Leveling the playing field

"If you look for the bad in horses and other people, you're apt to find it, but if you look for the good in them, you're apt to find that instead. But you can't do that unless you also look for the good in yourself."

--John Baar

I went to a yoga class this summer while I was on vacation, and the teacher had us do a meditation on loving kindness. It started with visualizing someone you love. Then you direct that love toward yourself, then a stranger, then someone you're having difficulty with at the moment. I was completely stuck at the second step. I'd never even considered what a self that I could love might look like. I realized that generally I see myself as an amalgam of skills and talents that are in constant need of improvement, and I focus almost exclusively on the parts that need improving. Good lord! Was this also the way I see and treat my horse?

Right about this time I also started reading a book that a couple of friends had recommended. Titled The Introvert Advantage, it bills itself as an effort to level the playing field between introverts and extroverts. The author contends that, in a world where extroverts both out-number and out-speak introverts, it is their values that are considered the norm, and introverts internalize those values and consequently feel inferior when they don't live up to them.

I felt that I was pretty in touch and okay with my introvert nature, but I read the book anyway. And it was, I'll confess, really nice to have someone validating the way I often react to situations, even if I didn't feel that I needed the validation. The author discusses everything from the way that introverts have to budget energy to the way that their brains actually use a different neural route to process information, thereby making them slower but deeper thinkers. Most of all, though, she argues for all the important things that introverts bring to the table, including "the ability to focus deeply, a propensity for thinking outside the box, the strength to make unpopular decisions, and the potential to slow the world down a notch."

It was fascinating to study the physiological differences between extroverts and introverts, and I read the book with a lot of interest, too, because it discusses right-brain and left-brain types, so it has a lot of overlap with Parelli.

But it wasn't until a few weeks later that all this mushed around in my brain and changed something fundamental there. I realized that I'm always hard on myself not only because I focus on the skills I don't have, but because I give myself absolutely no credit for anything that comes easily to me.

Here's how I tend to operate: I find people I admire—people who have skills that I don't. I then compare myself to them, giving them full points for all of their skills, whether they are innate to them or not, and myself points only to the extent that I compare with this person. Now, because I'm only comparing myself to people I admire, and only comparing myself on their terms, who's going to come up short?

So, taking one particular friend that I admire as an example, if I were to assign actual points to the way that I'm subconsciously scoring things, here's how it would stack up:

My friend	Me
+1 reliable	+1 reliable
+1 willing to try new things	+1 willing to try new things
+1 good under pressure	+1 persistent, keep at it
+1 hands-on skills
+1 decisive
+1 confident
+1 can think and act quickly
+1 dedicated mother
+1 nurse/firefighter
+1 tolerant of family
+1 assertive
TOTAL = 11	TOTAL = 3

And actually, this is a generous score, because what I'm really doing is not only finding myself lacking in all the things I admire in my friend, but also assigning all the negative corresponding traits to myself. Thus, my naturally extroverted friend gets points for things like being able to think quickly, even though that's not necessarily a skill she worked for, while I beat myself up for being such a slow thinker. So my subconscious score really looks something more like this:

My friend	Me
+1 reliable	+1 reliable
+1 willing to try new things	+1 willing to try new things
+1 good under pressure	+1 persistent, keep at it
+1 hands-on skills	–1 inept
+1 decisive	–1 indecisive
+1 confident	–1 second-guessing
+1 can think and act quickly	–1 slow to think or act
+1 dedicated mother	–1 overwhelmed by the idea of a family
+1 nurse/firefighter	–1 largely useless
+1 tolerant of family	–1 intolerant of noise, commotion, and demands
+1 assertive	–1 non-assertive
TOTAL = 11	TOTAL = –5

Now, I'm not saying it's a good idea to compare yourself to others, but if you are going to, you should darn well use the same scoring method for both of you! I realized that I needed to give myself points for my innate—if less flashy—qualities, rather than just seeing my differences in a purely negative light.

