How paying the right kind of attention can change everything
It’s a problem, though, if my horse is paying attention to eating grass and I want to lead them to the arena or ride them down the trail. How do I get them to pay attention to what I want them to do?
These are three actions I teach to get things started.
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If your horse is already eating grass, get them to move.
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If you’re leading your horse, walk forward and ask your horse to go with you.
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If you’re riding, use one rein to ask your horse to turn.
Those are only three of over ten different to-do’s I teach with horses that eat grass when you want them to do something else. Getting your horse to stop eating grass and get moving depends on many subtleties in the individual relationship between you and your horse.
Listening to your horse helps, and you probably already do this. But when your horse is saying “I want to eat grass,” and you can’t get them to do anything else, what’s a person to do?
It actually starts with paying a special kind of attention that goes two ways.
I don’t know about you, but when the teacher interrupted me daydreaming in class and said I wasn’t paying attention, I really didn’t like her very much. I know I was just a kid, but I thought she was kind of mean. So when a horse gets jerked away from the grass, I wonder if they feel like that, too.
It’s a big problem when a horse won’t stop eating grass when we want them to do something else. We need them to do things but we don’t want to be like the teacher, especially if it makes the horse not like us.
The difficulty with the teacher in that story is that they were paying attention to me in ways that totally disempowered me. It made me slouch at my desk and hang my head. What if I could pay attention to my horse in ways that empowered me?
Let me help you pay the kind of attention to your horse that empowers you.
To apply for a complementary strategy call, click HERE.
The real trouble here actually is not that my horse is paying too much attention to eating grass. The real problem is that I don’t want to be like that teacher. I’d like to be something else.
My student Carol learned to be something else one day even though she barely missed getting derailed by disempowering attention. Leo, her schoolmaster horse, kept getting the wrong lead. It happened every single day. She got so worried about doing it wrong that was all she could think about. She was afraid her horse was getting disgusted with her because she was messing up so much. It was so disheartening that the next time she brought her horse for a lesson, she did not want to even try to canter.
Has something like that ever happened to you? When all you can think about is what you don’t want to happen? Have you ever been so discouraged that you just about gave up?
Fortunately Carol did not give up. Once she learned to pay attention to the right thing, she became so empowered that her horse picked up the correct lead every time.
There are so many things to pay attention to, so many things to remember, that it’s hard to know which one is the most important and what will work the best.
The thing we don’t pay attention to and take time to do is Loving Presence.
Once my student Elizabeth learned how to turn her attention to Loving Presence in herself and her horses, she was able to cast aside the negative self-talk that she’d previously been telling herself every time she rode. This one amazing result of many new discoveries changed everything in her life.
What is Loving Presence anyway? We all know what love is so it would make sense that if we just love our horse and pay attention to them, everything will be fine, right? Wrong. Because there’s a lot more to it than we think.
We think we know what Loving Presence is but we can’t do it unless we know exactly what to pay attention to, just like knowing what the most important thing to notice is when our horse is eating grass. Is it this thing or that thing or the other thing?
I don’t know what it is for you, because it depends on a whole complex combination of things that have come before in your relationship with your horse.
If you’d like to speak with me on a complementary call about how to pay the kind of attention
that empowers you to get real results with your horse, click HERE.
When we pay the right kind of attention, things don’t get muddled up. Communication with loving presence empowers clarity so that our horses know what we want. We become better riders and make fewer mistakes.
You can choose what you pay attention to
Sometimes it feels like we don’t have much choice about what we pay attention to. Have you ever had your mind get stuck on a tune from a song you’ve just heard and you can’t get the tune out of your head? It’s like that.
It often feels like attention has a mind of its own. It’s hard to pay attention to purely one thing and not have a hundred other thoughts racing in and out of my head.
But when I notice where my attention is directed, instead of just paying attention to all the thoughts I’m thinking, everything changes, just like it did years ago for a student I taught at one of the first ever United States Dressage Federation Instructor workshops.
When my student first entered the arena, her reins were tight and her expression tense.
Even so, she was attentive to my instructions about teaching her horse to leg yield, a dressage movement where the horse moves sideways.
She correctly shifted her weight and used one leg to tell the horse to move sideways, one rein to keep his shoulders straight and the other rein to ask for flexion.
But the horse kept going straight and not sideways.
Frowning, the rider stopped. Her horse turned their head around to the side and looked her straight in the eye. That made her catch her breath.
In that moment, she had two choices: 1. Pay attention to her horse 2. Ask her horse put their head back to the front.
Her choice of #1 proved priceless.
Her eyes welled up and she began to cry. She told me that her attention was on wishing she was riding her older horse and how he would have known just what to do. He had died two weeks beforehand. When the horse she brought to the workshop looked her in the eye, it hit home that she wasn’t paying the right kind of attention to them.
When she dried her tears, her hands softened on the reins. Her horse rounded his neck and they trotted right out sideways in a lovely cadenced leg yield.
That horse and rider brought home the realization that everyone has a choice about what to pay attention to.
The thing is, you just need to know how to prevent your attention getting stuck on topics and thoughts that disempower you. When you have the skills to do this, you don’t mess things up with your horse. You can do what you really want to do and your horse will join you willingly.
What if, instead of always worrying about messing up your horse, you could be paying attention to that sweet connection that you yearn for each time you ride?
Want to learn more? Figure out how that sweet connection could happen for you?
To speak with me on a complementary strategy call, click HERE.
There’s another way, a real solution that feels good deep inside, to not mess up your horse and do things together with them truly connected.
We just have to learn how. Everything you’ve just read in this e guide moves you towards the ultimate foundation of paying the right kind of attention.
It’s time to stop the worry about messing up your horse. It’s time to pay attention to the yearning inside that says there’s a lot more you could do with your horse. If this is you, let’s talk.
It’s your time and your opportunity to get support for what you and your horse need to get that sweet connection you long for each time you ride.
What amazing things could be in store for you and your horse with the right kind of attention?
To speak with me on a complementary strategy call and find out how that could happen,
click HERE.