Leadership essentials

In my last post I wrote about a different way to view what I call a left-brain freak-out: the angry response that LBI's sometimes give and that looks a lot like a temper tantrum. "Okay, fine," you might say, "but while I'm taking a rosier view of my horse's behavior, what am I supposed to do about it?"

I had a big realization when I was watching a friend with two of her horses, one a right-brain and one a left-brain. Both had a tendency to over-react when she asked them to do things: the right-brain horse would get explosive quite quickly, while the left-brain horse would pretty much just leave. Though I am a horsenality junkie and love the different strategies for the different analities, in this situation I found myself putting together the same solution for both horses. Which got me thinking.

It seems to me that when your horse is getting lost in emotion, whether fear or anger or confusion or what have you, there are a few basic things you do pretty much no matter what. These aren't earth-shattering, and they're not some major breakthrough in horsemanship, but I think they're worth emphasizing all the same. To me they are the most important components of getting your horse calm and back on the same page with you, particularly when his over-reaction is caused by something that you're asking him to do rather than an environmental stimulus (though these basic leadership skills will apply as well if he's spooking).

Here they are:
1. Be clear about what you want.
2. Keep your focus.
3. Don't react emotionally.
4. Really release.

All of these are things that sound obvious but don't come easily. I'm going to break them down and talk about the first two in this post and the next two in the following post.


Be clear about what you want.
If you don't have a clear idea in your head of what you want your horse to do, there is no way you can communicate it clearly to him. It's amazing how often we *think* we know what we want, but our idea is so vague as to be meaningless.

I was at a clinic with Dan Thompson, who is provocative in the best sense of the word, and we were all playing around on line with something or other when Dan's voice rang out, "Why are you playing this game?" And of course we all said, "Because you told us to." He smiled in the way that lets you know you have another think coming. "That's a good enough reason when you first start Parelli, but by now you should have your own reasons for any game that you play." He waited expectantly. We stared blankly. "Because I want my horse to get better," someone offered. "In what specific way?" Dan asked. It was then that we began to have a notion of what he was driving at.

If you send your horse out on the circle with the vague idea of getting it "better," what are you actually waiting for your horse to do? Be snappier in his departure? Maintain gait more consistently? Ask more questions? Bend his body more on the circle? Be more responsive when you ask for transitions? Go out on a larger circle? What?

We learned at that clinic that, if you don't know what you're looking for, (a) you can't communicate it to your horse clearly, and (b) you won't know when to reward him. And if you're waiting for him to improve on all those fronts before you reward him, you'll be waiting a long time because he's going to give up if he tries several things and still hasn't gotten a release. So it's best to pick one manageable thing, focus on it, get it better, and quit.

That's not to say, of course, that you can't reward him when he offers something really cool that you didn't ask for. When I started Parelli I was so focused on my horse getting the "right" answer that it took a while for me to learn to be flexible when he offered something equally positive. But if he's truly lost and freaking out, he needs a clear direction to head in. And the more lost he is, the clearer and simpler it needs to be.

I realized that one reason the Touch It pattern is early in the sequence is because you can make it very black and white: did my horse touch the thing I was focusing on or not? Once your horse learns that you consistently do have a goal, and one that he can be successful finding, he will start to look more to you to find out what you're asking. He is gaining confidence both in your leadership and in his ability to problem solve, and from there you simply build in more and more complexity. But most especially as you get more complex, you need to keep asking yourself if you know why you're playing the game: what does my horse need to do for me to say "game over" right now?


Keep your focus.
I've written before about how I learned at Fast Track the importance of maintaining focus, most particularly when your horse is upset by external stimuli or is unmotivated. What I've realized since then is that focus is equally if not more important when your horse is resisting or reacting to what you are asking him to do, though it can be highly difficult for us to maintain focus in this situation.

When a right-brain horse is exploding, or a left-brain horse is pitching a temper tantrum, our first impulse is to stop what we are doing. This makes sense: the horse is over-stimulated or upset, so we try to take away the thing that's upsetting him. However, if we do that, we wind up training our horse to be reactive because that's when he gets the release. 

I have struggled a lot with my LBI because he tends to get big and scary when I do things he doesn't like (generally these are things I'm asking him to tolerate being done, like oral dosing, although sometimes they are things I'm asking him to do, like leaving his sweet spot).

I find myself in these instances walking a fine line between backing off enough that neither of us gets hurt and persisting enough that he doesn't get a release while he's resisting. And I can tell you that, at this stage, we're both on a fair amount of adrenaline in some of these situations, which makes both of us quick to get angry and defensive (more on that in the next post).

It's a tricky situation, but I stay in it because I know one key thing: once I push one of my horse's buttons, it is only going to be worse for both of us if I don't hang in there and finish things on a calm note. My reward happens when it's easier the next day, which it usually is. (That's not to say he won't still pitch a temper tantrum, but generally—don't always say always, usually say usually—he's not as committed to resisting and we move through it more quickly.)

But there's also something else that I know, which is a bit more positive: when your horse is upset, whether they're scared out of their mind or fighting you or both, your focus is like a life line to your horse, helping them find their way out of emotional chaos. If you abandon your focus, they will think that you don't know a way out of the chaos either.

While it can feel to us like we're asking a lot out of a clearly distraught animal by persisting in our focus, what we're really doing is proving to him that he can find a way out of distress by listening to us. We're not being mean; we're demonstrating leadership. And we're helping our horse learn how to cope with things that cause discomfort—to learn how to be braver and calmer when facing the demands of living in a human world.

It's possible to over-focus, however—to put so much pressure on your horse that he can't calm down. I learned this with tying near the cow, where Lupin was too emotional to learn. In these instances, it's necessary to find a way to back off without abandoning your focus. Depending on the situation, this may mean you play a less adrenaline-riddled version of the game you were playing (with the cow, I continued to play with tying and extreme friendly games, but I took the actual cow out of the equation).

Or it may mean—if, for instance, your horse is hyper-sensitive and freaking out at pressure you are directly putting on him in the form of a stimulus—that you briefly reduce your phases down to a thought, which is a form of approach and retreat. This is very different, though, from taking all the pressure off when you retreat, even if all you're doing is still holding your goal in your head until he calms down enough to re-approach. It may look to an outside observer like you have quit playing the game, but your horse will feel the difference if you're still thinking about your goal rather than getting sucked into his emotional chaos and worry. And if you hold out until he does the appropriate movement in response to your stimulus rather than wigging out, he'll learn to understand and appreciate positive pressure.

Or it may mean that you break down something complex and focus on one smaller part where your horse can find success. The important thing here is that you then put the whole thing back together again once you've gotten his confidence better on the smaller piece. (Unless, of course, you've figured out that thing is way more challenging than you thought and you need to break it down over several sessions.)

Or it may mean playing a different game altogether for a little while. Often Lupin's resistance isn't about what I'm asking him to do, but about his druthers—what he'd rather be doing. In those instances Dan has shown me that it's much more effective to play a quick, high impulsion game to get his focus back on me generally, or to play a form of passenger lesson to show him that while he can go where he wants, it will be more comfortable for him to be where I want. The critical thing again, however, is that once the druthers are in better shape I go back to the game I was originally playing, so that he doesn't learn he can change my focus.

The number one way that horses get us to change our focus, of course, is by causing us to get emotional. As Pat Parelli has explained, they are masters at frustrating the predator. I'm no zen teacher when it comes to this stuff and I still take the bait and get emotional sometimes, but in my next post I'll share a few things that have helped me be less reactive myself.