I thought of a particular incident when this friend lost patience with my non-assertiveness in loading my horse. She was absolutely right that my problem in that instance was a lack of assertiveness, but that didn't, as I initially thought, negate all of my leadership skills.

Yes, I needed to be more assertive (a constant theme for me), but it wasn't just unwillingness to be assertive that caused me to back off. It was also because I was taking the long view of my relationship with my horse and putting that before the goal, and I was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt that it could be a confidence issue for him, and I was willing to be patient. I started to see that these are positive traits in me that, in the long term, stand me in good stead. 

That doesn't mean I don't have room to improve and become more balanced, but I'm not, as I initially thought, standing at the bottom of a mountain of achievement with no worthwhile skills. Rather, I have a different skill set and a different leadership style.

After that realization, I re-did my comparison, and here's what I came up with:

My friend	Me
+1 reliable	+1 reliable
+1 willing to try new things	+1 willing to try new things
+1 good under pressure	+1 persistent, keep at it
+1 hands-on skills	+1 conceptual / analytical skills
+1 decisive	+1 thorough / don’t rush to conclusions
+1 confident	+1 stick to my principles even when unsure
+1 can think and act quickly	+1 patient / wait to understand the bigger picture
+1 dedicated mother	+1 dedicated horse-woman
+1 nurse/firefighter	+1 teacher/trainer
+1 tolerant of family	+1 tolerant of living on my own
+1 assertive	+1 fair-minded / give the benefit of the doubt to others
TOTAL = 11	TOTAL = 11

Once I plotted this out, I realized that while I do admire assertive people who can act quickly, I also really appreciate people who, for instance, think generously of me and are patient with me, and by dint of that fact, I’ve found a new way to appreciate myself for those same tendencies. I've found, in other words, a positive self that I can love. 

I also began to realize that life choices don't make one person inferior to another. Take the example of living situations. I’ve always thought that anyone who lives with a family could probably just as easily live alone because, from my perspective, living alone is easy. Meanwhile, the thought of having a family is pretty intimidating to me, so I’m always impressed by people who go that route.

Yet the fact that I don’t choose to have a family doesn’t mean I couldn’t do it, any more than the fact that my friend doesn’t choose to live alone means that she can’t. It’s just a question of having different predilections, neither one inherently better than the other.

If this all sounds obvious, that’s good, because that’s the way it should be. Everyone should walk around realizing that they aren’t less than other people just because they have a different skill set. The trick is to know that AND to believe it. 

Happily, as I thought about my view of my horse, I realized that I'm not actually as hard on him as I am on myself. I do tend to be critical, but when I think about the things I love about him, it's his curiosity, his understated playfulness, and his confidence—all things that are innate in him, and that luckily I have not discounted just because of that fact. I have, however, recently been appreciating him and loving him more.

Don't make it personal.

This is what I've been telling myself for years, but without any perceptible change in my tendency to be reactive. Taking things personally is, I believe, the root of so much of our emotional baggage, and yet so few things actually are personal. But knowing that doesn't change your perception.

Lupin and I just got back from our first Parelli clinic since Colorado, and it was astoundingly refreshing. I forget, for one thing, how nice it is just to be around Parelli people, who are so calm about things that normal horse folk freak out about (like a horse left loose in the ring during a lesson). And then there's the delightful feeling of your brain really processing things as you hit one A-ha moment after another.

I had a lot of A-ha moments courtesy of Dan. Many of these are cumulative: you've heard it before, you've felt it in action, and yet it can be a long time before it clicks in your brain in a way that is habit-changing rather than just intellectually interesting.

In terms of taking things personally, I watched Dan give a private lesson where the horse was being super dominant. Dan showed the owner how to apply an action/consequence way of thinking to deal with the horse: the horse still gets to choose what to do, but certain choices have consequences. You're not punishing the horse, or forcing him to do something different; you're just showing him that sometimes he needs to make a better choice. So, for instance, rather than chasing the horse out of his space, Dan turned his back on the horse and gave a big yawn and a bigger stretch that just happened to land on the horse's mouth.

