to react in the same way we always react to certain stimuli. If you become aware of your pattern of reaction, and that of the people and animals around you, you can start to figure out ways to improve the relationship. And a lot of those reactions have to do with personality types.

It’s also helpful to be able to understand and accept where a lot of your own reactions are coming from before you deal with trying to change them. There’s a bit of a trick here, because it’s easy for me to say, “Well of course I have a slow reaction time—I’m a left brain introvert,” and use that identity as an excuse not to change. But if instead I say, “Okay, I’m a LBI, so one challenge for me is going to be improving my reaction time,” then it’s more empowering.

I don’t know why I find it useful to have that piece of information. I’ve known for a while that I need to improve my reaction time, so why does it matter what the reason is? (Well, maybe because I’m an LBI, and we like to thoroughly understand things!) Whatever the reason, though, it does make me feel more motivated. Maybe because once you understand personality, you’re seeing the whole picture—both the good and the bad (or challenging) parts of your personality. So now I can start by saying, “Okay, I’m an LBI, which means that I’m really good at knowing all the reasons behind what I’m doing; now I just need to do it a little faster,” instead of just saying, “Good god, why in the heck am I so dang slow?”

All in all, it seems to me like examining your personality type lets you see more of the potential in yourself than the problems, but it also gives you a way to focus on those problems that doesn’t make you feel like a failure. That’s because, I think, you’re no longer seeing those problems as personal short-comings that move you further away from some Platonic version of your perfect self. Instead, you’re seeing them simply as characteristics.

Personality charts then help even more because they let you see that other people have complementary characteristics to your own. Looking beyond yourself like that makes it all less about perfection and more about experimenting with different ways of being in the world. And when you think about playing around with new things rather than trying to fix personal shortcomings, that makes the whole process of self-improvement a lot more fun, just as it's more fun to play games with your horse than it is to endlessly try to perfect him.