Oh. Look what might happen when you stand too close. Action, consequence.

The next morning, we were horse-shoed up, and Lupin was playing his usual game of creeping forward between me and whoever was talking. As I listened to Dan, part of my brain noticed how difficult it was for me to ask Lupin to back up, and I realized that's because I was thinking of being assertive with Lupin in personal terms: that he was challenging me, and doubting my leadership, and I had to prove it to him. Yes, that's probably what was going on, but for Lupin there's no emotion in that--it is truly just a game. For me it's an assault on my sense of myself. Sometimes that makes me angry ("How dare he!"), but more often it just makes me tired ("I can't believe I have to stand up for myself again.")

Note that just the physical action of backing Lupin up takes very little effort--in fact, I was sitting down, and all I had to do was lift my stick. It's the psychic energy of powering up for a perceived emotional confrontation that's draining.

Later, on board, I was asking Lupin to stay on the circle using John's method: if the horse comes off the circle, you get very buzzy--your energy comes up, you use your aids quickly and with a lot of noise--so that the horse wants to get back on the circle where you're calm and quiet. Lupin took this a little personally--or at least got impulsive. I just kept playing my game as he went up to a trot, then a canter, then finally back to down to a trot. But I noticed on one circle toward the end a slight hesitation: I waited longer than I should because I didn't want to apply the aid. Maybe it was because I wanted to believe he was with me, or because I was tired of being assertive, but there it was again: that emotional reluctance to be assertive.

It was a quick mental fix for me, though, when I thought about the action/consequence idea. You don't have to make being assertive a personal issue, and it doesn't have to cost you emotional energy. As soon as I started thinking just in terms of the actions, I had no problem: Lupin comes off the circle, I use my leg. There's no emotion there, whether it be hope for Lupin to do better, worry that I'm doing wrong, feeling inadequate because Lupin isn't with me. It's just an action and a consequence. The circle game was a good one for this because it is so clear and simple.

I'll be curious to see how this realization continues to work for me. I think a lot of the strength of it comes from the fact that it's hard to work off of negative stimuli ("don't make it personal") and much easier to change a habit when you have a positive model to substitute in place of your old mental habit (action/consequence rather than provocation/emotional reaction).

Thanks to Parelli, as always, for giving us so many new positive models.

"That's just your ego getting in the way."

This was something that John said to us when we were having emotional difficulty with our horses, or when we were experiencing frustration during our sessions in Arena Grande. At the time, I felt both the fairness of that assessment and the increased frustration that came with my inability to do anything about it. It's one thing to know that your ego is getting in the way; it's quite another to get it back out of the way.

Ego--not just your vanity, but all the things that are wrapped up in your sense of identity and that can therefore make you feel vulnerable and defensive--is a huge roadblock on a horseman's journey. So a few months ago when a friend mentioned he was reading a book about dealing with your ego, I said, "That's exactly what I need."

A New Earth by Eckhart Tolle is a sort of spiritual self-help book that is geared toward helping you be in the present moment without being mired in excessive analysis or emotion. Tolle's book is unlike anything I've read in its immediacy: rather than just telling you how to change your focus, the process of reading the book itself changes your focus so that you feel lighter and happier just by reading it.

And it's absolutely what every horseman needs. It helps you understand how to be more like a horse by living with the horse in the present moment. And it gives you a road map out of resentment and frustration by showing you how to get outside of the stories you tell yourself that create those emotions.

In that sense, it builds on Linda Parelli's strategy of stepping back and saying, "How interesting . . . ": rather than just giving you a strategy for when you're already emotional, it gives you a whole new way of looking at the world that--hopefully--helps you not to go there in the first place.

I know I'll read this book again and again if only because reading it is like an active meditation that makes your thinking--and therefore the world--a better place.

Horseanality/Personality

As I pause and re-group between completing my Level 3 On Line and launching into my Level 3 Freestyle, I’m doing a little review of my Fast Track notes, and my plan is to do some blog posts on some of the main points that I’ve taken away from the course now that the dust has settled.

First off, I have become truly fascinated by horseanality and personality. I've appreciated the work Parelli has done on horseanality ever since it came out as being something that immediately clarified so much about how to understand and interact with different types of horses. But personality has always seemed a bit more muddy to me, partly because there's so much complex stuff out there on personality (who can even keep track of all the Myers-Briggs designations?), and partly because people just seem unnecessarily convoluted compared to horses.

So I was intrigued when John went over personality a bit on our last day. As I've mentioned before, because of horses, I've begun to see the benefits that thinking about personality can deliver: the ability to be a little kinder to yourself and others by seeing characteristics as just that--characteristics rather than limitations--and the opportunity to establish better relationships based on a better understanding of what motivates both yourself and other people.

But reading horseanalities and personalities doesn't come easily to me, so I've been really happy with the information Parelli has distributed. As far as horseanality goes, everyone involved with Parelli has seen these charts:

Click on charts to see a larger version.

But when it comes to similar breakdowns of personality, I haven't found much out there. Alex directed me to one Parelli instructor's blog that had the following personality chart:

Though things line up differently on this chart, there are some useful parallels here. Sanguine roughly equates to RBE, Choleric to LBE, Melancholic to RBI, and Phlegmatic to LBI. But the obvious limitation is that this chart sees half of the personalities in a purely negative light. The wonderful thing about the way Parelli views personalities and horseanalities is that each type has its challenges, but also its opportunities. You work with the horse/person you find to help them become more centered no matter what their type is (because any of the 4 types, taken to extremes, is going to become negative), but at the same time, you also consider what that horse or person is ideally suited to do or be, given their natural aptitude. And every quadrant has positive potential linked to its characteristics. Here are the horseanalities from this view:

So I'd like to add some (slightly less pretty and less detailed) charts that we got in class to help flesh out personality along similar lines:

Self-talk of the different personality types breaks down in the following way:

(I find this chart a little odd in that it implies LBE's are the clearly desirable personality; however, in terms of what their unconscious tells them they may indeed have fewer challenges.)

Left-brain extroverts and right-brain introverts are on the group/family axis: they are both oriented toward thinking in those terms, though the RBI's run the risk of over-sacrificing for the sake of the relationship.

Right-brain extroverts and left-brain introverts are both on the "self-centered" axis and are the two personality types that tend to butt heads. I can attest to this myself, as I'm an LBI who's had intimate dealings with two RBE's, and it's a situation built for frustration. RBE's tend to be unconfident and get emotional, which is a huge turn-off for LBI's who sit there and wonder to themselves what in the hell is wrong with these people that they can't just sit down and be calm and rational about things. Meanwhile, the RBE's read the LBI's calmness and reticency as not caring, which pisses the RBE's off because they don't understand how the LBI's can be so unfeeling. This whole situation causes the RBE's to go more extroverted and the LBI's to go more introverted, and nobody has much fun.

I find that I can understand and even move into the RBI and LBE quadrants sometimes, but I just don't get RBE's, so I'll be needing to get a good deal further along in my horsemanship journey before I even think about owning a RBE horse (though having a horse with such a horseanality would probably ultimately make me more tolerant of people with that personality, as I find myself a lot more forgiving of horses than I am of people).

Okay, one final personality chart, courtesy of my friend Alex, who is an absolute whiz at nailing other people's personalities. (Alex, incidentally, claims she is a RBE, but while I put a great deal of faith in her readings of people generally, I have trouble believing her reading of herself because I got on with her so well and saw no sign of her going emotional during the month we spent together, despite the fact that we were both under-going a lot of personal growth. It's possible, though, that Alex is just a very together RBE, though she would deny that as well.)

In any case, Alex and I spent a good chunk of our drive home from Colorado talking about personalities, and she explained that she factors body types into her readings as well. The following is how she pegs the different personality types, though I don't recall exactly how she described RBE's:

John did give us a couple of references for further research. Linda based her horseanality stuff on the work of her teacher Glynn Braddy, who came up with something called "The Elements of Man," though I haven't been able to find this. John said the closest book out there is called The Personality Compass by Diane Turner, which I've got on order.

2014 update: I've just taken Linda and Patrick Handley's Horsenality/Humanality course, about which I've begun blogging here.

I'm including below a brief and entertaining video we watched in class that illustrates the four humanalities by the Eysenk names:

 (1) sanguine=RBE
(2) choleric=LBE 

     (3) melancholic=RBI

   (4) phlegmatic=LBI

(Click where it says "Four Basic Personality Types" to watch a larger version on youtube—this video is subtitled.)

Confessions of a Type A Personality

When we attended our Fast Track course, our parting gift was a free video audition voucher (in the Parelli program you graduate to the next level by submitting 10 minute unedited videos in the different savvys). I've only officially passed one level in Parelli because I had to do it to attend a clinic; in general, having no video camera and no real reason to officially pass a level has left me with little motivation to do so.

But external deadlines are good things for procrastinators like me, and I came away from my course determined to embrace playing On Line in a way I haven't before, so I thought, "Okay, December 30th gives me a couple of months to achieve some stuff On Line, and if I *do* decide to become an instructor, I'll have what I need to get started if I pass my Level 3 On Line."

So I recruited a filmographer and a friend who knows his way around video editing and uploading, and I set a date that would work with both their schedules while giving me maximum time to improve some stuff beforehand.

And off I went in my happy little OCD fantasy world dreaming up all kinds of things I could do. I spent hours listening to CDs in my car to find the perfect music, and I envisioned all sorts of over-the-top, camped-up musical-type numbers that Lupin and I could do together. (I thought, for instance, about using "You've Lost that Loving Feeling" and getting down on my knees during the circling game. Ultimately I jettisoned the song, but I kept the move.)

Once I had my list of compulsory moves and my list of things I wanted to include, I started playing around with the ideas with Lupin to see what would work. I spent over a month learning that waltz moves (or at least waltz moves done in waltz tempo) don't work as well as one could wish with horses, and that just because I can talk Lupin into going up and through a really high tree root thing multiple times does not mean that he's ever going to be happy about doing it.

Yet it was really an enjoyable process, I have to admit, because it was fascinating to watch my ideas evolve based on Lupin's feedback. It felt a lot like I was a director working with an actor, and over a few weeks we tried different patterns and combinations until we had a little routine choreographed. I didn't go through it much with Lupin beyond what I needed to do to work it out, but I was amused to think of the difference between this way of doing auditions and the ones I'd heard of where a Parelli student would just start doing stuff with her horse and someone would shout out in the last couple of minutes "Oy! You haven't done a circling game yet" and the Parelli student would throw one in just under the wire. (Of course, I told myself that I couldn't envision doing it that way, not because I was OCD, but because I didn't have any Parelli pals handy to help me out like that.)

In any case, Lupin and I had tested everything out in the ring and then moved out to the cow pasture--where I wanted to do the actual filming--the week before, and we were READY.

And then it snowed. Not a nice powdery snow, but slush, which was amazingly hard to run in. I decided against turning the whole thing into a Christmas-themed video and instead postponed taping.

My friend only had a limited time window on our "rain" date, but I wanted to go ahead with it because I was afraid that some heat in one of Lupin's feet meant that he was brewing an abscess (and by then we were starting to get down to the wire). So I got up early that morning to lug barrels and pedestal out into the field and have time to warm Lupin up.

He was a WILD MAN. I had left him in the stall the night before so his feet could dry out some, and he had some serious energy to burn. He trotted around in the ring snorting with tail high and then took off at a canter, but my Fast Track training kicked in and I urged him into a gallop and then threw some poles in his path. In pretty short order he was over thinking cantering was a good idea, though I was still dubious about taking him out by the cows, who were camped out all around our filming site. On a normal day if he was that insane in the ring I would not have taken him in the cow pasture at all, and I wouldn't have played with him right up by the cows on any day, but having a focus helped me move out of my comfort zone, and the experiment was a success. Lupin barely reacted, even when the arrival of hay caused a mass cow migration.

However, we didn't manage to nail our audition. I hadn't practiced the trailer loading much because I didn't want him to make assumptions and load up without my sending him. Every time I *had* practiced it, though, he had been more than ready to get in and the only difficulty was keeping him out until I asked him to go in. This day, however, he ambled around to the back of the trailer, then his head reappeared around the side with an "I don't get it--what am I supposed to do?" expression. After a few repetitions of this, our ten minutes expired with me practically jumping up and down at him. My friend had to leave, so that was that.

I kept my fingers crossed for the next 48 hours that the weather predicted for my next filming date would hold and that Lupin wouldn't develop an abscess. And I was lucky. The heat left Lupin's hoof, and the sun came out for the first time in a week for the few hours we shot the video. I very briefly warmed Lupin up on the circle and then he proceeded to do the best he's ever done on almost every single task the very first time through. Woohoo!

So now the only thing left for my OCD to fixate on is that there were a few glitches in the tape that make it look like I might have cut and pasted it, which is a little ironic since Lupin absolutely didn't give me any reason to even be tempted to do that. But I'm happy for my OCD to focus on technical issues with the tape rather than performance issues with my horse, who made the entire audition filming process an interesting and creative one for me.

Now I'm kind of looking forward to the next one . . .

I'm not in it to win it. I'm in it for Lupe.

I had my first official outing with Lupin since we returned from Colorado on Saturday when we went to a beginner polocrosse clinic.

Lupin and I played around with polocrosse a little this summer at our own farm, and it was an excellent opportunity to apply a purpose to things to find out what we needed to work on (emotional collection at higher speeds, snappier turns on the haunches, tolerance for other horses in Lupin's personal space, and how to push other horses without getting overly aggressive).

It was also just plain fun, but I'm afraid that over the summer I gave in to my competitiveness and focused too much on trying to get the ball rather than focusing on what Lupin needed to be getting out of it. I was just so darn sure that he would enjoy the game and become competitive himself once he understood the point of it, but of course he needs to be confident in order to do any of those things.

As it was, his unconfidence came out in the fact that I could barely steer him at higher speeds and that he kicked at other horses when they were too close to him.

Now that I've gone to Colorado, I'm more aware of the fact that we need a better foundation before we start specializing in things that demand high levels of precision. However, I think that, as long as I'm aware of the holes in our training and I don't ask him to do things he can't handle, we can start focusing a little bit on some of the skills we'll need in polocrosse in order to motivate us to move on to a higher level. So I decided that at the very least the clinic would be a good field trip for us and that we could back out of anything we weren't ready for and I could just watch.

On Friday as I was getting ready I was amazed to feel a little bit of the kind of nervousness I used to have when I first started doing things that required trailering a horse back in college. Back then I was constantly immersed in situations where I had no idea what to do. I was new to Thoroughbreds and to trailering and to jumping and to show rules and to pretty much everything I was doing, and of course I was young and unconfident. But now Lupin and I are old hands at traveling places by ourselves, and Lupin is generally laid-back about new places and new things. Even when he isn't, I now have the skills and perception I need to deal with the situation. So I was surprised to find that I was needing to give myself a pep-talk on all these points.

The only thing I can figure is that this was my first re-entry into the normal world of horses. While most of the folks I ride with don't do Parelli, they're generally very tolerant of my Parelli-esque antics and are perfectly happy to do their thing while I do mine. And the key point here is that, other than my little bit of dabbling in polocrosse this summer, my thing has been Parelli--and little besides Parelli--for a long time now. When Lupin and I have packed up and headed out on our own, it has almost always been to go to a Parelli clinic where, even if we aren't familiar with the people or the place, we know generally what to expect and that we'll be supported in our goals.

The polocrosse clinic was going to be the first time I would be immersed once more in a non-Parelli pursuit, and I'd be wholly responsible for staying true to my principles and, if I did have problems, for sorting them out and getting Lupin and myself out of any bad situation we got ourselves into. But I knew, when I thought about it, that I was perfectly capable of doing both of those things.

As it transpired, my nervousness proved quite unnecessary. Lupin loaded like a champ, as he's been doing for quite some time, and when we got there I warmed him up on the ground as I learned to do in Colorado (though still in my head was John's voice saying I should warm him up harder than I did--which, I suspect, will almost always be true no matter how hard I warm him up). He seemed largely nonplussed by the cows whose pasture we were in and by my asking him to canter on the circle. He also stood quietly tied for over an hour while we did exercises on the ground.

When I got on him, I felt the habits of Colorado kicking in, and I automatically started following the border of the polocrosse field at the walk and then, after Lupin blew out a lot, at the trot. I could feel the instances at which the old me would have let Lupin lead me off my focus, but I had no trouble insisting that he stay focused on the next cone, and that immediately relaxed him. And when it came time to practice, I simply said that I wasn't going to go faster than a walk because I knew that Lupin would get emotional if I did.

Everyone was fine with that, and as it turned out, the lady who was initially paired with me had the same problem that I did: her horse didn't like walking in close proximity to another horse, so we kept them together at the walk until they got a little more used to the idea. I did this with a few other people as well, and I only trotted when we were by ourselves and away from the play.

Later in the afternoon, though, I was paired up with a woman who didn't mind walking, but who was being highly competitive at the walk. Her horse was really pushing Lupin around, which is fair enough given that pushing is what the game of polocrosse is about, but Lupin hasn't gotten comfortable with the concept yet, and since he isn't even comfortable with walking beside other horses, allowing him to be pushed around didn't seem like a good idea. (Nevermind that I don't exactly want him to learn to be okay with being pushed around; the point is for him to learn how to push back without getting overly aggressive.) So here was where I made my first mistake: rather than asking the woman to back off, I pushed Lupin more, finally asking him to trot at one point when I was trying to score, and, predictably, he kicked out.

Happily, this group of people was very laid-back about Lupin kicking. They said they'd seen a lot worse and that he clearly wasn't trying to hurt anyone when he did it and that he'd just had too much pressure. I was relieved that they took it well, especially since it was my pushing him that caused him to do it. It was a good wake-up call and reminder of exactly what I had said to myself going into the clinic: as much fun as it is to be competitive, Lupin's needs have to come before competitive goals. Always. I can't fudge on that every now and then when I'm soooo close to making a good play. I have to commit to it wholly. That's the only way that Lupin will get in the game with me, and as Parelli says, when the horse is with you, there's nothing you can't do. If I wait to push Lupin until he really understands why I'm pushing him, I truly believe we'll be a force on the polocrosse field. More importantly, we'll be two partners having fun together.

All in all, the clinic was an interesting follow-up to the testing and Parelli games in Colorado, where it was more about the knowledge that your performance is being watched. That's one kind of pressure--the pressure to do your best because you know you're being judged. Polocrosse is a whole different kind of pressure--the pressure to win. And it's equally, though differently, seductive. So I look forward to the challenge of advancing my game while simultaneously advancing my horsemanship rather than doing one at the expense of the other.

The most positive thing that came out of the day, though, was the feeling that the safety net of Parelli is internal now. It's not just something that's there when I'm at home practicing, or when I'm surrounded by Parelli people. It's with me always in the lines that I draw about what I will and won't do with my horse (or in my understanding of when I've asked him to do too much), and in the way I set things up to help him.

I think it's been that way for quite some time now, but I felt it most on Saturday when I got Lupin off the trailer and knew exactly what to do with him despite the fact that no one around me was doing what I was. There was no doubt, no second guessing--just the good habits that Parelli has instilled in me. That was such a far cry from the times in college when I unloaded a horse and just prayed for the best. When I think back on those times, I am unendingly thankful for the way that Parelli empowers people by giving them the knowledge about how to set their horse up for success . . . and the perception to recognize what true success with horses is.